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Notes:

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 middle years(65-75) 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 youth 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 world-
wide-web and, in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire
body of epistolary material was written during the dark heart of an age of
transition, an age which was my life, perhaps the darkest in history.

This collection of 10,000 items including those hybrid forms of letter, the
email and internet post, which emerged as a new millennium was
opening, are written by and to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an
international pioneer(1971-2009). They are communications written to: a
friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or persons at one of 1000s of
sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at the local, national or global
level; one of a multitude of other organizations, a family member or some
association in an unnumbered set of contexts. Readers will find here at
BLO mainly general commentaries on my letters and the letter as a genre,
prose-poems on letters, mine and those of others in history and literature.
Except for the occasional letter the body of my correspondence is not
included here.

Another 10,000 letters and correspondence of many types were written in


connection with my employment from the early 1960 into the first decade
of the new millenium, 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 detailed response were kept as were the
responses if they were more than a few lines. On my demise some or all
of this collected correspondence that can be accessed may be published.
We 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, its postmodern
variants.

Note: Beginning two years ago, in August 2007, I kept all correspondence
of significance in computer files; the only hard copies kept were an
assortment of quasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to
have a logical place in my computer directory.

The Letters of Ron Price: 1959-2009


Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section VII--Letters
by Ron Price
Editor:Bill WashingtonPublished in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An
Autobiographical Study and a Study In Autobiography Section VII:
Letters
Unpublished
Originally published as "Title of document, original edition:same title in
the original edition" in English.

The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront and
international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent
writing letters, emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009,
I dedicate to the great letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these
hours and these communications to the Central Figures of this Faith,
Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice--individuals and
institutions that have produced a treasure house of correspondence.

Then there are the many whose names are on Bahai lists but who have
played little to no part in the Bahai community in their years of
membership; as well as the not-so nameless and traceless, each of whom
has their story and their varying degrees of writing and who, collectively,
have written what I have little doubt are literally billions of letters, emails
and written communications of an epistolary nature. To these I also
dedicate my collection of letters. If I also include in my dedication, the
massive quantities of correspondence that has been written by the
institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of its
administrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief
precursors of this Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history
of this emerging world relgion, and those who also wrote letters in
responding to the seeds these precursors sowed and were involved in
different ways in the earliest days of the history of this new Faith as far
back as the time that Shaykh Ahmad left his home in N.E. Arabia in 1770
to 1783(circa)---the letters of this multitude to whom I dedicate my own
epistolary efforts might just reach to a distant star if they were laid side
by side!

Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of this nearly two


and a half 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 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 communicaton that are part of the history of this
Cause.
As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to
lose the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them
better.(Emerson, Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a
period going back now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing
something for another was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an
email and, since the late 1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with
mechanical skills and proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly
interested in so many things in the popular culture like sport, gardening,
cooking, heavy doses of much of the content in the print and electronic
media; indeed, I could list many personal deficencies and areas of
disinterest, I found the letter was one thing I could do and write and in the
process, perhaps, document some of my sensory perceptions of the
present age, perceptions that were relevant to the future of a religion
whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind which was
scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at the basis of
my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my letters
would evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they would be
of value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this skill, was
in its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a popular
sport! The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty volume
of paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in the
end amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or
purpose.

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. Im 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
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 can not fail to take deep
satisfaction on a number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and
the mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not
for others, are revealed therein.

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.

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. If these letters do come to appeal it will
not be for their literariness or wit but for their ordinariness, their witness
to a time, a period, in Bahai history, in the second half of the first century
of the Formative Age. 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.

Inventivess and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are
possessed by a letter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the
poet Roger White possessed these qualities and they had a narrative
momentum without which his letters would have grown static and
repetitive. Sadly, I have often felt that my letters expose the limits of my
literary, my epistolary and certainly my humorous sensibility. My letters
often grow limp, or so it seems to me, perhaps because I have often felt
limp; or they become crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual,
abstractions as I have tried to deal with concepts that I only half
understand and ideas far beyond my philosphical and literary capacity to
put into words. In some of my earliest letters, letters to my first wife
which we used to call my love-letters, written in the early months of
1967, I fell back into an emulation of the Guardian's writings, hardly
appropriate Judy and I often felt later, when we read them on a quiet
Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings for her. Of course, the feelings
they expressed were ideological and intellectual and not aesthetic and
romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.

Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say,


1959 to 1989, 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 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.

I would like to think that this collection of letters possesses some


narrative force and thrust and readers may indeed detect some story-line
surprising in a collection of letters. My metamorphosis from my first
letters in the 1960s to those I wrote when I was 65 in 2009 and on two
old-age pensions is not without its drama and that drama can be seen
through the letters if they are followed chronologically and if they are
appropriately selected.

Another engaging aspect of the collection is its depiction of cataclysmic


change in the world during the hald centory from, say, 1960 to 2010. The
letters resolutely ignore most political events--events that are the flesh
and bone of political and social analysis in the wider culture, in media
culture--but perhaps precisely because of this they serve to remind
readers of the ordinary lives that were led in the midst of extraordinary
events. So much of these times were extraordinary that the senses were
dulled to their impact, their surprise, their evnetfulness. The collection's
chronicle of movement from place to place, of the experience of job,
family and Bahai community life as it changed over these fifty years will,
perhaps, be of interest one day, if not to readers in the world I now
occupy.

Is it too much to see in this collection something of an author in the


twilight of his life putting his literary affairs in order through the auspices
of his letters, in the desire to help insure their relevance and readership?
Perhaps this is what I am doing. If all these letters possess any relevance
that will be decided by others than I: by archives departments in Australia
and in Haifa, by my executors.

Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,
everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have
no idea whether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships
and in life: one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to
our acts, to our lives--or anyone elses--in terms of whether they will
result in justice, harm or benefit--since their frution, ultimately, is
destined for another plane of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do
evaluate, as I do here in this lengthy analsysis at the Bahai Academic
Resources Library Site.

MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS

The outline below of the categories for the collection of my letters began
to take form in the first decade of my retirement from FT
employment(1999-2009), especially after the official opening of the Arc
Project on Mt. Carmel in 2001. This collection tends to get altered from
time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live body of
work. Only the occasional letter is found here at the Bahai Academics
Resource Library or on the internet in various places since these letters
are either personal, professional or private. I prefer to keep this body of
writing confidential until at least my passing. At the present time there are
some 50 volumes under ten major Sections delineated below by roman
numerals. Section III below contains my contacts with sites on the
internet and there are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site
homepages, forums, discussion boards, postings, replies, inter alia. The
headings, the categories, of the letters are as follows:

I. Personal Correspondence:

1. Volume 1: 1959-1984
2. Volume 2: 1985-1988

3. Volume 3: 1989-1994

4. Volume 4: 1995-1996

5. Volume 5: 1997-1999
6. Volume 6: 1999-2001

7. Volume 7: 2002-2003

8. Volume 8: 2003-2004

9. Volume 9: 2004-2005

10.Volume 10: 2005-2006

11.Volume 11: 2006-2007

12.Volume 12: 2007-2009

II. Writing to/from Baha’i Institutions

1. Baháí World Centre

2. Universal House of Justice

3. International Teaching Centre

4. NSA of the Baha’is of Australia

5. Hands of the Cause

6. Continental Board of Counsellors


7. BROs, RTCs and Bahai Councils

8.1 LSAs; 8.2 Auxiliary Board Members

and 8.3 Assistants

9. National Committees of the NSA of the Bahais of Australia

10. NSA and National Committees of the Bahais of the United States

III. Contacts with Publishers, Magazines and Journals

Vol 3.1 to 3.11

Vol 3.12.1 to 3.12.16

Vol 3.13 to 3.17

IV. Communications with Canada:

Vol 4.1

Vol 4.2
Vol 4.3

V. Roger White:1981-1992

Vols. 1 to 4

VI.1 Association of Bahai Studies: Vols. 1-3

VI.2 Individuals

1. Bill Washington

2. Judy Hassall

3. Gary Olson
4. Toni Edmonds

5. Graham Hassall

VII. 1. Baháí History in WA and the NT

Vol. 1 to Vol.4

-Letters, Essays and Notes

VIII Magazines, Newspapers, Journals, Media

1. Dialogue

2. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1-Newspapers

3. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1 Radio Stations

4. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1 Magazines

IX. Correspondence For Writing Novels/Essays


1. From 1987 to 1991

X Correspondence For Job Hunting

1. 1960 to 2001

2. 2001 to 2008

XI. On-The-Job Correspondence

1. 1960 to 2005

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 1988-
2008 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 1989, a small but significant
body of this hybrid type of letter was kept in the two decades, 1989-2009.
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:
1959-2009 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.

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 information—fragment or
mutilated—is 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 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
Baha’i or a Baha’i 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
mentorship. I find there is something basically unstable or slippery about
experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in the words of
Baha’u’llah, 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
later. It seems to me that those who read these letters one day, if they ever
do, will have difficulty grasping the nature of my personality inspite of,
or perhaps because of, the extensive literary base I have provided. The
only impeccable writers and the only personalities we feel we understand,
William Hazlitt noted nearly two centuries ago, are those who never write
and people we have only briefly met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis
here that we often feel we understand a personality, but it is always in
part. Getting to know people is a bit of a mystery at the best of times
whether they are beside you on a bus, a train, a kitchen table or a bed.
One is always adjusting ones mask for correspondents and, in the process,
one creates a series of self-portraits, a mosaic of true and false, real and
unreal. The quality and maturity of my relationship with others is, as
William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the best measure of spiritual
progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such mature relationships
depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-development. And
the measure of ones spirituality depends on much else, too much else to
venture an analysis of in this brief statement. The letter is a reflection of
this inner life but, in the end, it is but a reflection of a spirituality which
lies at the centre of ones heart and soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of
Spirituality, Bahai Studies, Vol.11, 1982, p.25.)
I asssume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is the
revelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This
is not to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed
through letters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with
fragmentary, often ambiguous and decidedly opague material over which
they will be unable to wield any kind of imperial authority and
comprehension. Whatever insights they gain in readings, they will be
inevitably partial and will have a distinct tendency to crumble in a
epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull and vulnerable from or within
the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of letters are not the most
favorite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies and at
book launches except perghaps in the form of letters to the editor. They
exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced off area of privacy, an
island of subjectivity, where even the external world is experienced as an
inner world. This, the sociologist Georg Simmel once said, is the essence
of modernity.

Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of
action, there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never
privy. Oftentimes neither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix,
for mystery abounds in our worlds. The writer, namely myself in this
case, turns his letter like a historical microscope with some sensitivity
and with some attention to minute causality, but it is a causality he never
fully grasps and a sensitivity he only attains to partially. The road these
letters describe Im not sure I would ever have entered (either the road of
the letters or the road of the analysis) if I had known of its length when I
wrote that first letter fifty years ago.

Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives.
That is the name of the game. My choice and my command of language,
to whatever degree of imperfection and perfection I attained, were the
fruit of exercise and with the arrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that
exercise was able to find much fuller expression. Some of the facts of my
past, my religion and my society are presented in these letters in a
language that is rich in a type of coherence and a type of embedded
comment. I like to think that the cumulative effect of this comment is to
predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation of reality and
the world. But my more skeptical self is more inclined to the view that a
collection of letters is not likely to change the world view of readers no
matter how open and receptive they may be. The stubborn testimony of
unexceptionable facts, the facts of my life, gradually bring me to the bar
of history and the sober discretion that I trust these same facts embody
are a statement about my present age and hour. At the bar there is no final
verdict only a series of temporary assessments and at the bar where
individuals read these letters there will be combinations of the non-event,
the boring, the occasional bright spark or low flame, perhaps a burning
sensation or two, a little indigestion, a wishing and a willing that is
beyond my pen to even attempt a descriptionor a discretionary comment.
But no final judgement.

These letters present a divergent and unfocused, 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
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 Bahai Faith increased by 30 times, from 200
thousand in 1953 to six million in 2008.

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 minutae, 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
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 letter-


writing an inherent straying away from what actually happens, however
slightly or innocently, a quiet but discernable progression from fact to
fiction. Self-deception, lieing, 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 toaim 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.”

-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 d’etre.
It may just be that one of the best routes to self-forgetfulness, which
‘Abdu’l-Baha says is at the heart of self-realization, is through self-
understanding 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.

(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.
--17/1/96

It was Charles Darwin's custom to file all his letters received and when
his slender stock of files ("spits" as he called them was exhausted, he
would burn the letters of several years, in order that he might make use of
the liberated "spits." This process, carried on for years, destroyed nearly
all letters received before 1862 at the age of 53. After that date he was
persuaded to keep the more interesting letters, and these are preserved in
an accessible form.

For different reasons my letters before 1979, in other words the first 20
years of my correspondence, are few in number. The concept of saving
letters grew on me slowly over more than two decades.

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 don’t
think I was at all conscious of letter writings hermeneutic influence until
atleast the late 1980s when the Arc Project had been officially announced.
If the letter appeared in my life it was accidentally, serendipitously and
hardly worth any analysis, but that began to change as this Cause I have
now been associated with for more than half a century was finally
emerging from the obscurity in which it had languished for a century and
a half.--Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and
the Life Course, Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications,
London, 1988.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

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 4000 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
first edition possesses much but has no 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
reservoire 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
these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in
writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than
knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving
beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a
framework of factual experience, as far as possible. To read my poetry
should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Bahá'í
experience in what the Bahá'ís see as 'the tenth stage of history' and,
especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt.
Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition.
There are several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition
to the above. I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to
time in the introductions to some of my poems.

From a Bahá'í 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 portait 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 autobiograhers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international
pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in
Canada-all of this over thirty-six years, I have watched this emerging
world religion grow perhaps fifteen times. I have taught in schools for
nearly 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 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 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.

16/3/97-28/9/98

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 ethnographer’s 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
autoethnography’s intricate interplay of the introspective personal
engagement expected of an autobiography and the self-effacement
expected of ethnography’s cultural descriptions. The impulse for self-
documentation and the reproduction of images of the self pervade our
everyday practice. The common business of social existence is the
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 Auto-
Ethnographic Authority,” The Yale Journal of Criticism,Volume 16,
Number 1, Spring 2003.

______________________________________________________

unstable selves battle it out.

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


VOLUME ONE:

CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS

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, men’s 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
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
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 sub-
collection of these letters would fill a sizeable book but, when they were
written it was for the imediate 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 sub-
collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of the appreciation of
one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochs under
review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,
indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two
interlocutors are not so much possessed of a literary caliber superior to
others I wrote to, although in most cases that was true, but the
correspondence went on for many years, more years than that of others.

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
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 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 is 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, Im not sure how
much meaning readers need to find here in these complex epistolary
ideas.

A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might
singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be
done, each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion
only which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, that the stones
which form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the
diamond of a ring. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be
enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether
real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words. When
the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience;
when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions. If
any custom is disused, especially the literary, the words that express that
custom often perish with inactivity. As any opinion grows popular, it will
innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice. Since I retired
from full time work in 1999 my mind has been unchained but, as yet, my
opinions are not popular. They are, though, growing in the public place at
a faster pace than ever. I leave it to readers to assess the junction, the
intersection, between my letters and the pace of change in society on the
subjects that occupy both me and that wider milieux. By 1999 my life had
become more speculative than active, more literary, than people centered
with its endless listening and talking. This shift in my literary and daily
avocation is strongly reflected in the quantity and content of my letters
and coalesced in my first extensive publications on the internet.

In the hope of giving longevity to that which my own nature repells me,
forbids me, to desire, namely, the fame of my letters and my immortality
through them, I have devoted this collection of letters, the labour of years,
to the honour of my religion and as a testimony to one of my lifes
achievements. There is a glory to life from its arts and its letters. Whether
I shall add anything of my own writings to these arts and letters, to
English literature, must be left to time. Much of my life has been lost
under the pressures of illness, lack of direction, a certain frivolity, jobs
that were fill-ins, conversations that seemed to go nowhere, activities that
functioned largely to fill in time, the desire to be entertained regularly and
daily, inter alia. Much of my days have been trifled away.

Much time each day has been spent in provision, in functioning, for the
tasks of the day that was passing over me, doing what was in front of my
nose. I have not thought my daily labour wasted; I have not thought my
employment useless or ignoble. If, by my assistance, foreign nations and
distant ages might gain access to the propagators of knowledge and
understand the teachers of truth, or if my labours might afford light to
some of the multitude of the repositories of learning, then my
employment will be more worthwhile than any contemporary
achievement. For vision and a sense of the future inspires so much that I
do. When I have been animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my
collection, however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
a man that has endeavoured well. Useful diligence in the microcosm of
letter writing may in the end prevail.-Ron Price with thanks to Samuel
Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary From Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary
of the English Language, London, 1755, Edited by Jack Lynch.

I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this
autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003.
It was one of my essays that was, in that process of ten years in the
evolution of this autobiography, simply gathered into an appendix and not
integrated into the body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a
better integration of material, of my autobiographical resources. My
imaginative function became more fertile in the third edition. As the poet
Wallace Stevens writes, referring to imagination: I am the necessary
angel of earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again, I am seeing the
world again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a
prolific letter writer, saw his letters as a sort of spontaneous
autobiography and his poems as his spiritual autobiography. I like the
distinction. Perhaps, one day, a selection of letters from my spontaneous
autobiography will become available.

Here, then, is some of that essay.....As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of
pioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to
2002, I wrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience....
Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of
this letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first
letter I received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St.
Helena in 1967. Cliffs wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five.
Cliff is still in St. Helena thirty-five years later. He has remarried. He
never wrote again. I replied but I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed
I kept few of my personal letters until about 1982, twenty years into the
pioneering venture.

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 junior-
youth 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
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
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 Baháís 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 I’m sure
will not be due to my wit, my humour, the adventureousness 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 assoication 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 minutae of life just to get from one day
to another in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. I’m
not so sure about this characterization of the double self, but that sense of
surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses
an appeal. It helps to keep me going, keep me writing. “The secretion of
ones innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one
gives to the public,” writes Naipaul. “What one bestows on private life—
in conversation, however refined it may be—is the product of a quite
superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by
putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world. While I’m
not sure this is entirely true, it certainly is in part.

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 Baha’i 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.
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 eighteen-
volume 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 Baháí 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.

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,
Baháís 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 Baháí studies or international Baháí pioneering studies


will one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of
the great Baháí international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(1937-
2004), 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 Baháí history of that region. I have
now given them to the Regional Baháí Council for the Northern Territory.
Much more collecting of letters written by Baháís 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
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 Baháí often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I
have frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas
Henry Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find
encouraging. He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter
from a Bishop Butler, a bishop of the episcopal seat of Aukland, to the
Duchess of Somerset. The bishop wrote: And when I consider, in one
view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the
burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in
another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as
they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put
upon me to do. As archaic, as anachronistic, as the style of the good
bishops words may be, the point for me is important, namely, that Huxley
saw his autobiography, even the humble letter, as something put on him
to do, by the interpositions of a watchful Providence, the eye of a
necessary Fate or the simple needs of circumstance, however trifling it
appeared to be.

I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A


Sudden Music. White says that the highest service a Baháí 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
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.

I’ve 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 Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the
repairs and improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if
Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-
educated man, one of Englands founders of primary schools for all, this
father of eight children, this coiner of the term agnostic, saw himself as
an instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, Im sure he
felt he had things of great importance to do and that they had been put
upon him. Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not
until the nineteenth century that self-consciousness had developed so far
that it was the habit of men to describe their minds when they wrote their
letters and their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I
am conscious, as Woolf puts it plainly, of the worlds notorious
indifference. And it may be many years, if ever, before this collection of
letters has any interest to even a coterie of people.

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 Emerson’s 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
Capote’s 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
Baha’is of a conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one for
those who are Baha’i in name only, one for youthful types, one for old
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 mid-
to-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 Baháí Era. They
present pictures that tell of a concrete reality, a time and an age, that I
hope will stand revealed to future readers. For these epochs were
characterized by what Toynbee calls a schism in the soul in an age of
social disintegration. A fully seasoned universal state with its supreme
authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were not part
of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization, for humankind
in this half century, although some serious and significant beginnings to
that process were made in that direction.

What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some
signs and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the
global level. The Bahai Faith has been central to my education, my
ambitions and my assumptions as far back as the early 1960s and late
1950s. Much of this educatyion was peripatetic and that of an autodidact.
What is here is spiritual autobiography and psychological revelation in a
different literary form than my poetry and it tells of a period during which
the Baháí Faith made a significant leap forward in its numbers and in the
maturity of its community. Often, to the Baháís working in their personal
lives and in their communities this maturity and this growth was either
not evident or not appreciated. So often it was the struggle itself that
dominated their perspectives, their emotional life and their thoughts.
Often, too, readers awareness of the many Ron Prices that make up my
life and whatever maturity I have or have not attained is sharpened by
their dip into the pool of my letters. But perhaps most importantly the
number of collections of letters from international pioneers during this
period may not be that extensive given the busyness of peoples lives and
what seems to me to be a quite natural disinclination to keep letters
beyond a salient few of some personal importance. If, as Anthony
Burgess suggests, artists must be judged not merely by excellence, but by
bulk and variety, then at least Id be in the running, if ever I should want to
be running. Sometimes, though, bulk compromises quality. Perhaps that
is the case here. I leave that to readers to judge. As yet my literary
landscape has not been surveyed professionally or by amateurs. I
certainly hope I escape the fate of Burgess, at least as it was held in the
hands of biographer Roger Lewis who wrote: From an aesthetic
viewpoint, all of Burgess relentless productivity was one vast waste of
words and paper. But one never knows for sure.

Film critic Gerald Peary notes in his essay on the biography Clint: The
Life and Legend, there are at least two Clints. I think it is fair to say there
are probably more than two Clint Eastwoods. There are certainly more
than two Ron Prices with hopefully a golden thread joining all the selves
as well as threads of many other colours. On the internet I found by the
year 2007 at least 50 Ron Prices: car salesmen, writers, poets, evangelists,
Deans, Board Members,harpists,insurance salesmen, etc. etc.

After more than fifty years of excessive contact with human beings, the
quiet, only child, the self who had learned in his early childhood(up to
1949) how to occupy himself in a solitary way, seemed to want more of
that solitude. Price was ready by the turn of the millennium for
televisions more metonymic contact with others. He found in this
medium, a medium which had been part of his life on and off for half a
century, that all of those storytellers, priests, wisemen and elders which in
many ways had become lost to society in the years of its disintegration in
the previous century and especially in recent decades, the decades of his
life, had become restored to cultural visibility and to oral primacy in his
nightly fare on TV and in the daily fare of radio programs. With
embellishments from the internet and books, embellishments which were
usually more satisfying to the mind, he felt little need for any human
contact at all. And society, he felt, seemed to have little felt need, for his
story, drowned as society had become in a plethora of stories, day after
day, night after night and year after year from the tidal wave of
productions of the print and electronic media

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.

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 oclock 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. Baháí 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.

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 activitiy 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 ennumerate 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
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 one’s 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 fiber and by my fifties I came to prefer, as
Thoreau had been all his life, to be more isolated from my surroundings,
more insular and solitary. I came by my late fifties to plant myself near
the sea with a granite floor of principle beneath me, although often there
were layers of intervening clay and quicksand which, even in my
solitude, seemed to entrap me. Of course, that trap was the one I had seen
all my life: the trap of self, of ego, of natures insistent self and of lifes
inevitable complexities. Was I too quick or too slow to answer lifes call,
too inclined or not inclined enough to switch off its insistent urgings?
Lacking the right words for the right time or failing to come up with the
right verbal package did I rush in where angels feared to tread? Was this
equally true in the letters I wrote? One could not always frame the words
to say-it-right in every letter and email. I hope, I believed, I was saying it
better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said is the
poet’s true autobiography.

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.

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 Im happy with it this way.
During the time the letters in this particular part of the collection were
written I began work on some thirty-two instalments on The History of
the Baháí Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997; I also completed
my book The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature,
organized and refined the second edition of my website Pioneering Over
Four Epochs into fifteen hundred pages and gathered together a body of
resources for what became the third edition of my autobiography which I
wrote later in the twenty-first to twenty-fourth months of the Five Year
Plan(2001-2006).

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. Baháís, 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

Ron Price

17 February 2003

PS. The genre that Henry Miller enjoyed writing most was the letter.
Long letters to close friends, wrote Mary Dearborn,(1) were his favourite
pieces of writing. I must add that I, too, have come to enjoy this form of
writing much more since retirement, but they are rare occurrences these
long letters, if one defines a long letter as, say, four typed pages, 2000
words, or more. The attitude that many have in my time is: why write it if
I can say it on the telephone? Many are like famous Samuel Johnson who
wrote letters with great difficulty and reluctance. And although I take
delight in conversation over limited periods with some people, I am
equally happy now to have little to no conversation except with my wife.
However fine, too, that my letters may be, the greatest of lifes arts is the
art of living.

-(1)Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry


Miller, Harper Collins, London, 1991, p.12.

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, I
see myself as kind, one of the kind Canadians 'Abdul-Bahá 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 Baháís 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,
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 twenty-
three to my surprisingly late-discovered masterbatory abilities in middle
age, my sexual exploits are given the kind of detail that would satisfy the
most ardent voyeur, well, at least some ardent voyeurs. I leave readers
with such interests and the readers who acquire a taste for what I write
here, with a reward at the end of the tunnel of my life. Stay tuned, your
persistence will yield its just deserts. My sexual achievements or lack
thereof, my career in fornication, like many of my forays into aspects of
life’s burgeoning variety of pursuits and however stimulating they may be
when well-written-up, will, it seems to me, in the end contribute little to
nothing to my literary reputation or an understanding of the pioneering
life. I was, like Henry Miller, enthralled by women.(Erica Jong in the
Devil at Large, 1993) This enthrallment is a story in itself and relatively
little of that story is found in my letters.

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. Exceptfor 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
my letter-writing is difficult to assess. Im 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 contempible animal. For, as Baháulláh 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
particlarly 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.

I’d like to think that, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, my
letters could be read in the same way Katherine Suzannah Pritchard read
those of Miles Franklin: “Every literary nerve in me thrills to your lovely
breezy way of saying things….And it’s almost as good as a yarn with you
to read one. I just simmer and grin to myself when I do: with a sense of
real contact with you.” That’s what I’d like to think. I’d like to think, too,
that others might learn not to be too tedious in the exposition of whatever
Gospel they may be espousing, particularly that associated with the two
nineteenth century God-men at the centre of the Baháí paradigm. But I
am more inclined to think these letters simply preserve a record of a life
in the context of a period of four epochs in the historical development of
a new world Faith. Perhaps I give my life and times a fresh and novel
colouring; perhaps my writings will enjoy a coterie of the worlds readers
interested in the great experiment of which I am but a part. Again, Id like
to think so. But it is difficult to know. In a world of mass entertainment, a
diversified print and electronic media, collections of letters dont rate
highly on the scale of popular interest, as Ive already said. Thats just a
simple fact. A coterie of people, it seems to me, may take an interest in
these letters one day. One day in a world of say, twelve billion, in which
the Baháí Faith is playing an important role in a future world Order, that
coterie may be a significant number. We shall see.
These letters “hang there,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote of the letters of
Oliver Cromwell, “in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost
extinct, yet like a real star; fixed, once a piece of the general fire and light
of Human life.” These letters also play some part in answering Carlyles
key biographical questions: how did the subject influence society, and
how did society influence the subject? My letters may indeed become
extinct. Certainly their present state of influence resembles extinction
more than influence of any kind. The nine hundred letters of Cicero
written in the middle of the first century BC were one of the first,
arguably the first, in history to give us an understanding of the times. Of
course he had, and his society had, no telephone, fax, email, computer, et
cetera, to convey messages. The letter was, for perhaps two and a half
millennia, much more crucial as a genre of communication. Somewhere
in the nineteenth century, gradually, letters, like biographies, became
much more human and revealing, not like the wax figures they had been.
After perhaps a century and a half of this fresh wind, my letters join, add-
onto this new tradition. Perhaps readers will find here: the creative fact,
the fertile fact, the engendering fact. One can but hope. However much
my life and my thinking have been focussed on a single point, elaborated
across a wide field of action and behaviour, I would think my letters are a
good illustration of the application, the delineation, of this focus. During
these four epochs there was so much happening in the public and private
spheres to fragment daily life. My letters, it seems to me, provide a lens
that magnifies many of my autobiographical gestures and throw light on a
life, a time and a religion in a way that my general autobiography does
not. So did Ciceros and, as famous as he has been, now he is read only by
a coterie.

Signs of the continuous evolution of a lifelong scheme of devotion are


difficult to describe without appearing to be fanatical or obsessive or
unduely pious, in a world that has lost any interest in piety. Years even
decades of concentrated effort are easy to accummulate 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
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, altough 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 chouder, 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!!

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.

6 Reece Street

George Town

Tasmania 7253

4 October 2000

Dear Rebecca

The program Life Matters today, Wednesday October 4th, was on the
theme“Taking Time Out.” I won’t try to summarize all the points made
by the guests: Ester Buchholz, Margaret Murton and Gavin Smith and the
many callers discussing as they were, what one speaker called “the
neurosis of our time: a lack of aloneness.” I will briefly tell of my own
experience here in this letter. Fit in what you can when, and if, you read
this letter.

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 I’d get some kind of withdrawal
symptoms. So I spend time helping organizing the local seniors’ group; I
have a radio program for half an hour a week; I am involved with the
Baha’i community and my wife’s family here in northern Tasmania. All
of these activities together do not involve a lot of time, but they give me
that needed social contact, that balance between solitude and being with
others, which I find essential to my comfortableness.

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
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 it’s possible that, at 55, my life is
just half over. While my mother was the dominant person in my life until
my twenties; my first wife in my twenties as well and my second wife the
dominant person to this day. Like the women in Lawrences life, these
women in mine were all of independent mind, resolute and highly
articulate. My correspondence, however, does not really deal with these
important relationships; or does it deal with other important relationships
in my life, like those of my father, my uncle and a small handful of
academic Bahais, among others. Admittedly, too, my letters come
nowhere near the honesty and completeness with which Lawrence
disclosed his personality. I feel quite confident that no one in the future
will say of my letters, what James Boulton said of the letters of
Lawrence, namely, that they were masterpieces of the letter-writing art
and an unexampled expression of his creativity.

The following letter to the program presenters of an ABC Radio series


Life Matters is 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.
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 Dave and Barb

Time seems to go by faster as you get older, you hear it said so often, and
it certainly seems to be the case. Ill soon be sixty and I assume, as long as
I am in good health and I have a range of interests, the years will spin by
irretrievably from my grasp as one writer put it. And so is this true of all
of us. And so the time has come again for the annual letter to what is for
me about a dozen or so friends and relatives, the periodic up-date of
events in this swiftly passing life. At one level not a lot seems to take
place: the same routines, habits and activities fill the days as they did this
time last year. At another level a great deal takes place. On the
international and national landscape the events continue to be of
apocalyptic/ cataclysmic proportions as they have been off and on it
would seem since 1914--or, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet argued
persuasively , since about 500 BC. Mark Twain once said that to write
about everything that took place would make a mountain of print for each
year. James Joyce produced several hundred pages to describe one day in
his book Ulysseys. Ill try to reduce the mountain of life to a small hill or
two in this email.

Chris and I have been here in George Town at the end of the Tamar River
in northern Tasmania for three years and three months. Daniel has been
with us and working at the Australian Maritime College as a research
engineer for two of these years. He is happier with his job now than he
was in the first year, although occasionally he applies for another job
somewhere for graduate engineers; Chris is not suffering from ill-health
quite as much as this time last year, having received some useful
medication from her doctor and treatment from an osteopath. Both Dan
and Chris plug along battling with the forces that destiny or fate, divine
will or predestination, free will or determinism, circumstance or
socialization throw up for them to deal with from day to day.

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 Laun- ceston 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
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/Baháí)/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
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 Baháí 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 don’t 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
saintship’s most characterisitc qualities, is difficult to determine by an
examination of a person’s letters.

I take much pleasure from most of my letter writing which obviously the
poet Samuel Johnson did not. I don’t think my letters have that “easy
power” which those of Henry James possessed. Indeed, so much of their
content, it seems to me, is repetitious. In a large collection of letters, like
a large collection of life, repetition it seems to me, is unavoidable. I am
encouraged, though, by some of the remarks of language philosopher
Roland Barthes. He says that readers learn how to acquire the experience
of those people they are reading. Rather than being consumers of my
letters, then, they become producers. This is partly because literature, of
which letters and autobiography are but a part, takes in all human
experience, ordering, interpreting and articulating it. Readers learn to set
aside many of the particular conditions, concerns and idiosyncrasies
which help define them in everyday affairs.
And so I have hope that what may be for many readers a banal collection
of decades of letters, may be for others a body of print that will arouse a
response in the reading self, the reading system, the meaning, the identity,
system, of others. Perhaps, too, that response will be something quite
significant, something that their interpretive principles allow them to see
and that even a relaxation of cultivated analytical habits which often
happens while reading a letter may help them to see. Of course, whatever
reasonable arguments I present, whatever challenges to magnanimity I
raise, they are, again, as William James puts it so succinctly, “folly before
crocodiles.”

Here is an introduction I wrote to a collection of letters to Baha’i


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

Who knows what will become of all these letters, now contained in some
fifteen volumes of assorted sizes and contents. “Letters enabled Emily
Dickinson to control the time and place of her relationships,” writes
James Lowell in his introduction to a volume of her letters.1 I’m sure
they have a similar function for me; I have become even more conscious
of this as the email grew and developed throughout the 1990s and became
a more important part of my life and as my world of employment became
a world of retirement filled as it was with writing and reading. I do not
keep a copy of all my emails, only the main ones. Since so many emails
are of the short and snappy variety, basically a form of entertainment, the
funny and the wee-wisdom, as I call them, the variety which exercises
that control which Lowell speaks of in a light way, an important part of
this new variety of my correspondence I simply do not keep a record of in
my files. I suppose, though, that since they are never recorded in the first
place, it will never be missed.2

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
Dickinson’s 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 White’s
letters.
Are there no letters? There’s nothink I like better than a read of a good
letter. Look and see, Mrs. Goosgog, if you can’t find me a letter.I’m
inclined to feel melancholy at this time of night.4-The Ham Funeral

The TV, video and the DVD proably have this entertaining function now,
largely replacing any function the letter may have had to keep people
amused. As I indicated above, the letter may even have been on the verge
of extinction had it not been for the email’s resurrecting role. As the
1990s progressed, the email came to dominate the landscape and replace
the letter. With the world population doubling in these three epochs, too,
I’m sure the letter/email is now in safe hands, even if nine-tenths of the
production is not worth saving or pondering over after an initial read.

And so here, in this small volume, the reader will find my


correspondence (i) with the Canadian magazine Baha’i 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 Baha’i
Academic Resource Library. I have written a 2000 word essay on the
“funnies and wee-wisdoms” email style.

3 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words, Oxford UP, NY, 1996,


p.205.

4 David Marr, Patrick White’s Letters, Random House, 1994, p.vi.

Ron Price

10 February 2000

Such are the introductory words to another volume of letters, one of many
introductons written in the fourth decade of this pioneering venture.

Again on this subject of the letter let me add this short essay in relation to
a special type of letter, the job application, which was arguably the
dominant form of letter I wrote during all my pioneering and job-seeking
life, 1961-2003.

INTRODUCTION TO FILE OF JOB APPLICATION LETTERS

LETTER WRITING 2 JOBS A WEEK FOR 42 YEARS JOB HUNTING


1961-2003
The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer use in the
job-hunting world, should help anyone wanting to know something about
my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This
resume might be useful for the few who want to assess my suitability for
some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must
emphasize again, I never apply for anymore. I stopped applying for full-
time jobs six years ago in 2001 and part-time ones in 2003. I also left the
world of volunteer activity, except for work in one international
organization, claiming as it does to be the newest of the world's great
religions of history, the Baha’i Faith, two years ago. The age of 63, then,
sees me self-employed as a writer-poet. I gradually came to this role in
the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, eight years ago.

Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a
week in a job and many other hours to community activity marked a
turning point for me so that I could devote my time to a much more
extensive involvement in writing. Writing is for most of its votaries a
solitary, hopefully stimulating but not always pleasurable leisure-time-
part-time-full-time pursuit. In my case in these early years of my late
adulthood, writing is full-time about 60 hours a week.1 I have replaced
paid employment and activity with people in community with a form of
work which is also a form of leisure, namely, writing and reading.

Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of
the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out
this experience, this resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this
introductory statement on the history of my job application process.2 If,
as Carl Jung writes, we are what we do, then some of what I was could
and can be found in that attachment. That document may seem over-the-
top as they say these days since it now goes on for more than 20 pages,
but for nearly half a century of various forms of employment, years in the
professional and not-so-professional job world produced a great pile of
stuff/things. As I say, I make it available to readers of this account, when
appropriate, and I update it to include many of the writing projects I have
taken on during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-
time and volunteer activity.

The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the
document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of
another adventure, another pioneering move to another town, another
state or country, another location, work in another organization, another
portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my
late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason,
movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be
necessary or desired. But this seems unlikely as I go through these early
years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life.

In the last three years which are the first of my late adulthood, a period
from 60 to 80; and in these early years of my retirement(1999 to 2007), I
have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able
to do in those years of my early and middle adulthood from 1965 to 1999
when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept
my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially. And now, with the
final unloading of much of the volunteer work I took on from 1999-2005,
with my last child having left home in 2005 and a more settled home
environment than I’ve ever had, the years of late adulthood beckon bright
with promise. My resume reflects this shift in my activity-base.

The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern
for forty years is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi.
Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and
their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines
of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime.
Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth,
nor is a long list of jobs, although some degree of inner change, some
inner shifting is just about inevitable, or so it seems to me, especially in
these recent decades. For many millions of people during the years 1961-
2003, my years of being jobbed, the world was their oyster, not so much
in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in
terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global
context.

This was true for me during those years when I was looking for
amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and
avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years
of pioneering, my applying-for-job days, the more than forty years from
1961 to 2003. My resume altered many times, of course, during those
forty plus years is now for the most part, as I indicated above, not used in
these years of my retirement, except as an information and bio-data
vehicle for interested readers, 99% of whom are on the internet at its
plethora of sites.

This document, what I used to call a curriculum vitae or CV, is a useful


backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry, although
some poets regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, personal
background as irrelevant to their work. For they take the position we are
not what we do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly,
"we are not our jobs." I frequently use this resume at various website
locations on the Internet when I want to provide some introductory
background on myself, indeed, I could list many new uses after forty
years of only one use--to help me get a job, make more money, enrich my
experience add some enrichment to my life, etcetera. The use of the
resume saves one from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One
doesn't have to say it all again in resume after resume to the point of utter
tedium as I did so frequently when applying for jobs, especially in the
days before the email and the internet. A few clicks of one’s personal
electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game goes on or
comes to a quick end at the other end of the electronic set of wires, as the
case may be.

During those job-hunting years 1961-2003 I applied for some four


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 forty year period. The great bulk of those thousands of
letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, quite
exhausting and frustrating a process, I did not keep. I did keep a small
handful of perhaps half a dozen of all those letters in a file in the Letters:
Section VII, Sub-Section X of my autobiographical work, Pioneering
Over Four Epochs. Given the thousands of hours over those forty years
devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to
the pioneering venture that is my life; given the amount of paper
produced and energy expended; given the amount of writing done in the
context of those various jobs,(3) some of the correspondence seemed to
warrant a corner in the written story of my life.(4)

It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire, to write this short


statement fitting all those thousands of resumes into a larger context. The
things we do when we retire!(5)

____________________________FOOTNOTES___________________
__________

(1) This involves reading, posting on the internet, developing my own


website and writing in several genres.
(2) My resume is only included with this statement when it seems
appropriate, on request or in my autobiography.

(3) Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research
Institute in 1964, I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries, reports,
essays, evaluations, subject notes, inter alia, in my many jobs. None of
that material has been kept in any of my files and, over 40 years, it
amounted to literally millions, an uncountable number, of words.

(4) The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-


lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1960 to 2007. I
guesstimate the collection contains about 3000 letters. This does not
include these thousands of job applications and their replies, thousands of
emails now and an unnumbered quantity of in-house letters at places
where I was employed. I have kept, as I say above, about half a dozen to
a dozen of these letters and none of the approximately 10,000 documents
I wrote in the years 1961 to 2003.

Note: Since about 1990 thousands of emails have been sent to me and
replies have been written but, like the job application, most have been
deleted from any potential archive. For the most part these deleted emails
seem to have no long term value in an archive of letters. They were
deleted as quickly as they came in. Of course there are other emails,
nearly all of the correspondence I have sent and received since about
1990 to 1995 which would once have been in the form of letters, is now
in the form of emails. They are kept in my letter-files. (See the internet
site 'Bahá'í Library Online' and the 'Personal Letters' section for an
extended discussion of this aspect of my life: writing letters.)

__________________________________

That's all folks!


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 manic-


depression, 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 won’t 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
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 other’s 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.

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.

“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.

HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Kevin Hart, a poet who lives in Australia, says that writing poetry is
about retrieving something you have lost. When you write a poem you
lose that thing again, but you find it by writing about it--indirectly. This
indirection involves, among other things, finding how to write about this
lost person, place or thing in your life.1 One thing I find I lose frequently
and have to retrieve, recreate, find again in a new, a fresh way, a way with
hopefully more understanding than when I last passed by, is history, mine
and all that is the worlds. I need a narrative, a chronological, base to bring
out the truth of the past; I need silence to contemplate the sources of
inspiration and know- ledge; I need to be able to tell a good story in my
poetry for this is what will give it enduring literary worth. A good story, it
seems to me, is one thats a little too complicated, twisted and
circumlocuitous to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television
story. Oliver Goldsmith once said, the most instructive of all histories, of
all stories, would be each mans honest autobiography.2 That may be true
but it depends on just how the story is told. -Ron Price with thanks to
1Kevin Hart, Poetica, ABC Radio National, 2:05-2:45 pm, 3 November
2001;and 2MarkS.Phillips,Reconsiderations on History and
Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of
Eighteenth-Century Britain, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.57,
No.2, pp.297-316

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.

Ron Price

3 November 2001

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEVER

Price’s attitude to his poetry was not unlike that of Sylvia Plath’s. He saw
himself as an artisan. He was an artisan with an idea. All of his poems
began with an idea, a concept, a something; at worst the beginning of a
poem was what Roger White called a poor connection on a telephone
line. But it was a connection. Sometimes the connection was sharp and
clear. He was happy to flow down whatever river the water was willing to
go down, to make whatever product he could make, as long as it
exhausted all his ingenuity in the process, as long as the water flowed to
the sea becoming part of that great body of life. Sometimes Price’s poetry
was confessional, showed the indictment of immediate experience. Some
of his work was what Robert Lowell once described, in reference to the
poetry written in the last year of Plath’s life, as the autobiography of a
fever. Sometimes Price would disappear into his poem and become one
with it. In poetry Price found his lie could defeat the process of easy
summary. -Ron Price with thanks to Stanley Plumly, “What Ceremony of
Words,” Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath, editor, Paul
Alexander, Harper & Row, NY, 1985, pp.13-17.
You were always an intruder, then,

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

I’ve earned my place, especially now,

after all these years; there’s a sacredness

here and in the grass; there’s 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 truth’s 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;

you’d been trying to bow out since 19534

when I’d just breathed the first words

and the Kingdom of God on earth

had begun in all its glorious unobtrusiveness.

1 Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1962

2 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.

3 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, p.121.

4 Plath’s first attempt at suicide was in 1953.

Ron Price
23 February 2000

Id like to think that one day I might have some of the experience that
Thomas Carlyle had back in 1866, as the very outset of a new Revelation
that Carlyle had absolutely no awareness of in the England of his home.
In that year, two months after the death of his wife, he was reading some
of her letters from the year 1857. He said he found in those dear records a
piercing radiancy of meaning. Carlyle wanted his own letters preserved as
a record of his life so that his record would be as full as possible.

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 soul’s 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 Dickinson’s Readings of
Men and Books, MacMillan, London, 1990, p.69 and “The Heroic Soul
and the Ordinary Self” Baha’i 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

as if destroying cancer
in the centre of one’s home.

There is an outer victory;

‘tis measured every day,

tho\\\\\\\' so frequnetly it\\\\\\\'s defeat

that faces us when we pray.

Then there is what’s 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.


Ron Price

29 October 1995

And so, at the end of several thousand letters, at the end of all the battles
and the losses, I anticipate that there will be \\\\\\\"a rank of angels\\\\\\\"
who will, as \\\\\\\'Abdu\\\\\\\'l-Bahá puts it in so many different ways in
His Memorials of the Faithful, be there as I am \\\\\\\"plunged into the
ocean of light.\\\\\\\" And there, \\\\\\\"lapped in the waters of grace and
forgiveness\\\\\\\" I shall review my days on this earthly plane which
passed as swiftly as the twinkling of a star. I trust I will be able to recall
that I made my mark at what was a crucial turning point of a juncture in
human history the like of which never came again in the story of human
civilization. Will I be able to recall, at that future time, a time beyond
time in that Undiscovered Country, deeds that have ensured for me
\\\\\\\"celestial blessings?\\\\\\\" Will there be regrets and remorse? Will
letters continue to be written in that place? Who knows

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

G’day from Tasmania!


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 Baha’is 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.
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! I’m glad I pulled the plug when I did at the ripe old
age of fifty-five. The time was right for me. It felt right in leaving and the
first 18 months have confirmed that was the right decision. Twenty-nine
years in the game was enough for me. Centrelink and the several private
employment providers don’t put any significant pressure on you here in
northern Tasmania, a region of high unemployment. The concept of
‘mutual obligation’ has not resulted in me taking on any jobs I don’t
want. I have a Web Page which is considered ‘an embryonic business’ by
Centrelink; I also work for a home tutoring organization in Victoria and
am the President of the George Town School for Seniors. The total time
per month, in recent months, on all of these ‘exercises’ together is about
two to three hours. Of course, in addition to the above, I must apply for 3
jobs/fortnight and that takes, roughly, two hours a week of various forms
of paper-schuffling. It is a pleasing change from the mountains of
marking and endless talking and listening.
When I left the classroom in early April last year I was really emotionally
worn-out, in ‘emotional labour,’ I think was the term I came across on a
Four Corners program about Call Centres I saw a few weeks ago. It was
not just a fatigue with teaching but, it would appear in retrospect, a
fatigue with a range of other social obligations I was involved with in
Perth. Wall-to-wall talking and listening. Now, after 18 months, I have
just enough social contact to satisfy my needs for sociability and enough
time in solitude to cater to that other side of me. I have a weekly radio
program on the local community radio station which I run for the Baha’is
of Launceston; and there are activities in the Baha’i community in
Tasmania to keep me in touch with humanity and prevent me from
becoming the total hermit which part of my personality seems to need at
the moment. I write lots of poetry and prose, read lots of books, walk 45
minutes every day and argue more with my wife, who has been going
through meno- pause and giving me the biggest challenge of my early
time of retirement.

George Town is a town of about 8000 people. I look out my lounge room
window (the whole wall is window) and can see the Tamar River, the
Bass Strait and the Asbestos Mtns(soon to be renamed). Winter
temperatures go down to zero to five at the low end and ten to fifteen in
the day. Things are warming up now in the early days of spring, but won’t
get to the high temperatures of Perth, perhaps thirty degrees once or twice
during the whole summer. We are half an hour from Launceston and other
critical points on the Tamar River where my wife’s family lives. My
family, consisting now only of cousins and their children in Canada,
might as well be on another planet. One perfunctory letter a year is the
only contact left now. Moving many thousands of miles from home, after
thirty years, tends to limit intimacy in most cases. Absence makes the
heart grow fonder, only to a point, I guess.

I 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 it’s
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 I’ve been out for my walks in the bush
near my home here in George Town, and so I decided to write. If any of
you feel like writing do so; I’d love to hear from you. But I know you are
all busy and getting in gear for the last term of another year. After living
in so many towns since I left my home town in 1962, I find the places I
have lived in become a little like chapters in a book, slices of memory.

Time moves us all on, whether peripatetic creatures like myself or more
sedentary types who live and die in the same city. I have happy memories
of Thornlie from 1989 to 1999; one leaves a little of oneself wherever one
dwells. And so I write this letter.

I wish you all well in your own careers and in your personal lives. May
you all be survivors and, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, if you can’t find
much happiness perhaps you can settle for measures of pleasure that you
can tease out of existence. I will enclose 3 or 4 poems to that end. Cheers!

Ron Price

encl.: poems(4)
I will not include those poems here, but I will quote the prolific letter
writer Anais Nin who said that the living moment is caught and in
catching this moment, by accumulation and by accretion, a personality
emerges in all its ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes--in its most
living form. Some of me the reader will find here in this chapter. If
readers want any more of the personas they have found here, they are
advised to go to my collections of letters. And there they will find the
dispersed and isolated facts of my life and some of continuitys threads.
But there is much in my life that is not in my letters. My childhood,
adolescence and, indeed, much of my adulthood is just not there, for there
are no letters for long periods of my life. Readers are best advised to go
to films of the period, the print & electronic media and books from the
last half of the twentieth century. These letters and my life provide only a
small window. Although much of the electronic media is bubble and
froth, light and noise and, although its mindlessness may be having a
negative affect on western civilization, there is much there that can
supplement rather than supplant the civilization of the book and fill in a
picture of society and life that my letters, no matter how comprehensive
and exhausting, simply can not describe.

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 Baháí 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.br>
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
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 Baháí 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
seems to come unbidden although there are often specific stimuli to
arouse the energies in both of these domains. The structures within which
the poetic and the literary flashes that fall onto the paper are defined and
described are, I hope, intellectually interesting. I have worked over the
years to make them more distinctive. But I know from my many years as
a teacher that appreciation of distinctiveness is entirely in the mind of the
beholder, the reader.
The political action of ordinary people in relation to the transformation of
the cultural and political landscape of Europe since the Reformation in
1517 has become a serious object of historical study. This historical study
is recent. In the years since I have been pioneering, that is since 1962,
ordinary people have come to occupy a much more central place in
history’s story. Such study naturally takes issue with previous scholarly
interpretations relying as they did on elite-centred accounts of the big
changes of the last five hundred years. This emphasis on ordinary people
explicitly undermines these elite-centered accounts of both the
Reformation and the consolidation of the peculiarly European system of
states. It also brings into question the explanation of other developments
and changes in western society in the last five centuries. In a far more
constructive sense, however, these more recent studies of the role of
ordinary human beings have broken the exclusive claims of rulers and the
ruling class to political and cultural sovereignty. The ordinary citizen, by
boldly entering political arenas that had been legally closed to them,
helped to shape the cultural and political landscape of modern Europe. In
the last forty years this fact has been at last recognized.

I 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 Bahaí 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
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
Ron Price, Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies: A Sub-Genre of the Email
Industry, Human Communication in the Twenty-First Century, editor,
Harry Funwisdum, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 45-63.

The following is a digest of Prices twenty-one pages that did not make it
into Funwisdums new book. Price is a prolific writer and, although he is
neither famous nor rich, he churns out some provocative stuff from his
word-factory on the Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, in northern
Tasmania.

Receiving so many funnies and words-of-wisdom as I do week after week


from a small coterie of people, I thought I would try to respond more
befittingly than I normally do with my perfunctory and usually brief set
of phrases and sentences, if indeed I respond at all. What you find below
is a more reflective piece that sets all these wisdoms and funnies I receive
from you--and others--in some perspective, a perspective that derives in
large measure from my years as a teacher/lecturer and from some forty
years now of imbibing funnies and wisdoms from a multitude of sources.
Indeed, it is probably these years as a teacher that have resulted in my
habit, engrained after all these years, of responding to any and all
incoming mail/email. I enjoyed teaching but, as the years approached
thirty-in-the-game, I got tired of much of what was involved in the
process. Some of the emails and letters I receive now are somewhat like
pieces of work I used to have to mark. Like making comments on the
work of students, I think it important to respond to such emails and letters
with courtesy and with honesty. This is not always easy for courtesy and
honesty do not sit easily together, especially if the content of the received
material is neither funny nor edifying, as is the case with so much of the
material I receive.
It has been ten years since the email became part of my daily life. This
short think-piece is a reflection on an aspect of the email industry as well
as a celebration of the many advantages of this wonderful, although not
always rewarding or intellectually engaging, mechanism of technology. I
think I write this for me more than I do for you, since the thrust of so
much of this sub-genre of email communication does not, for the most
part, require any reflection, or anything more than a minimum of
reflection. I really wanted to have a think about an aspect of this industry
that has engaged my attention for some of these last ten years. Quick hits,
so many emails are, like jokes themselves-affections arising from the
sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing, as the
philosopher Emmanuel Kant once defined laughter. Perhaps, they are a
sign of a mind lively and at ease, as Emma once said in Jane Austins
book by the same name. These quick hits require quick responses, if any
at all.

Is this humour and wisdom? Or is it the trivialization of the human battle,


as the literary critic Susan Langer once defined so much of the output of
the electronic media factories? After ten years(1991-2002)( minus a few
months of travelling to Tasmania) of receiving what I guesstimate to be
some 2500 pieces of this type of email, I felt like writing this little piece
on one of the aspects of the genre. I hope you dont find it too heavy, too
much thinking, too long without the quick-natural-lift, message or laugh
that is part of the particular sub-genre of emails I am concerned with here.
In the end you may see me as too critical but, as I used to say to my
students, that is the risk you take when you open your mouth or write.

CARRY ON GANG

I have been giving and receiving various forms of advice/wisdom for


some 40 years now, 2002 back to 1962 when life began to assume a more
serious aspect for me in my late teens and when school, sport, girls and
entertainment found some competition from serious ideas in lifes round
of activities. First as a student imbibing humour and wisdom from the
several founts of knowledge and laughter I was then exposed to or that I
investigated as a youth(teens and twenties); and then as a teacher/lecturer
in the social sciences(including human relations, interpersonal skills,
conflict resolution, negotiation skills, working in teams, a list of subjects
as long as your proverbial arm)I received and dispensed advice and
wisdoms in a multitude of forms. I was clearly into the advice and
wisdom business. It was part of the very air I breathed. I should by now
be a fount of unusually perspicacious aphorisms from the wisdom
literature of history, or at the very least run wisdom workshops for the
lean and hungry. In addition I should have an accumulation of
jokes/funnies to keep everyone laughing in perpetuity.

But instead I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has
been married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off, marriage
that is, but he has had a lot of experience trying.

For some fifteen years, during this educative process, I used to give out a
summary of the wisdom of the ages on several sheets of A-4 paper to the
approximately one hundred students I had every term or semester.
Thousands of intending students of leisure and life and I went through the
material to see if we could come up with the wisest of the wise stuff,
practical goodies for the market-place and the inner man/woman. For the
most part I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz.
Of course, it had to be done in a certain way for advice givers and jokers
can be as tedious as they are valuable and entertaining.

Now that I approach the evening of my life, the wisdom continues to float
in, unavoidably, inevitably, perhaps to an extent I even encourage it.
From emails and the internet, among other sources, material is obtained
from:

(i) the wisdom literature of the great historical religions;

(ii) the wisdom of the philosophical traditions(outside religion);

(iii) the wisdom of popular psychology and the social sciences(usually


from the fields of (a) human relations, (b) interpersonal skills, (c) pop-
psychology, (d) management and organizational behaviour and (e)
endless funnies from known and unknown word factories.

Unlike some of the other academic fields like, say, the biological and
physical sciences, the social sciences(the disciplines in which the wisdom
literature is now located are either old-like history, philosophy and
religion--or young like economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
human relations, etc.) are all inexact, highly subjective and infinitely
more complex than the physical and biological sciences. Everybody and
their dog can play at dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes
providing the best advice in the form of close friendships, at least for
some people with canine proclivities. Unlike the physical and biological
sciences, though, knowledge and experience is not required. Anyone can
play the game. Often the untutored and apparently ignorant and those
who have read nothing at all in the field, can offer humble wisdoms and
funnies which excel the most learned, with or without their PhDs. So be
warned: its a mine field, this advice and wisdom business. A great deal of
useless stuff gets attractively packaged. Many ideas are like many
attractive young women; the beauty is only skin deep, as it were.
The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise
and entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie,
poorly constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of
laughs are had and wisdom gets distributed liberally. The industry, the
word factories, pour out their wisdoms and their humour with greater
frequency with every passing day.

I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of emails at this ten
year mark and this half-way point(if I live to be 98!) in what you might
call my wisdom/advice-lifeline, as I, and you, continue to imbibe the
endless supply of resources available from the endless supply of word
factories. I hope the satire here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at
all. Canadians are on the whole nice people who try to perform their
operations on their patients in such a way that they leave the hospital
without the suspicion they have even been operated on, but with the new
glands fully installed for daily use. Like the pick-pocket and the burglar, I
want to get in there and out without alerting anyone to my work. The
New Testament calls it the act of: The Thief in the Night. But, again, this
is a prophecy capable of many interpretations, as all prophecies are.

I send this your way in response to your many emails in recent months.
There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who are into this sub-genre and
who send me this special type of material in the course of a normal year.
This dozen sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years
go by, including photos to embellish the content of the wisdom and
humour.

I feel, after so many years of giving it out as a teacher, it is only fair that I
now receive it all as graciously as mine was accepted by my students over
those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I receive
is funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then,
you cant win them all. Both wisdom and humour are irrepressible. So,
carry on gang.

George Bernard Shaw used to say that I can no more write what people
want than I can play the fiddle. So he wrote what he thought people
needed. What people need and what they want are usually not the same.
Many found George presumptuous. I hope what you find here is not in
the same category as Shaws, presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this
somewhat lengthy read has been worth your while. If not, well, you now
have:

.....ten choices (and many more combinations of choices) regarding what


to do next:

(i) delete the above;

(ii) print and save for pondering because its wise, clever and something
quite personal from the sender;

(iii) read it again now, then delete it;

(iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;

(v) none of these;

(vi) all of these, if that is possible;


(vii) write your own think-piece on this sub-genre of emails;

(viii)send me a copy of your writing on this sub-genre of emails for(a) my

evaluation(1)or (b) my pleasure;

(ix) dont send it to me; and/or

(x) dont think about what Ive written; just dismiss it as the meanderings
of a man moving speedily toward his last years of middle adulthood(the
40 to 60 block).

(1) using(a) the scale: A+(91-100), A(81-90) and A-(75-80); B+(71-


74),B(68-70) and B-(65-67); C+(60-64, C(55-59) and C-(50-54); D(25-49
hold and try again) and E(0-24 attend a workshop on wisdoms and
funnies; and (b) anecdotal feedback.

August 20 2003

Life is a densely knit cluster of emotions and memories, each one steeped
in lights and colours thrown out by the rest, the whole making up a
picture that no one but the person who experiences that life could dream
of undertaking to paint or to write. Experience comes in and is left to rest
in memory and the writer crystallizes it in expression where it happens to
fall or at some point later in life,perhaps in a letter. As long as the wear
and tear of the act of living and its discriminating processes do not tax the
mind and emotions the letters go on in an endless cycle of vivid and not-
so-vivid, incessant and often uneventful adventure. I find the daily drama
of my work now that I have given up FT, PT and casual/voluntary
employments, with all the comfort and joy that the work of the
imagination brings me, hardly appears with more than a faint undertone
in whatever conversation my letters are engaged. And even when I am
also engaged in some sociable pursuit or act of urbanity, my heart lives in
its solitude, in the shrine of its labour and the intensity and serenity of its
occupation. Writing letters, now in these years free of just about all the
employments mentioned above, is such an occupation. The love of
tranquillity and its association with writing grew, as it did for the
philosopher David Hume, far more rapidly than my years.

INTRODUCTION TO LETTERS

SECTION 1: VOLUME 8

PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

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 poet’s
correspondence is the raw material of biography: the poet’s first hand
perceptions, unguarded, unpolished, and uncensored. “It’s a way of
recovering the warts-and-all humanity of these individuals.” These poets,
Ahearn goes on, “are writing things about themselves which they might
not otherwise.” Ahearn also edited selections of letters between Pound
and Zukofsky, published by New Directions in 1987, and
Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E.
Cummings, University of Michigan Press, 1996. The contrasts and
comparisons between my correspondence and the letters of these poets is
interesting, but not my purpose to examine here in this introduction.

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. “It’s 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
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 Baha’u’llah, a
sort of tangent to the immense quantities of correspondence contained in
Baha’i administrative archives. Of course, time will tell regarding the
relevance of these letters in the years ahead as Baha’u’llah’s Order gains
in strength and influence in the world. In the end all these letters may
become simply dust and ashes at the local tip.
Readers will see me sometimes groping and fumbling, sometimes
confidently writing, sometimes making tentative steps and then bold steps
toward trying to grasp the merits of what another person is saying. Often
I am completely misunderstood, but so is this such a common experience
in daily life when nothing is written at all. In personal letters I often drop
my guard; whereas in a more public face, in some public articulation of
ideas, such an exposure doesn’t take place, at least not the kind of real
human hesitation that contains real human fear. And if it does, if I adopt a
confessional mode I often regret it, as I do in everyday life. Often, too,
there is a drawing close. One can never be too sure. Such is life. There is
a limit to ones personal revelations. Teaching and consolidation has taken
many forms over these four epochs: 1944-2021. Many of these forms are
found here.

As this 43rd year of pioneering opened in the last three months, this
introduction to Volume 8 of Section 1 of my letters: Personal
Correspondence, a volume which I began fifteen months ago, came to be
filled more quickly than previous volumes of personal correspondence. I
had originally planned in a vague sort of way that this arch-lever file
would last for at least two years, but the great volume of internet site
material, postings, replies to my postings and emails prevented this from
occurring. There has developed insensibly in the last several years a
burgeoning of emails and they have filled the space available in this file
very quickly.

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
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 VOLUME 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 mother’s letters
going back an additional seven years to November 1960. I had been a
member of the Baha’i Faith for 13 to 14 months at the time of the first
letter in my Mother’s small handful of letters. This file, Volume 9 of my
personal correspondence, begins with 18 months left in the current Five
Year Plan(2001-2006). The beginnings of this file also coincide with the
third month of the 43rd year of my pioneering, the first month of the 46th
year of my membership in this Faith and, arguably, the end of the 50th
year since the beginning of my association with this Faith through my
mother’s first contact with the Cause in 1953.(1) As I pointed out at the
outset of the previous Volume of this collection, the first letter I received
and that I kept in this collection was on December 1st 1967.

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 mother’s 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.

So much for outlining the general time-frame for these letters. The vast
majority of Baha’is will leave no letters, will provide no historical
material by means of this useful genre. There will, though, be a core of
inveterate letter writers. I quoted in that last introduction to my personal
correspondence, Volume 8, a Barry Ahearn, professor of English at
Tulane University and the editor of the letters between poets Zukofsky
and Williams, who said that a poet’s correspondence is the raw material
of biography: the poet’s first-hand perceptions, unguarded, unpolished,
and uncensored. “It’s a way of recovering the warts-and-all humanity of
these individuals, because they are writing things about themselves which
they might not otherwise,” says Ahearn. Ahearn also edited selections of
other warts-and-all letters, those between Pound and Zukofsky, published
by New Directions in 1987, and Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence
of Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings, University of Michigan Press,
1996.(2) Readers will certainly find lots of warts in my writings, but
whether they will find that many of the greater, the uglier, warts in my
letters is another question since, as Baha’u’llah once wrote and as I was
sensitive to when I wrote: “not everything that a man knoweth can be
disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely and not every
timely utterance is suited to the ears or eyes of the reader.”

Keen students of biography may find some rich and varied warts in my
Journals which, as the years go on and I am more comfortable to confess
what I am still not comfortable to confess in my letters, may curl their
mental toes. It may be, though, as Roger White writes in his poem “Lines
from a Battlefield,” my “nurtured imperfections” are “not so epically
egregious” and the angels will simply yawn at their mention.(3) For the
most part, what is found in my personal correspondence is of a moderate,
tempered, hopefully judicious, expression of thought. I may not have
exercised a rigorous discipline on my words while I have given vent to an
individuality, a spontaneity and, I think, a certain degree of equanimity.

I hope I have been a source of social good, for that has been my aim. By
the time I came to write this introduction at the outset of the accumulation
of yet another collection of letters/emails/postings in November 2004, I
was receiving 300(circa) emails a day, most of which I simply deleted.
Perhaps as many as a dozen emails were kept and responded to each day,
although I never kept a statistical tabulation of the incoming and outgoing
items. For the most part, only items of some literary, informational,
social, religious, philosophical or historical significance were kept in my
files although, here too, I’m sure I kept material that would be of no use
to anyone. On the other hand I’m sure I did not file material that may
well have been useful to future historians and archivists.

In the burgeoning world of print, on the internet and in daily life, I could
not help but wonder, as I have oft-expressed before, what value this
collection of mine would be to anyone. But I shall persist and hope it has
some worth. As I indicated in the introduction to my last volume there
was coming to be just too much to keep track of. I shall return to this
introduction at a later date and an appropriate time and finalize these
words to Volume 9 of my personal correspondence before Volume 10
appears on the horizon probably some time in 2006.

The sheer repetition that appears in these letters will give ammunition to
any admirers and any critics who come along in the years ahead. My
admirers, I hope, will delight in seeing the constancy and firmness of a
core of my opinions across the years. I have only rarely found any
withering pressure to yield vis-a-vis this core. Those who become my
critics will see a frequent repetition of familiar themes and facts as
confirmation of a supposed, an apparent, lack of creativity, perhaps even
a simple-mindedness. Who knows what they will say if, indeed, they say
anything at all. In parsing my arguments, though, I hope that both
admirers and critics do not overlook what I hope they see as genuine
sincerity and doggedness in my letter collection. I often tired of writing
out again and again the same arguments and sentiments. Staleness not
freshness often dogged my path so that I did not enjoy the experience of
that phenomenal letter-writer of my time, President Ronald Reagan, who
felt when he wrote a letter that “he was expressing his views for the first
time.”(4) I experienced some of this useful emotional and intellectual
feeling but not as frequently as I would have liked.

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 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.

I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline,
and canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were
required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality
masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these
qualities are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were
masked by humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to
assess in this space.
Finally, I am conscious that my letters could be used both to my
disadvantage and to the disadvantage of the Baha’i Faith if they were to
fall into the hands of severe critics, enemies of the Cause and that
permanent lynch mob that the world creates out of its bosom and the
depths of its heart. For evil men, as the Guardian once wrote, we will
always have with us. And so I entrust these letters to the appropriate
Baha’i institutions on my passing. There is much to be pondered in my
letters including my day to day efforts as a practitioner of the protocols of
a religious piety originally imbibed at my mother’s knee more than half a
century ago. I’d like to think that readers will also enjoy what is a shrewd
mix of practicality with ideological conviction. That’s what I’d like to
think but it is difficult to assess oneself in these areas. My nuanced view
of man, society and religion might also be useful to readers--or so I hope.
I hope these letters will also bring to future readers a subtlety, a
stimulation and a pleasure that will enhance their work for this Cause in
the decades ahead as it comes to play a greater and greater part in the
unification of the planet.

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
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 I’m not sure exactly when my mother first
began her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.

2 Kevin Larimer, “First-Class Mail: A Poet’s 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.
Ron Price

December 4 2004

The history of the epistolary form could be seen as the history of the man
who explores, discovers and philosophizes, while the woman awaits his
messages, responds to his actions of conquest, seduction and
abandonment. Indeed the core of epistolary literature has been described
as a man’s narrative and a woman’s reaction to that narrative, her
monument to his passages through her life. Other analyses of epistolary
narratives are descriptions of scenarios driven by seduction, erotic love or
male dominance. Such is not the case of this collection of letters. If
anything, the general context for these letters could be said to be a
cultivation of friendship. Such could be said to be one of my lofty aims.
The Greek philosopher Isocrates once wrote that not all eternity could
blot out the friendships of good men. The older I got, though, the more
enigmatic the notion of friendship became. Still, I think the body of my
letters reveal much about the friendhips I did achieve, their meaning, their
complexity, their range and much else.

This collection of letters and its many sub-categories is part of the


author’s effort to compensate for the tendency of his fellow Baha’is
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-Baha’i 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

THOUGHTS ON MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS

By the year 2003, thirty-five years after the first letter arrived in my
colleciton, I had gathered, amassed, collected, some 35 volumes of letters
and these volumes are listed above. I often wondered about the relevance
of attempting to keep such a collection. Would it be of any use to future
historians of the Cause examining as they might be the Baháí experience
in the last half of the twentieth century? Would this collection be seen by
some readers of this web or, indeed, any future readers of this collection
should there be any such readers, as an inflated attempt to blow ones own
horn, so to speak? Just an exercise in pretentious egotism?
In the introduction to the Cambridge edition of the collection of D.H.
Lawrence’s letters(Vol. 1: 1901-1913), James T. Boulton discusses the
major influences on Lawrence’s life. These influences are reflected in his
letters. Indeed, as Aldous Huxley comments, Lawrence’s life is written
and painted in his letters. I feel this is only partly true of me and my
letters. There are very few letters in my collection before I was forty
years of age. Virtually all the letters I wrote to my mother(1966-1978)
are, in the main, lost; all the letters I wrote to old girlfriends like Cathy
Saxe and Judy Gower in the 1960s are gone. Both of these women had a
formative influence on my development as a person. Our relationship was
mediated by the teachings and philosophy of the religion we had so
recently joined in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They would have been
interesting documents had they been kept and they would be viewed in a
different perspective with the passage of time. My mother was the
dominant figure in my life, at least until I was 22. Judy Gower became
my first wife and dominated the personality landscape until I was 29.
There were other women, but I did not write to them, at best only on a
rare and occasional basis: Dorothy Weaver, Heather Penrice, Terry
Pemberton-Pigott, Kit Orlick. With them I had varying degrees of
intimacy as my adolescent male friendships slowly disappeared. Dorothy
went on to marry Bill Carr, the first Baháí in Greenland.

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 Baháí 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. Lawrence’s 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
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 Baháí 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 Mansfield’s 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 Baháí 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 Baháí


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 Baháí 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,
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.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME SIX OF PERSONAL LETTERS

2000-2001

As this 38th year of pioneering opens up 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 Cliff Huxtable on St. Helena in
1967 while I was living on Baffin Island. As I have pointed out on
previous occasions there were letters received and mailed going back as
far as about 1957, but I have not kept the letters from the period before
1967. There are many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which
were destroyed. Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have
no fame, no significance in the general and public eye, it is unlikely that
any of my letters are being kept in private hands.

If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it


would be the twenty years: 1981 and 2001. Certainly the first two
decades of my letter writing, 1961-1981, were relatively sparse compared
to the following twenty years. I do not have any interest in going through
this collection of letters in some thirty two and three ring binders. Perhaps
a future day will see me making a more 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 my letters.
Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to my letters. I have
also taken only a very general interest in the collections of letters of other
writers. I have opened a file of introductions to collections of letters by
some 40 writers and have kept additional notes on the genre from the
writings of other letter writers. As the Cause has gone from strength to
strength in the last several decades, indeed as it has been transformed in
the years I have been associated with the Baháí Faith: 1953-2003, I seem
to waver from seeing significance in the whole idea of keeping a
collection of letters, to seeing the exercise as a pretentious, if not
meaningless, act.

Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, activity;


occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or
community responsibility. Letters were the very texture wrote Henry
James of Emerson’s history. There is certainly a texture here that is not
present in the other genres of this wide-ranging autobiography. This
texture is also a result of a new writtten form, the email, a form which
was present in Volume 5 of these personal letters as well, but one that
makes a strong appearance in this sixth volume of these personal letters.

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 edge. Like much of
conversation it is random, routine and deals with the everyday scene, ad
nauseam. But these letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not so
much as a collection of letters, for collections are a common genre over
the centuries, but as a collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth
epochs of the Formative Age of the Baháí Era in the first several decades
of the tenth stage of history when the Faith expanded some 12 times.
They present pictures that tell of a concrete reality, a time and an age, that
I hope will stand revealed to future readers. For what is here is, in part,
spiritual autobiography and psychological revelation in a different literary
form than my poetry.

The future of the Cause as well as the context within which these letters
were written is very great, at least that is my belief. These days are
precious. In these days in which I have worked for the development of
this Faith in the last half of the twentieth century, when these letters were
written, the individual Baháí, myself included, while believing in the
future greatness of the Cause, was confronted daily by the apparent
insignificance and the small numbers of his particular Baháí Group. The
contrasting immensity, pervasiveness and complexity of the wider society
in which he worked made it difficult for him to see a letter written or a
meeting attended in terms of any special significance. But this will not
always be the case as these years of the Formative Age advance.

These letters are, among other things, strands of experience woven into
patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that is letter writing, an
expression of my art, a means of communication. By the time this
collection, Volume 6: 2000-2001, begins I had become exhausted by
personal contacts. This was my reason for any apparent aloofness and any
insistence on solitude that is found in either my letters or poetry. Perhaps,
like Rilke, I had been too responsive for (my) own peace of mind.1
Perhaps the letters are an indication of a great need of imparting the life
within (me.).2 Perhaps they are simply a matter of pouring experience
into a mold to obtain release, to ease the pressure of life. When
inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to correspondence. It was
handicraft, a tool, among several others, that could keep me at work in
constant preparation for the creative moments.3 For the drama of my life,
certainly by the time this volume of letters begins, was largely an inner
one. The external battle went on but in a much more subdued form. The
tangled rootand the tranquil flower is here: cool detachment and an
anguish of spirit4 and much more of the former than the latter. I leave it
to future readers to find these roots and flowers. I trust their search will
have its own reward.
Most of the correspondence with any one individual in the thirty-five
years of collected letters(or 50 depending on the definition of the
beginning point) was short, from, say, a week to three months.
Occasionally a more frequent correspondence was struck up and lasted
for several years: there are perhaps half a dozen correspondents in this
category. On rare occasions a correspondence continued for many years:
Roger White for a dozen years and Masoud Rowshan for nineteen. Much
of what I call institutional correspondence goes on for many years,
twenty years or more. Perhaps in my dotage I might analyse this
collection of letters in more detail. For now, though, these letters will
have to sit in their files getting dusted on a monthly basis.

I hope this opening comment on Volume 6 of Section VII of Pioneering


Over Three Epochs sets an initial perspective of some value. These
words, begun on 1 September 1999, were continued on several occasions
and completed on 26 August 2001 after living for nearly two years in
George Town.

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.

Ron Price

26 August 2001

I have only recently been able to free myself of the demands of


employment and the various volunteer activities that occupied me for so
may years. In order to pursue, with that same unclouded happiness, the
literary activity that Henry James pursued at the core of his faith, I seek
out the same triangle of forces he sought out: silence, seclusion and a
solitude that yields concentration. Often, too, like James, my letters do
not engage in the activity of persuasion or proselytising. There are many
reasons for this, but perhaps the main one is that people generally seem
immune if not actively hostile to efforts to engage their overt religious
sympathies and convictions.

The matters which deeply concern me usually do not find a place in my


letters, although they do come to occupy some niche--as postings on the
internet did about bipolar disorder and apologetic discussions on the
Bahai Faith found a place on many an internet thread. So let me say one
or two things about apologetics, the kinds of things I often opened my
postings on many an internet site. the following paragraphs are an
example of such a posting, a posting that appeared many times on the
internet.
Apologetics is a branch of systematic theology, although some experience
it’s thrust in religious studies or philosophy of religion courses. Some
encounter it on the internet for the first time in a more populist and
usually much less academic form. As I see it, apologetics is primarily
concerned with the protection of a religious position, the refutation of that
positions assailants and, in the larger sense, the exploration of that
position in the context of prevailing philosophies and standards in a
secular society. Apologetics, to put it slightly differently, is concerned
with answering critical inquiries, criticism of a position, in a rational
manner. Apologetics is not possible, it seems to me anyway, without a
commitment to and a desire to defend a position. For me, the core of my
position I could express in one phrase: the Bahai Revelation. With that
said, though, the activity I engage in, namely, apologetics, is a never
ending exercise.

The apologetics that concerns me is not so much Christian apologetics or


one of a variety of what might be called secular apologetics, but Bahai
apologetics. There are many points of comparison and contrast, though,
which I wont go into here. Christians will have the opportunity to defend
Christianity by the use of apologetics; secular humanists can argue their
cases if they so desire here. And I will in turn defend the Bahai Faith by
the use of apologetics. In the process we will both, hopefully, learn
something about our respective Faiths, our religions, which we hold to
our hearts dearly.

At the outset, then, in this my first comment on apologetics, my intention


is simply to make this start, to state what you might call my apologetics
position. This brief statement indicates, in broad outline, where I am
coming from in the weeks and months ahead.-Ron Price with thanks to
Udo Schaefer, Bahai Apologetics? Bahai Studies Review, Vol. 10,
2001/2002.
Id like now to make some final comments in outlining my basic
orientation to Baha’i apologetics. Critical scholarly contributions or
criticism raised in public or private discussions, an obvious part of
apologetics, should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Often
questions are perfectly legitimate aspects of a persons search for an
answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich once expressed the
view that apologetics was an answering theology.(Systematic Theology,
U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p6.)

I have always been attracted to the founder of the Bahai Faiths


exhortations in discussion to speak with words as mild as milk with the
utmost lenience and forbearance. I am also aware that, in cases of rude or
hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone may well be justified. It does
not help an apologist to belong to those watchmen the prophet Isaiah calls
dumb dogs that cannot bark.(Isaiah, 56:10)

In its essence apologetics is a kind of confrontation, an act of revealing


ones true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating essential
characteristics of faith. Dialogue, as Hans Kung puts it, does not mean
self-denial.(quoted by Udo Schaefer, Bahai Apologetics, Bahai Studies
Review, Vol.10, 2001/2) Schaefer goes on: A faith that is
opportunistically streamlined, adapting to current trends, thus concealing
its real features, features that could provoke rejection in order to be
acceptable for dialogue is in danger of losing its identity.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without


getting someones beard singed. In the weeks that follow, my postings will
probably wind up singing the beards of some readers and, perhaps, my
own in the process. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics. Much
of Bahai apologetics derives from the experience Bahais have of a
fundamental discrepancy between secular thought and the Bahai
revelation on the other. In some ways, the gulf is unbridgeable but, so too,
is this the case between the secular and much thought in the Christian
revelation or, for that matter, between variants of Christianity or secular
thought itself. That is why, or at least one of the reasons, I have chosen to
make postings at this site. In addition, this site invites debate.

Anyway, thats all for now. Its back to the winter winds of Tasmania,
about 3 kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of
place is so much simpler than that of the spiritual geography readers at
this site are concerned with, although even physical geography has its
complexities. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and
simpler and simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone. Here in
far-off Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there
through some other route than off the end of South America--your email
will be gratefully received.

Apologetics, though, I rarely engage in in letters or emails. On the


internet there are many opportunities for such engagement. But I will not
be posting examples of this engagement here.

Let me post two prose-poems thought as we cometo the concluson of this


rather long item at BARL.

UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS
After reading some 20 pages of letters from the Universal House of
Justice on The Study of the Baháí Faith, I was reminded of a great many
other letters over the years. I tried to summarize my reaction to the
content of these and other House letters which I have kept in three two-
ring binders going back to the mid-1970s after purchasing the first two
volumes of the letters of the Universal House of Justice in Wellspring of
Guidance and Letters: 1968-1973. The following poem represents one
such reaction, one summary.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs,
22 May 1998.

Where does one fit this1 in?

On the one hand is the words sweetness

from the lips of the All-Merciful

and, on the other, is all else;

on the one hand

a system emerging inexorably

from obscurity and, on the other,

narrow and limited understandings;

bringing into visible expression


a new creation and a painfully slow,

often unsuspected, manifestation of benefits.

Oh, to be au courant with the varied learning of the day

and the great events of history,

so as not to prove unequal

to an emergency,

and possess comprehensive knowledge.2

For there are so many emergencies,

so many complex interrelationships

and principles to keep us busy

in these epochal days at the dark heart.

Ron Price
22 May 1998

1 Extracts from Letters of the Universal House of Justice on Issues


Related to the Study of the Baháí Faith, May 1998,published in Baháí
Canada,pp.1-20.

2 Abdul-Bahá, Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 170, p.36.

3 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, USA, 1957, p. 111.

STRANDS OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS

Virginia Woolf was never confident for long about who she was. She was
frightened that the centre of her personality would not hold. The protean
nature of her personality caused her to be lured by the vast elements of
nature, earth, sky and sea, which would protect her. She was a spider; her
letters were her web. The whole composition, her collected letters, was
spun in a hall of mirrors. It took a certain courage for her to enter that hall
which might be filled with terror, with a nightmare, a funhouse of
distortions, all part of her manic-depressive episodes. Many strands of her
identity were attached to her many friends through the letter. The horrid,
dull, scrappy, scratchy letters she said were those letters we write only to
those for whom we possess real affection. In writing letters you have to
put on an unreal personality, except to those who are your intimate loved
ones, and even then there are the limitations of this swiftly passing world.
It is rare that you can really tell it all. When we say we know someone it
is our version of them, a version which is an emanation of ourself.
Friends, defined in letters, were therefore part of her fragile stability.1 For
me, they are part of a changing kalaidoscope which is difficult to tie
down. 1 Virginia Woolf in Congenial Spirits: The Letters of Virginia
Woolf, The Hogarth Press, London, 1989, p.xii.

We inhabit a selfhood in our letters

and reach out, condensing life,

therefore, falsifying it,

becoming more or less

than what we are,

as you did

before you gave yourself

to the waters.
I am a many-coloured thing

in my letters,

something both real and unreal

in that many coloured glass of eternity,

no hall of mirrors, nightmare,

no funhouse of distortions.

I had them all long ago;2

now in a web of many strands

emanating from those writers of letters

who have filled my life

with their epistolary delights.

Ron Price

21 May 1999
1 Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941.

2 With the gradual use of lithium as a medication for those with the bi-
polar tendency in the late 1960s and 1970s, the distortions in that ‘hall of
mirros’ which Woolf experienced became ancient history for most manic-
depressives.

3 Letters play a very significant part in the edification and the guidance of
the believers.

Ron Price

21 May 1999

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
goes from strength to strength and, as one writer put it several decades
ago, comes to conquer the world by storm.

Ron Price November 15 2004

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, although I’m sure there are many
others. I am not in their league but, when I did write a letter, I felt as
Reagan did, that I was writing to a friend, although I often pondered on
the meaning of that term. 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.

I’m not sure that my letters offer examples of the toughness, discipline,
and canniness that the President exemplified in his letters and which were
required in his extensive dealings with the public. His public geniality
masked these qualities. I leave it for critics to assess whether these
qualities are present in my letters. I tend to think that these qualities were
masked by humour but this is too difficult and complex a subject to
assess in this space.

Finally,6 I am conscious that my letters could be used both to my


disadvantage and to the disadvantage of the Baha’i Faith if they were to
fall into the hands of severe critics, enemies of the Cause and that
permanent lynch mob that the world creates out of its bosom and the
depths of its heart. For evil men, as the Guardian once wrote, we will
always have with us. And so I entrust these letters to the appropriate
Baha’i institutions on my passing. There is much to be pondered in my
letters including my day to day efforts as a practitioner of the protocols of
a religious piety originally imbibed at my mother’s knee more than half a
century ago. I’d like to think that readers will also enjoy what is a shrewd
mix of practicality with ideological conviction. That’s what I’d like to
think, but it is difficult to assess oneself in these areas. My nuanced view
of man, society and religion might also be useful to readers--or so I hope.
I hope these letters also will 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.

It has been said that mans most important actions usually proceed from
mixed and dubious motives with virtue and vice equally distributed and
hardly ever mutually exclusive. Im not sure if this is the case as one
student of the decline of the Roman empire and of the works of Edward
Gibbon pondered to himself. But certainly in my case, in the case of a
person I have come to know perhaps altogether too well, I know of the
virtue and of the vice that was part of my life and was revealed, also in
part, in my letters. I do not tell it all in my letters or even in my journals
but I think I strike a balance between dull chronicle and rhetorical
declamation as I proceed with what you might call a philosophical history
which some regard as the highest form of historiography. For I give
meaning to my letters in the same way I give meaning to history, to the
washing of dishes or the attention to the removal of waste matter from my
body or my house. Impartiality is an impossible goal; subjectivity
inevitable and judgement often held in suspense as I offer in my letters a
range of options to my readers.

My letters will reveal for the reader, when and if they are published later
in this century or one of the next,an endless success of engagements with
the past in which the dramatis personae were never fully able to fathom,
control or command the events. Perhaps, though, through the diligence
and accuracy with which I attempted to document my times in a very
personal, idiosyncratic way and record the transactions of my past for the
instruction of future ages, the crimes and follies, the misfortunes and
failures will be attested to in a different way. For I would like to think that
my words would be for use not ostentation and that they would provide
multiple layers of insinuation, innuendo and hidden meaning. For my
letters provide no answer book only the meaning I give it and, in the end,
only the meaning readers give my letters.

_______________________________FOOTNOTES________________
__________________

1 I say ‘arguably’ because I’m not sure exactly when my mother first
began her involvement with the Baha’i Faith in 1953/4.

2 Kevin Larimer, “First-Class Mail: A Poet’s 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 Four months before the conclusion of this volume, on July 29th 2005, I
came across a review of some of the collected letters of Francesco
Petrarch. I have appended to this introduction(Appendix #1) my
interpretation of that review and its relevance to my own collection of
letters.
Ron Price

November 27th 2005

Appendix #1:

Petrarch’s letters are divided into two sections: the Familiares(350) and
the Seniles(128). They are both monuments of Petrarch’s epistolary
activity, to humanism in the 14th century and to Petrarch’s own special
vitality and constellation of interests. Even after nearly 700 years there is
no critical text for the entirety of the collection of Petrarch’s letters. If it
has taken that long for society to possess a critical overview of Petrarch’s
extant letters, it is most probable that my own letters will never find a
place in critical epistolary literature. Not that I mind really for I write
these introductory pieces, overviews of my own letters, to help me place
my own life in perspective in what are the darkest hours in history. I do
keep one eye on the generations to come but it is not a glance with much
weight, with what you could call a long and steady look because the
whole question of the value of this oeuvre is too iffy for words.

Petrarch’s Seniles are not simply those letters which belong


chronologically to the late part of Petrarch’s life, 1304-1374. Although
the date 1361 when Petrarch was 57 can be taken to mark the beginning
of the collection known as the Seniles, Petrarch included in the
Familiares letters written after that date, and in the Seniles, other letters
written before that date. What this fact suggests is Petrarch’s concern with
the overall design. The sense of the structural architecture of his
epistolary collection is as evident as in his poetry. If I was to divide my
extant collection into a similar two sections, with 45 years under my
letter-belt, so to speak, it may just be timely to begin the Seniles. For I am
now 61 and have just entered late adulthood to use a term from
development psychology. Old age is nearly 20 years away and if, God
should grant me a long life it is just possible that I could have another 45
years, taking me and my letters to the age of 106. Given the advances in
medicine that is just a possibility.

Petrarch’s ‘Letter to Posterity’(ca 1372), which is as close as he came to


an autobiographical narrative, is one of several letters he wrote to dead
figures from history. When I came across this idea it had an instinctive
attraction to me, although time will tell if I implement it. Lots of ideas in
life never get beyond the ‘that’s a good idea,’ stage. There is a symmetry
to Petrarch’s letters, letters which address the past and those which
address the future. They encapsulate what you might call his time travel
one of his literary passions. They also imply the concomitant of his love
for past and future, a concomitant which one can easily see in reading the
letters, namely, a distaste and even loathing for the present. The Seniles
gain their special pathos from the oscillation between such moments of
praise and blame. These same polarities exist in my writing, more so in
my poetry and essays than in my letters, I think. But without rereading
these letters I must say that I’m not really sure.

We can learn much from these letters about the details of Petrarch’s life
as we can about mine. Petrarch was never concerned to simply reveal
himself to his correspondents. On the other hand, I find self-revelation in
letters in often essential if one is ever to gain any degree of intimacy. The
model of Seneca’s treatise-like epistles was always at least as important
as that of Cicero’s familiar letters, to Petrarch. I have never considered
using the letter in any treatise-like way. Perhaps at a future time. My
letters seem to exist at some half-way point between intimately personal
and essay-like, between the style of the letters of Mozart and those of
Richard Wagner.
Petrarch’s tendency to let a letter swell into a treatise informs the
structure of the Seniles. There are a number of letters on single topics
which occupy an entire book, alternating with books composed of
numerous shorter letters. For example, Book 7 comprises Petrarch’s
exhortation to Pope Urban V to return the Holy See to Rome; Book 9
consists of complementary letters to the Pope and his secretary Francesco
Bruni, congratulating them on the accomplishment of that move; the two
letters of Book 12 to Giovanni Dondi carry on a polemic against
physicians; in Book 14 Petrarch instructs Francesco da Carrara on the
qualities of a good prince. From this point of view too, his ‘Letter to
Posterity’ acquires a special importance as one last epistolary treatise to
culminate the pattern: a treatise on the self. My autobiography and my
poetry serves this function.

The topics treated in Petrarch’s texts are representative of the more


important concerns of Petrarch’s later years. His quarrel with physicians,
for example, amounts to an obsession. I, too, have my obsessions. As my
wife sees it, I possess a worry and self-absorption that is exceeded only
by her worry. Self-absorption lay behind much of my volition and
action--and the thick web of my letter writing. My letters are important,
though, not for their revelations of any particular psychological
tendencies or particular views of the times or of history nor to indicate
how I came to think my thoughts or take my actions during these epochs
but, rather, for their association with a movement that I believed was
slowly, imperceptibly and inevitably going t6o take the world by storm. I
shall leave this subject of obsessions, self-absorptions and psychological
tendencies and see what becomes of them in the next 37 years as I head
for centenarian status in 2044! At the opposite pole in what might be
unkindly called his garrulousness, Petrarch increasingly expresses a
resolve to be brief in his correspondence.
Plutarchs resolve to turn his mind toward eternal life creates an ongoing
counterpoint with his earthly literary urge, an urge which is not only an
opinionated old man’s inability to be silent, but lies more fundamentally
in his sheer pleasure of reading and writing. At the same time, we obtain
glimpses of the practical obstacles to his correspondence, such as the
interference of border guards. I have no problem with border guards as
some of my fellow co-religionists from Iran have had. Life, I’m sure, will
unfold for me different practical obstacles in my life as life unfolded
different obstacles for those Iranian who began to populate the Bahá'í
communities in the West in significant numbers after 1979.

We also become aware of just how much Petrarch loves what he feels he
must renounce. I, too, have loves that I should renounce but, if I dealt
with them here, this introduction would become far too long. These
words about my letters already possess a prolixity which will keep
virtually all readers far from whatever insights they possess. In his final
letter, a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch becomes truly moving in his
valediction “Farewell, dear friends, Farewell, dear letters.” This is a
fitting end to his life of letters and to mine, for now.—Ron Price with
appreciation to Francesco Petrarch, “Letters of Old Age” and to Stephen
Murphy for his review in Italica Press on the Web.

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

VOLUME 10 PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

With the opening of this arch-lever file of personal correspondence there


now exists ten volumes of personal letters to individuals for future
biographers, analysts of embryonic Baha’i institutions and communities
and interested parties of various ilks. This volume of letters opens the
23rd year of my extensive letter collecting and the 46th since the first
letter in this collection found its place in volume 1 and was dated
November 27th 1960. For the most part these letters are a casual,
although to some extent, systematic collection. In recent years I have also
added some non-epistolary material because it seemed appropriate and I
will leave it to assessors to sift out this material, to keep it in appendices,
to simply include it as part of a varied type of letter/communication or to
delete it as desired. The decision as to how to organize this assortment of
resources I leave in the hands of anyone who takes a serious interest in it.
To decide what to do with it all belongs to them.

In some ways my collections of writing are themselves manifestations of


my effort to make my life subservient to a personal need to be a letter
writer, a poet, an essayist, a note-taker, as Dylan Thomas’s writing efforts
were part of his self-appointed task to make his life subservient to his
need to be a poet. This is a subtle idea and quite complex and I deal with
it more extensively in my writing, especially my poetry, from time to time
over the years. But the idea, however intricate, delicate and subtle, needs
to be given an airing occasionally in these periodic reviews of my letters.

There is, it seems to me, an unavoidable self-consciousness in my


approach to the business of writing since perhaps the 1980s. This self-
consciousness was also the case with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as I
pointed out above as Paul Ferris states in his introduction to Thomas’s
collection of letters. This self-consciousness has done Thomas some harm
at the hands of his critics--as Ferris notes in his discussion of the analysis
of Thomas’s critics from the 1960s and 1970s. However self-conscious I
may have been in providing future readers with a ringside seat at a period
in the cultural transformation of the Bahai community and in offering
them an insiders view of the birth and development en passant of its
community in the West I can not see this as doing any harm. Who knows,
though, what will befall both my community and my letters in a future
epoch?
Perhaps my somewhat dogged sense of living within the confines of a
self-constructed role as a writer in the first century of the Formative Age
will prove my undoing. As a writer, I revel in the context of a range of a
complex set of implications both for me and for the Baha’i community of
which I am a part. Perhaps this will bring me some “harm” as well in the
long term. Of course, if this harm ever occurs, I will be long gone from
this mortal coil. In the short term the problem is irrelevant at least insofar
as any public is concerned occupied as it is with a host of problems that
this same public does not in any way connect with this new and
revolutionary Cause.

Since my retirement in 1999 I have written a great deal more in all the
genres of my writing. In my years of full-time employment and student
life as far back as the late 1940s, if I take the analysis as far back as the
years of middle childhood, the notebook dominated my writing life. Then
the essay and several attempts at a novel as the years went on. The extent
of my writing in all other genres in the last dozen or so years(1992-2005)
has exceeded whatever I had done before. This is especially true of
letters.

In the most general of senses, I see my letters as “a kind of spiritual


journal.” Robert Gittings says this of the letters of John Keats written at
the time of the birth of Baha’u’llah and the Bab. There is an obsessive
quality in some of Keats’ letters, occasionally a sign of morbidity and
despair and many signs of self-control and the lack thereof. This is also
true of my own letters and journals. Like Keats, I try to face my
difficulties, fight my battles and get on with the journey. I do not always
do this successfully. There is obviously an effort, occasionally if not
often, to put on a good face for the sake of the recipients of the letters, for
the purpose of stressing the positive and to try to confront the
disapppointments of life with that stiff upper-lip and persistence which is
part of the English tradition.
I would like to draw extensively here on the words of Rachel Donadio
who discusses the email in her article in the New York Times because so
much that is in my collections of letters in recent years is in the form of
an email. “Back in the 20th century,” Donadio writes, “it was often
lamented that the telephone might put an end to literary biography. In lieu
of letters, writers could just as easily gab on the phone, leaving no trace.
Today, a new challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural
historians: the e-mail. The problem isnt that writers and their editors are
corresponding less, its that theyre corresponding infinitely more -- but not
always saving their e-mail messages.

Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no
coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that
would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or
fictionalized, is arguably one of todays richest literary forms, but it relies
on a kind of correspondence thats increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.

My correspondence is not lost. I keep a goodly measure of it in each of


my collections of letters. I like to think that my correspondence reflects a
sensitivity to, an appreciation of, the idiosyncracies of the recipients of
my emails. Writing is like talking and, in the process, one tries to create
some impression. With the passing of time, whatever talking I have done
will have gone into the ether, but this writing, these letters and emails,
will reveal much about my life and my times. Many of my poems
sprinkle the pages of my emails in an impromptu, often impulsive and
serendipitous fashion, although I often do not keep a copy of the whole of
a letter with all of its poems. Worrying about trees and the extent of print
one produces became a concern in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 2004 alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to chose but one publisher, put out
The Letters of Robert Lowell” and a biography of the critic Edmund
Wilson that draws on his letters. The list of publications that draw on
correspondence is extensive. But that doesnt necessarily mean that
publishing companies are saving their own communication with writers.
This is also true of many a writer. A great deal of personal
communication is just going down the proverbial tube. Since the email
became part of my life some 15 years ago(1990-2005) I have tried to save
emails that are significant, relevant or important in some way for the
tasks at hand. I have written about this subject before and I do not want to
go into detail here. But this subject does need to be given an airing
occasionally.

I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books


were working on, or about our relations with authors, but Im sure I dont
always keep the good stuff, particularly the personal interchanges, which
is probably what biographers would relish,Jonathan Galassi, the president
and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said. He made this comment via
e-mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers who might make a
comment on such an issue. I dont think weve addressed in any systematic
way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we
ought to,” Galassi continued. I include these comments here in the
introduction to Volume 10 of my personal correspondence because
virtually everything in the last few volumes of personal correspondence is
now an email. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and I have
commented upon them before.

Random House Inc., whose imprints include Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday


and Bantam Dell, has not set any email guidelines. At present Random
House Inc. does not have in place a distinct corporate policy for archiving
electronic author-publisher correspondence, and we have yet to establish
a central electronic archive for housing publishing material, Stuart
Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, noted. Each of our
publishing divisions decides what author-publisher correspondence and
materials they wish to retain. W. W. Norton doesnt have a policy for
saving e-mail messages or letters, leaving it to the discretion of editors,
and Harcourts archiving policy doesnt yet govern e-mail communication.
So, it appears, I have lots of company in my new problem, a new problem
that arose in the 1990s and especially since my retirement in 1999.

Although David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said he


considers the collected letters of Harold Ross, the magazines founding
editor, the best book Ive ever read about The New Yorker, you wont see
Remnicks collected letters or e-mail correspondence, any time soon.Oh,
God forbid, Remnick said. For one thing, The New Yorker routinely
purges messages from its system. And I do the same; I have to with over
200 emails coming in every day from the many websites I am a member
of in the last several years.

Deborah Treisman, who as The New Yorkers fiction editor is in


communication with most major living writers, confessed she doesnt
always save her messages. Unfortunately, since I havent discovered any
convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I dont
usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months,
Treisman said. If theres a particularly entertaining or illuminating back-
and-forth with a writer over the editing process, though, I do sometimes
print and file the e-mails. The fiction department files eventually go to the
New York Public Library, she said, so conceivably someone could, in the
distant future, dig all of this up.

The impact on future scholarship is not something that Ive spent much
time thinking about, Remnick said. “As much as I respect lots of
scholarship in general, what matters most is the books and not book chat.
Somethings obviously been lost, even though I dont think its the most
important literary thing we could lose. This may be the case for me and
my letters and the final result of all this worry-warting may be that it all
simply bites the dust and all the issues about what to save and what to
erase may prove irrelevant, immaterial, in the ‘who could care less’
basket.

Book chat or no, irrelevance or not, great letters are great literature. In
Robert Lowells letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into
whole worlds of feeling. I think our letters on the agency tax-money must
have crossed,Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife,
in 1971. Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick
dressing, I have been thinking about our long past, he continued. Not
having you is like learning to walk. Some entire books dont convey as
much raw emotion as those eight words do . I feel the same is true of
some of my correspondence. In the end, of course, the significance of
what I write is so intimately tied up with the growth and development of
the Baha’i Faith as the emerging world religion on the planet.

Designed for constant and instant contact, e-mail messages inevitably


have a different tone from postmarked missives that allow correspondents
the time to ruminate and percolate, to apply a critical eye to their own
lives. Often less nuanced, more prosaic, written in haste and subject to
misunderstandings, e-mailed thoughts are microwaved, not braised. It
often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary
biography all but obsolete, Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of
Richard Yates and a forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. The
messages are too ephemeral: people write them in a rush without the sort
of precision and feeling that went into the traditional, and now utterly
defunct, letter. 95% of the emails I receive are certainly ephemeral and
oblivion is the only place for them and that is where they go within the
day they are sent. But there is much in the emails I write and receive that
is not in this ephemeral category. And these emails are found here.
Unless one possesses the emails or letters at the other end of the
conversation or dialogue one misses a great deal. I have tried, where
possible, to keep copies of relevant correspondence at both ends. One
misses a great deal, too, when all one possesses is the advocacy or the
judgement of the letter-writer. It is often difficult to find out the truth of
an idea or a situation in one’s own household; people who live in the
same house often have completely different stories to tell. A number of
views is often necessary, but not possible when one is dealing with the
contents of a letter. The copiousness of letters is no guarantee of what is
authentic, true and accurate. Perhaps, as a major biographer of Wagner,
Ernest Newman, said: “There can never be too many documents.” He
might have added: there can never be a final truth.

Ron Price

November 27th 2005

THE LETTER: A HISTORICAL NOTE

I want to draw on some of the experience of one of the world’s first letter
writers, Cicero(106 BC-43 BC). The information comes from Frank Frost
Abbott’s book Commentary on Selected Letters of Cicero(Boston. Ginn
and Co. 1909). The letters were written between the years 68 BC and 43
BC. As there was no postal system in the middle of the first century BC,
letters had to be sent by ones own messengers or the messengers of ones
friends. This made the composition of a letter a more serious matter in
Ciceros day than it is in ours. But his letters were not always studied
productions: some of them were written while he was travelling; others
between the courses at dinner.

These words about letter writing just before the time of Christ provide a
useful contrast with my own experience. In my case there were a very
few letters written while travelling or while eating dinner and, of course,
the whole process is as fast as the speed of light now.

When a letter was ready to be sent, it was rolled up; a thread was wound
about the middle of it and sometimes passed through the papyrus itself,
and a seal was attached to the ends of the string. Abbott spends some time
describing the process of writing letters, the technology involved and the
courtesies that attended the exercise. I could go into a similar description
and analysis, but with the literally billions of emails and letters written in
my lifetime, I’m sure there is no need to add anything on these matters
here.

A study of Cicero’s letters involves a study of his life and his philosophy.
Such a study comments also on Cicero’s style and his general purposes in
writing. Letter writing at that time was considered a ‘supreme literary
art.’ Our knowledge of the late Roman Republic was due in significant
measure to Cicero’s 900(ca) letters. There is little doubt that knowledge
of our time can be significantly improved by a knowledge of my letters,
although I like to think there is some historical and social value in them,
especially to the Baha’i community.

AMBIGUOUS MOSAIC
Ron Powers, in his biography Mark Twin: A Life, writes that in their old
age men employ what is left of their skills. Mark Twin employed what he
had left of his skill in writing. At the age of 61 he was financially ruined,
creatively exhausted, emotionally broken, his wife Olivia was chronically
frail and his daughter Susy had just died. But his writing, his thinking and
his reading continued until his death 12 years later. There was serenity
and peace, writes Powers, in Twain’s old age. And there was much else as
Powers tells us in his 700 page biography and as others have told in theirs
about this ‘Voice of America.’ -Ron Price with thanks to Geoffrey Wolff,
“Mark Twain:Voice of America,” The New York Times, October 2nd
2005.

Something had gone out of me,

too, Sam, by the ripe age of 61.

But, ironically, I felt my creativity

to be just beginning. I felt a little thin

on the ground to put it colloquially.

It’s as if I had an excess of speech,

like some deadly poison, taking

the stuff out of me. I, too, have


a frail wife, Sam, but we lean on

each other in different ways, Sam.

I’m comfortable on my disability

pension after a life of shape-shifting

from the Arctic to the Antipodes.

My decades, like yours, have been

contested, exploratory, blood-soaked,

Sam and my warring personalities

have finally got some resolution.

My letters and journals, like yours,

are clue ridden, although with 100

thousand letters, with their strike-overs,


legible erasures and endless notes,

you left more clues to who you were.

No microcosm, your world, all over

creation and mine, too, in 37 houses

and 22 towns over two continents.

I had my years, like you, as a showman

in classrooms creating an ambiguous mosaic,

inspired by sights, sounds and processes,

especially those of a new religion, Sam.

Ron Price

October 3rd 2005


AN ESPECIAL NEARNESS

In his short life(1795-1821) John Keats passed through periods of


extreme restlessness and depression, tragedy and illness. Keats’ poetic
life was very short(1814-1821), but he was gradually able to find a tone
of voice for thinking aloud in verse and for fitting his meditations on the
meaning and purpose of life into a formal and flexible poetic.

During these seven years he made an increasingly conscious effort to


make himself more effective as a poet. All his experience, reading and
thought was used for poetical purposes. He tried to shape every new
influence toward a study of poetry and toward his particular and
developing notion of poetry. The result was that his writing shows “an
almost instant transmission of impressions, thoughts, reading and ideas
into poetry.”1 So was this my aim and the following prose-poem links
Keats’ poetic efforts and my own. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert
Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann, London,
1981(1966), p. 8.

I, too, worked toward a method

for dealing with life’s complexity

as my own engagement with life

deepened with age so that I could write


frankly about myself and about poetry.

My enveloping desire was to express

my excitement, curiosity and interest

in writing and find ways of expression

for my own growth, for the incredible

changes and chances of the world,

so that I may soar in an atmosphere

of an especial nearness which sooner

or later will influence my own soul.

Ron Price

September 24th 2005


BEARING FRUIT

The following is a hypothetical book and is entitled An Annotated Edition


of the Correspondence Between Ron Price and John Bailey(1997 to
2010). It is edited and has a 50 page introduction by Mrs. Belle Lettre. It
is published in Ottawa Ontario by Tecumseh Press, 2080, pp. 252. The
book contains a selection of 50 letters by each writer from an archive of
320 letters. The correspondence between Price and Bailey has until now
been generally available mainly in the selective and unreliable editions of
Arthur Setlet: Ron Price’s Letters to John Bailey (1997-2010) and The
Letters of John Bailey to Ron Price (1997-2010), which were published
in 2056 and 2057. Belle Lettre’s Annotated Edition of the
Correspondence, which meticulously reproduces transcriptions of 50 of
the 320 available letters between the two men, together with copious
annotations, a lengthy and intelligent Introduction, various Appendices
(including facsimiles of several letters), an Index, and a Bibliography, is a
most welcome addition to Canadian poetry and Baha’i studies.

Mrs. Lettre’s edition has an appealingly modest and workman-like


quality. At a time when the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council is funding editions of/about early Canadian prose and poetry
works in the Baha’i community it is rewarding to see a volume such as
Belle Lettre’s Annotated . . . Correspondence which has, to judge by its
acknowledgments pages, been created and published through the
painstaking efforts of an energetic and enthusiastic committee and a
relatively small grant from the Ontario Arts Council’s subsidiary, Baha’i
Studies in Ontario.

Mrs. Lettre’s Introduction runs to over fifty pages. Rightly observing that
the Price-Bailey correspondence represents the only extensive exchange
between Price and a trusted literary friend which covers the entire span of
Price’s mature creative life. Lettre shows how the letters bear both on the
poet’s literary career and on his private life at a time (1997 to 2010) of
great poetic activity for him and changes in his personal, professional and
Baha’i community life. As anyone who has read the Price-Bailey
correspondence in manuscript knows, the letters offer detailed insights to
several of the books that began to be published in the years after 2056/7
on both Price and on many other individuals and developments in the
Baha’i community back at the turn of the century. The correspondence
also offers insights into Price’s family life and aspects of his ill health and
his private life. This private life emerges as quotidian and touchingly so--
on occasion. Attitudes to various political and social questions, his fellow
poets, and so on, are also part of this special collection of letters.

A valuable aspect of Lettre’s Introduction is its discussion of the different


uses made of the Price-Bailey correspondence by critics and biographers
from Carl Cannot to Munro Cando as far back as the beginning of the
second century of the Formative Age in 2021. It is a discussion which,
from a particular, although limited perspective, offers an overview of
features and perspectives on Baha’i history and sociology which have, in
a peculiar and unfortunately limiting way, been dominating the discussion
of developments in Baha’i history in the 4th and 5th epochs. The
sequence of letters is remarkably readable and the editor has done a
discreet, methodical and judicious job.–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, September 19th 2005.

I’d like to think there was something

enduring in all these letters, John.

I know it is of absolutely no importance

to you and the way you see ultimate things.


But I’d like to think that those 1300 pages

and more than half a million words can

bear some ultimate fruit down journey’s

long, stony and tortuous road. I would.

–Ron Price, September 20th 2005.

CAPTURING EXPERIENCE

Irving Layton, one of Canada’s most famous 20th century poets,


“experienced a mingling of scorn and neglect in his earlier years,” wrote
Peter Hunt in his lengthy 1977 essay on Layton in the journal Canadian
Poetry Studies.1 This scorn and neglect greeted Layton’s poetic output in
the 1940s and early 1950s. By 1956 Layton was receiving the accolades
of eminent critics. In 1959 he won the Governor-General’s Award for his
book A Red Carpet for the Sun. That year I became a Baha’i after six
years association with this new Faith. I did not write my first poem until
1961 and did not begin to write poetry at all seriously for another 30
years until the early 1990s.

If as another poet, Roger White, wrote in his poem Notes On Erosion,


“neglect will foster love’s thrusting growth,” perhaps neglect will have a
similar function with respect to poetry. For those same 30 years(1961-
1991) I neglected poetry and for the next 15 years(1991-2006) society
neglected me and my poetry. To scorn and neglect Layton responded
aggressively, attacking those who attacked him and who criticized his
vision and craftsmanship. I did not have this problem. For those 45 years
I was not surprisingly and not sufficiently well-known nor significant in a
literary and public sense to be either neglected or scorned.

Layton had an exalted view of his work and this view came to be echoed
by influential critics by the 1960s. I had no such view of my work,
although writing poetry gave me great pleasure. Layton wrote in what
George Woodcock called “the little zoo of Canadian letters.”1 I wrote in
another zoo, certainly smaller than the Canadian one, a little zoo at the
other end of the world. Layton wrote with “the ferocity of a ring-tailed
roarer,” said Woodcock. I was not sure how to characterize my work with
such convincing and graphic words.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter
Hunt, “Irving Layton, Pseudo-Prophet—A Reappraisal,” Canadian Poetry
Studies, No.1, 1977.

So many liked your work;

I was too young back then,

when you really got going

in that poetic Canadian zoo.


Criticism continued coming

your way all along the road,

at least in the years before

I really got going to climb

those poetic mountains

with appreciation’s spirit,

with a gift of language far

too inadequate to the task.

Yearly you were capturing

Canadian experience and

the poet’s long vocation

with your fusion of joy,

thought and intense feeling

or, as others said, with a


stunted, distorted view of life.

And all the while I was capturing

experience, too, my life’s1 and

that of a new world religion.

1 Layton wrote his first major poem in Montreal in 1944, the year I was
born and in the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963), my first ten years of
association with the Baha’i Faith when I was 9 to 19, he was his most
prolific.

Ron Price

September 13th 2005

LETTERS FRUITION AND LIFE


Felix Mendelssohn(1809-1847) composed letters in his youth, 1819-
1830, “filled with both drawings and vivid descriptions of nature,
architecture and people.”1 The philosopher Goethe(1749-1832) also
included drawings in some of his letters. Goethe’s drawings, in his letters
and in other places, are now gathered into six volumes. This combination
of forms, art and prose, was not something readers will ever find in my
correspondence. Drawing, painting, what might be called the figurative
arts in general, were for the most part not creative expressions in my life.

Letters from the period of my childhood and youth, 1944-1965, and any
of my art-work, are non-existent. There are two letters, both written by
others to my mother, from this period, but none of the letters I wrote to (i)
a pen pal, Hiroshi Kamatu, in Japan, (ii) to a girl in Georgetown, Cathy
Saxe or (iii) anyone else whom I can not even recall now.-Ron Price with
thanks to 1R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn and His World, Princeton UP,
Princeton, N.J.,1991, p.26.

There was no evidence back then

in those years up to 1965 that

artistic mediums really liked me.

Most of us don’t ever get going

in our early years anyway: seeds

are planted for the future harvest.


So many seeds were planted then

in those two Seven Year Plans,

that Ten Year Crusade and, then,

as the Nine Year Plan began by

my mother and father, my aunt,

my grandfather and uncles and

more Baha’is than I can remember

and a world in gestation: the Kingdom

of God on earth had begun, a new wind

was blowing, rock ‘n’ roll had started

with its new rhythms and blues and tones.

Perhaps the first fruition began in early


October of ’65, ten weeks into maturity,

with the embryo of my pioneering life

taking form, finally taking a rich form

30 years later when a special rendezvous

of the soul, a special inner life, a special

quickening wind, amplified and clarified

my perspectives and the brightest emanations

of Baha’u’llah’s mind became available at last:

that Unerring Balance, that Straight Path, that

source of true felicity, given tangible form,

part of the confirming assistance from another

world in ever-greater measure, part of that

befitting crescendo and those eternal traces.

Ron Price
September 10th 2005

ULTIMATE PERSPECTIVE

For someone like myself who has an archive of over 5000 letters, the
archaeological research in what has come to be called the Cave of Letters,
has a special interest. The first research was done in this cave near the
Dead Sea in Israel in 1960/1 and the letters which were found came from
132 AD(ca). No research was done again until 1999. My own cache or
cave of letters was amassed during this time(1960-2005) and can be
found, not in a region of karst topography, but in a small room in a small
town at the end of the Pacific rim, the last stop on the way to Antarctica.
Like those ancient cave documents from the period of time of the Second
Revolt of the Jews against the Romans just one century after the
crucifixion of Christ which chronicle what life was like two millennia
ago, my letters document the life of an international pioneer at another
important time in history, the first four epochs at the beginning of the
Kingdom of God on earth(1953-2021).

These letters in the Cave of Letters from nearly 1900 years ago are part of
a priceless collection of artefacts. State-of-the art archaeological
technology has enabled historians to add a substantial amount of new
information to the existing bases of knowledge from the second century
AD. It is difficult to see how my letters can provide anything like the
same function given the multitude of sources of information about our
contemporary way of life or, more particularly, the way of life of the
international Baha’i in the first century of the evolution of Baha’i
administrative institutions.-Ron Price with thanks to “Lost Worlds:
Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land,” SBS TV, 7:30-8:30 pm, September
4th 2005 and “2000 Excavation of The Cave of Letters,” Internet Site,
2001.

I wonder if azimuths, inclinations,

station sketches, computer programs,

cross-sectional maps, survey data,

archaeological and geophysical analyses,

digital pulseEKKOTM100 and 1000 GPR

systems and their resulting profiles using

antennae frequencies of 100 and 450 MHz

and a backpack transport system…….

..….and radar stratigraphic analysis

to investigate both lateral and vertical

geometry of reflection patterns;


archaeological probes using endoscope,

metal detector and other excavation

techniques. Two dimensional electrical

resistivity and tomography analysis----

…all of this just might reveal something

that the present generation of analysts

would not be inclined to even examine.

For the meaning of history is not so much

in the living but in retrospect as new fields

emerge, new meaning systems have their day,

and this earthly life finds its ultimate perspective.

-Ron Price September 5th 2005

YEATS AND ME
There are several complicating factors for readers in their appreciation of
my poetry and the several genres of my writing. One is that it helps
readers to possess what you might call a memory-bank of names,
symbols and personal references planted, propagated and grafted in one
careful arrangement of ordered writing or simply in place in their brain.
Without this possession readers are at a distinct disadvantage in gaining
any depth of understanding of my work.

A second complicating factor is that I have written a great deal about


myself. Like the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, I have also written thousands of
letters, large autobiographical accounts, innumerable essays, published
and unpublished, introductions to various pieces of work, millions of
words in prose-poetic form, explanatory notes, talks, the beginnings of
novels. How far can I be trusted as a reporter on my own life, the life of
my society and of my religion? Should all of my writings be considered
as ancillary parts in one large self-construction, but possessing no
objective reliability. These are questions that can be legitimately asked
about the oeuvre of Yeats. Alasdair D.F. Macrae asks these questions in
the introduction to his book on Yeats,1 but gives no categorical answer. –
Ron Price with thanks to A.D.F. Macrae, W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life,
MacMillan, London, 1995, p.3.

These same questions

can be asked about my works

with many possible answers


for these words of mine are

not rootless flowers but are

the speech of a man, standing

alone and by himself for years,

at the beginnings of his community,

on a path no other man has gone,

accepting his own thoughts

and those of a thousand others,

giving his life and his words

to the world as we all do

each in our own ways.

At the opening of that

Seven Year Plan you1 said


the poet writes of his life,

out of its tragedy, remorse,

lost love, loneliness, no bundle

of incoherence or accident and

not everything about everything.

But I am not a reliable assessor

of those several proportions

that make up the me that is me

and the changes and chances

of these my earthly days are

far from tidy, patterned, glib,

formulaic…many rags & bones.

1 Yeats in 1937

-Ron Price

August 31st 2005


IMMORTALITY

The hungering for immortality, for fame and renown, not so much in the
next life but in this has been a part of the yearning of the heart of many a
human being since the dawn of civilization. In some ways this hunger is a
natural yearning, a normal human desire. I come across examples of its
expression frequently in my study, my reading. This evening, in a book
about the life of a leading Roman in the first century BC, I came across it
in the first two lines of the introduction. The immortality Cicero hungered
for has been achieved not by what he did but by what he wrote in the
years 63 to 43 BC, “the sheer bulk and variety of his writings.”1 He is
accessible to us today and so he remains of unique interest. He projects
himself into posterity through his extant correspondence of 900 letters.-
Ron Price with thanks to(1)D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero, Duckworth
and Co. Ltd., London, 1971, p.ix.

Letter writing was a supreme literary art

in those years before Christ was born

and we know more of Rome’s history

in these years thanks to these letters.


Or, should we say, thanks?

Patterson says Cicero is

an intellectually pretentious,

thoroughly heartless slumlord

who is unreservedly, unashamedly

fond of his own glory and, sadly,

the major source of information

on one of the most vital periods

of our intellectual-classical past?1

What sort of fame is this?

His moral code, his philosophical

refuge, succeeded by the life----

four decades later----of a man

who wrote a letter, not one word.


1 Orlando Patterson, Freedom, 1991, p.232.

Ron Price

August 30th 2005

LETTERS FROM A NARROW WORLD

I saw the following piece in the New York Times.com which I read
occasionally. I began to read this internet newspaper just this year. The
article about some of the letters of T.S. Eliot caught my fancy because it
gave rise for the first time to some thought as to the monetary value my
letters might have at some future time. Of course, it is not a subject that
there is any point contemplating because, should my letters ever have any
money value, I will by then be long gone from this mortal coil.

The growth and influence of the Baha’i Faith fifty years after my passing
is very difficult to measure. Whatever value my letters have—and it is
impossible to estimate any value—will depend on the place of this Cause
in the years ahead and the value of the contribution of the international
pioneer in Baha’i history. If I assume, for practical purposes, that I die in
2021 at the age of 77, then fifty years after that point in time would take
humanity to 2071 or BE 227.
As the New York Times.com pointed out in this article about some of the
letters of T.S. Eliot which I came across today, August 12th: “nearly 50
typed letters, some illustrated and including poems, from T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965) to his first godson, Tom Faber, are to be sold by the Faber
publishing family on September 20th 2005 at auction at Bonhams in
London. Thomas Erle Faber (1927-2004), who became a physicist and a
member of the board of Faber & Faber Publishers, was the son of Eliots
friend and publisher, Geoffrey Faber. Private and largely unpublished,
these letters enjoy an estimated value of about $50,000. They are to be
sold, along with 84 other letters to Eliots friend Enid Faber, the wife of
Geoffrey. Also for sale are (a) inscribed first editions of Eliots work and
(b) a silver pocket watch, given to Eliot, then 12, for Christmas 1900 and
passed on to Tom Faber a boy of 13. -Ron Price with thanks to Lawrence
Van Gelder, “T. S. Eliot Letters Are to Be Auctioned,” New York
Times.com, 12/8/’05.

Where will this Cause be

when another 70 years

of this Plan have been

put into a divine framework?1

Where will I be
when another 70 years

of my life have been

put into its divine framework?

Gone from this darksome

narrow world, I will have

hastened away to the land

of lights and, I trust, will

have found infinite rewards;2

of course, one never knows

for sure, for certain, beyond

doubt, question and ifyness.

1 1937-2007; 2007-2077

2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, p.101.


Ron Price

August 13th 2005

ANODYNE

Pushkin(1799-1837) was the founder of modern Russian literature and


Russia’s greatest poet. In 1829 at the age of 29 he fell in love with a
beautiful 16 year old girl. In 1830 Pushkin was having one of his most
prolific periods of writing and that year he proposed marriage to this
beautiful Petersburg socialite, Natalya Goncharova. He had finally
received her agreement after an agonizing period of trying to convince
her family that he had the means to be a good match. But she was both
jealous of Pushkin and something of a flirt. His letters to her alternate
between snarky rebukes of her affairs and exasperated explanations of
why he cant make it back home. Their marriage lasted only five years.
Pushkin died in January 1837.

Pushkin wrote to his young wife-to-be in that fall of 1830 as follows: “I


wake up at seven oclock, drink coffee and lie in bed until three oclock. At
three oclock, I go riding, take a bath at five and then have a supper of
potatoes with barley kasha. I read until nine oclock. This is what my days
look like, each just like the last.” While lying in bed Pushkin was
singlehandedly founding modern Russian literature. -Ron Price with
thanks to Author Unknown, “Internet Sites on Aleksandr Pushkin,”
Internet, 2005.

I found this account particularly interesting because 144 years later in


1973 when I was 29 I, too, fell in love with a young girl. She was 15 and
her name was Anne. She had been in my humanities grade 10 class at
Para Hills High School in South Australia where I was a teacher. For
some eight months we got to know each other on a strictly platonic level.
But in early October 1973 after my first wife and I separated, Anne and I
began a sexually intimate relationship that lasted until late December.
She, too, was fickle and I discovered this in the third month of our affair
bringing it crashing to a halt. Who knows what unhappiness, like
Pushkin, I would have had if our affair had become a marriage?

I had just begun to have some success in my writing life in 1972/3, but it
would be another twenty years before my period of literary fruition really
took off in the early 1980s and moreso in the 1990s. And as I write this I
have had 38 years of marriage, have never fought the duels Pushkin did
and have played a small part in laying the foundation for an extensive, a
massive, literature in the social sciences and humanities written by
Baha’is.

I had dried out in a dry

dog-biscuit of a land

after freezing in Canadian


winters and she was waiting

for me like some angel-touch:

young, fresh, firm and willing.

And I was dizzy with desire,

lost after making shifts from

Baffin to semi-desert country.

He gave me to her or, perhaps,

her to me, a gift, anodyne

to ease life’s pain that had come

too sharply of a sudden-shock.

And ease it did, helped me move

to the end of the Antipodes where

I would find more angels, more than


I had ever seen, who would ease life’s

pain and give it to me slowly drop-by-

drop for the rest of my life: but still

that holy passion stirred me

in the country of my inner self

as I continued on the journey

to the Desired Unknown Country.

Ron Price July 29 2005

AN OBSCURE AND COMPLEX WAR

On April 21st 1937 the Seven Year Plan began in the North American
Baha’i community, although it had been mentioned for nearly a year by
then in the letters of Shoghi Effendi.1 One week later, on April 28th
1937, Saddam Hussein was born. He became President of Iraq from 1979
to 2003. In 2003 Saddam was deposed by the US and its allies. On
December 13th 2003 he was captured and, as I write this prose-poem, he
is about to stand trial before the Iraq Special Tribunal later this year. In
the last ten days of April 2006 the formal Baha’i teaching Plans begun in
1937 will enter their 70th year as will “the world’s best known and most
hated Arab leader.”2 -Ron Price with appreciation to 1Shoghi Effendi,
Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.7 and to 2Gerald
Butt, Middle East Analyst, BBC News, 4 January 2001.

The charismatics have a triumphalism;

Saddam Hussein fed triumphalist slogans

as he was fattened by fawning praise.

Triumphalism is as common as the air.

His life has been one long war while

we engaged in a different war

supported and reinforced by ideals:

ideals forces and lordly confirmations,

attacking as we did fortifications, castles,


right and left wings, lines of the legions,

right to the centre of the powers of earth,1

such was our vision, our goal and our acts.

Our war, though, was unobtrusive, unreported,

unbeknownst to those masses of humankind.

Confrontation2 was and is not the game

of our vanguard, our standard-bearers

this radiant army of the Lord of Hosts

in this gigantic task, on this immense field,

where the privilege is immeasurable,

infinitely precious and the concentration

of energies and resources involves no guns,

no swords, no uniforms as our spiritual

destiny unfolds in a manner that is as


glorious as it is obscure, as transformative

as it is beyond our capacity to understand.

1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, pp. 47-48.

2 Saddam means “one who confronts” in Arabic.

Ron Price

August 2nd 2005.

HOMO LUDENS *Man the player.

Jack Kerouac had an evolving set of etymologies for the term beat. In The
Origins of the Beat Generation originally published in Playboy in 1959,
Kerouac wrote: The word beat originally meant poor, down and out,
deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. But he added that in the
1950s the word gained an extended meaning to denote people who had “a
certain new gesture or attitude which I can only describe as a new more.
Kerouac suffused the “beat” label with positive connotations; he later
extended the word beat,” giving it a religious significance.
For Kerouac the importance of the beat label lay in its openness of
signification among other purposes. He returned to it in the 1960s several
times to pour new meanings into it. In several letters he claims to have
shown that beat was the Second Religiousness of Western Civilization as
prophesied by Oswald Spengler. This second phase always takes place in
the late stage of a civilisation. This second phase, he stated, possesses
something of the beatific, the sublime, but it coexists with coldhearted
times of urban skepticism and cynicism. This religiousness is the
reappearance of an earlier spiritual springtime in history. It also becomes
well-rooted and grounded in the culture. To Kerouac, the Beats were also
saints in the making, walking the Earth doing good deeds in the name of
sanctitude and holiness.

These beats only lasted until 1949 Kerouac said in another context, in one
of his many interpretations of the term, an interpretation he gave toward
the end of his life in 1969. Kerouac also said that “the beats” was just a
phrase he had used in his 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to
describe young men who run around the country in cars looking for odd
jobs, girlfriends and kicks. In 1958 a San Francisco columnist Herb Caen
coined the phrase beatnik to denote members of the growing Californian
bohemian youth culture which Caen associated with new barbarian
tendencies in America. The appellation “beatnik” came to enrage Kerouac
in the last decade of his life: 1959- 1969. By the late 1960s Kerouac was
denouncing the youth culture which had followed his example. To
Kerouac they had gone off the road, so to speak. Kerouac continued to
flirt with numerous religious systems, but he became in that last decade
of his life someone who preferred to stay at home, no longer King of any
Road or King of any Beats. –Ron Price with thanks to Bent Sørensen,
“An On & Off Beat: Kerouacs Beat Etymologies,” philament: An Online
Journal of the Arts and Culture, April 2004.
You1 were never impressed

with the hippies who had

evolved during those Plans

of the 1940s and 1950s2

from the beatniks-hipstirs.

I was 21, 22 and 23 when

hippie was catching on3

in its two strands: art/

bohemian and peace/

civil rights. And it was

reaching its height when

I was among the Eskimos,

experiencing a mild schizo-


affective disorder and trying

to teach primary school kids.

These hippies had dropped out

of a world they found meaningless,

played with sex, drugs & rock-‘n’-roll

while I played with a new religion---

but for some of us the play was as

serious as it could be: homo ludens.4

1 Jack Kerouac(1922-1969).

2 Plans: 1946-1953 & 1953-1963.

3 The term hippie was first used in a newspaper on September 6th 1965.
Six weeks before I had just turned 21. The term began to be used
extensively by mid-1967.

4 The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga discusses the seriousness of play,


the role of play, in culture in his book Homo Ludens(1938).
Ron Price

TOUJOURS TRAVAILLER

Treasures lie beneath God’s throne and poets have the key: so says an
Islamic tradition. During the more than a dozen years I have written
poetry extensively, I have come to see part of my role as helping other
poets travel in company. Poets who are my contemporaries and poets yet-
to-come do not need to travel in isolation. My work can help them define
where they are going and where they have been. My thoughts can help
other poets regenerate, refresh their perspectives; they can help them
infuse creativity into their voice and their lives. They can help them see
that a mighty effort is required in order to acquire an abundant share of
the poetic art. To put this another way: the poet must strive night and day,
resting not for a moment,1 as ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it; or, as the sculpture
August Rodin wrote: toujours travailler.2 -Ron Price with thanks to
‘Abdu’l-Baha in The Creative Circle, editor, Michael Fitzgerald, Kalimat
Press, 1989, p.182; and Rodin “Always Work,” in Letters To a Young
Poet, R.M. Rilke, WW Norton, NY, 1962, (1934), p.95.

Letting divine impulses flow

into our beings is surely at


the heart of the poetic game.

These heavenly suseptibilities

are a magnet attracting

the Kingdom’s confirmations,

opening doors of meanings

and healing waters, unbeknownst.

Unbeknownst, too, are those

intermediaries, like rivers, who

bring the leaven which leaveneth

within the powers of reflection,

industry, work, study and prayer

on the longest road of life: art.

Ron Price

March 15th 2005


June 14th 2005

EPISODES

Life is full of literally hundreds if not thousands or even millions of


episodes that would result in a mountain of paper, as Mark Twain noted,
if we were to write them all down for posterity. Some of these episodes
last only a few seconds, minutes, hours or days; some last for years or
decades. Some of these episodes are recorded in my letters and they
dramatize, in some ways, the kaleidoscopeic turbulence of the world I
lived in and about which I wrote over these four epochs. The episode that
has led to my writing the following prose-poem has been a series of
Monday afternoon visits to a seniors’ home here in George Town. About
1:30 in the afternoon I pick up a 66 year old man named Daryl
MacArthur whose family history goes back to the first convicts in
Tasmania. I first met Daryl when he lived three doors down from my
home and we went for our daily constitutional along local streets: Reece,
South, Mary and White. That was nearly six years ago in 1999.

Daryl’s wife has died and he has moved into a home for senior citizens in
the last few months. I take him into George Town for various personal
purposes: to do some banking, to visit the house he rents, to go to a
second hand shop, to newsagents or just to have a cup-of-coffee. About 3
pm I take him back to his room at the seniors’ home in Ainslie House.-
Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 18th 200 5.
Today it was banking

and a lawyer, a cup of

coffee and a chat on

this fresh autumn day

with a slight wind

blowing our 126 years

through a little episode,

hardly a chapter or a page,

not even a paragraph in

the great book of life,

perhaps part of a sentence,

although always difficult

to assess ultimate meaning.


Got myself into the library

for forty minutes while Daryl

had his meeting with a lawyer.

Must have browsed through

half a dozen books especially

Paterson’s In From the Front.1

That war inspired his best writing:

genial and graphic description,

swift and vigorous prose,

making his brilliant letters,

exquisite, enthralling missives

part of the history of our time.

And my letters, I thought,


inspired by another war:

what would someone say

about them spread over

the first decades of the last,

the tenth stage of history?

Not the end or the beginning

of the end, but the end of

the beginning of history’s

endless succession of episodes

when some of the world’s

dramatis personae were able

to see the outlines of a new,

a golden age on the horizon,

lofty summits of achievement,


far beyond the valley of misery

and shame where pundits said

we were slowly sinking deeper

in a slough of despond as a tempest

blew us all like a mighty wind of God

remorseless, deranging, bewildering.2

1 William Curnow, On A.B. Paterson: In From the Front, MacMillan,


Sydney,2002, p.1. The war here was the Boer War.

2Thomas Turners third of a million word diary has been reduced to one
hundred and thirty thousand words for this book. Turner kept the diary
from the age of 24 to 35. Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and
he tells us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the
misdemeandors of others,to justify his actions and ensure they were
correctly remembered. His preoccupations were parochial as are most
diarists in most times.-Ron Price with thanks to The Diary of Thomas
Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David Vaisey, OUP, NY, 1985.
Ron Prices two million word autobiography, spread over several genres,
will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all its genres may
convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never troubled
with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. Although he had to
deal with the misdemeanors and idiosyncrasies of others, as we all do, in
the long run of life they came to occupy little role in his writings, unlike
his grandfather’s work which partly inspired his own. The compendium
of human inadequacies and weaknesses which is part of our lot on earth
was like those dustmites that occupy much of life’s domestic space but, in
the end, they remain unseen and insignificant. While contributing much
to the environment, they seem, looking back, to be irrelevant. Price’s
work, at least part of it, could easily be included in that sub-genre of
autobiography: justification literature.

Ill-health and marital discord, inharmony, kept him busy during his two
marriages. From 1967 to 2000, at different periods, in different degrees of
intensity, with different rough edges knocked off, his tests, his battles, his
challenging experiences, his frustrations appear from time to time in his
writings. These preoccupations, far reduced in intensity as the millennium
turned its corner, are evident in his poetry, his letters, his autobiography,
his essays and his journals. These preoccupations are not excessive. By
the time he began to write seriously in the 1980s his health was excellent
and his marital life far less troublesome.

New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and 90s: with
personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his marriage and
from the general nature of lifes travail which we all experience in various
degrees. Finally, in George Town, in his retirement, the hassels of life had
slipped to the perifery. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April
18th 2005.
THEY CAME

They came as separate poems and when I had what seemed like a sizeable
number, I think it was usually somewhere between about fifty and a
hundred, I made them into a little booklet. The plastic binding cost me
five dollars at a local Xerox shop; the paper and the ink cartridge had
another cost, lets say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2004 I
produced 53 booklets of some 6000 poems. It works out to a little more
than a poem a day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of
eighteen with Cathy Saxe who lived in George Town Ontario. Then, in
1980, I started saving the poems I wrote. I was thirty-six at the time. At
48 I became even more serious about poetry. It was then 1992. As far as
direction in my poetry was concerned, well, I really didn’t know where it
was going. I had, from time to time, several senses or intimations of
direction and, after one period of strong intimation in the mid-1990s, I
organized my poetry into four time periods, each with a different heading
or title drawing on the historical construction of the Shrine of the Bab and
its embellishments in the gardens and terraces on Mt. Carmel as my
metaphor, my physwical analogue.

I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my
autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger Whites poetry. I
dont lay them out like my website, my letters, my essays or my attempts
at novels. My poetry has some inner evolution which, even after 42 years,
is essentially mysterious.-Ron Price,Pioneering Over Four Epochs,May
12,2004.

Back in the 80s

I took little interest


in rhyming bed & head:

there were enough, I thought,

banalities in life

without my adding to them.

There was so much

I did not need to know:

the Hang Seng, the FTSE

the price of gold,

the price of a new hoe.

My eye, as Shakespeare said,

was in a fine frenzy rollinG

from earth to heaven and


heaven to earth........,with

my imagination bodying forth,

turning things I did know

into a shape, giving them a name,

a habitation--something more

than airy nothing.

Ron Price

May 12 2004

RSI

After 18 years as a student, 30 years as a teacher, 5 years as a writer and


uncounted and uncountable hours typing minutes, letters, reports,
comments, essays, just about every conceiveable genre of writing, I
finally acquired just two months before the age of sixty, what is known as
RSI, repetitive strain injury, or as it is also known, cumulative trauma
disorder. Im surprised I did not acquire this disorder earlier in my life,
having sat as I have for thousands of hours with my fingers over a
typewriter, a word-processor or with a simple pen in hand, endlessly
turning the pages of a book. I began, in late May of 2004, a series of
exercises to counteract RSI symptoms: the tightness in my neck and back,
soreness in the arms especially at the shoulder joints. These exercises
were prepared for the most part by my son, Daniel, and others I got off
the Internet.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June 13th, 2004.

While writing poetry I worry:

a little about the affects of RSI

the accomplishments of others

and pleasing my wife and son

and others who cross my path.

But in my writing:

my job is simply or not-so-simply

to learn to accept what occurs to me

and to give it the dignity and worth

it deserves.1
What I write can be called

many things: poems,

messages, pieces of language,

parts of a long work,

a long statement, an epic,

a very long poem,

low level wisdom literature,

with parts that will

always be missing

as I struggle obsessively

to give expression

to the complexities and

incredible wonder of it all.


1 Peter Stitt, The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets,
University of Georgia Press, 1985, p. 98.

Ron Price

June 14th 2004

REVOLUTION

Forty-five years ago in 1959, the year I became a Baháí, there was a film
released that was made in England called The Devils Disciple. The film
was set in 1777 in the days just prior to the surrender of the British to
American troops at Saratoga. 1777 was in the middle of the American
Revolutionary War(1775-1783). And 1959 was, of course, days of a quiet
revolution in my own life centred as it was at the time on baseball,
schoolwork, ice-hockey, girls, on the endless indulgence that was
growing up in the fifties in the middle class in Canada and on a new
religion that had blown into my life thanks to my mothers continuous
combination of curiosity and need. -Ron Price with thanks to Candidus,
Hollywoods Treatment of the 18th Century,The Colonial Movie Critic,
April 2004.

I must have missed that one


as I have come to miss most

of the films of the 20th century

which is not to say I have not seen

an eye-full of stuff since

the Kingdom of God on earth

had its silent and unobtrusive start

back in 53 when that temple

in Chicago was finished and

that superstructure of the Babs

Sepulcher in Haifa was completed.

I was on my way to being

a disciple of another kind

in a religion that was on its way

to being the religion for humankind.


And in 59 I only saw movies at

the Roxy Theatre down by the lake

where Id been a marquee

with my bag of metal-letters.

Maybe The Devils Disciple

just did not come to town:

maybe I was at a fireside that night

or the snow was drifting at 20 below

or maybe I had a grade ten exam

or maybe I had to play ice-hockey.

The dust of time has hidden this

from view as the revolution has proceeded.

Ron Price
April 28 2004

NO POWER-POINT PRESENTATION

In the Guardian’s letters and the messages of the Universal House of


Justice there is a sense of order, pattern and precision given to Baha’i
Plans, programs and community life. We read again and again about a
sequence of activities, a progression and development and direction and
guidance in the foreground and background of these texts as the Baha’i
community is forged in what might be called ‘the crucible of
transformation.’1 We experience whatever hardships and tribulations are
part of our life together; they exist subtlely and not-so-subtlely in the
spaces of the foreground and background of these communications as we
read colouring them with the patterns of our lives.

We know that only some of our Baha’i life can be reduced to a set of
numbers, lines with arrows on the end, circles and squares, triangles,
rectangles and different coloured icons such as those that can be found in
power-point presentations. We who are actually engaged in what often
resembles a battle, a battle of community and inner psychic life with its
demands and responsibilities, with its conflicts, its joys and pleasures
know there is often little consonance between what we experience, what
we actually feel and what we read. They blend together in a mix that
requires some skill to paint in words or colours, in some artistic form.
What we experience we often feel to be inconsequential, idiosyncratic,
subtle, too personal to us as individuals to ever share, although this
experience is often deeply etched on our remembering minds. A flood of
everything from the trivial and inconsequential to the intensely
meaningful comes into our sensory emporium. An intricate and coloured
pattern on a Persian carpet, a beautiful woman whose features delight the
eye week after week, a dominating personality whom we are happy to see
the end of after every meeting, a particular way that someone performed
some simple act, exhibited some gesture or said a prayer: all of this and
more than we can ever convey comes swimming in as we read the words
of the authorized interpreters of this Revelation.

Human beings in the Baha’i community are not highly trained machines2
as are their equivalent numbers in the army, navy or marine corps. Guns,
swords and military technology are replaced by a spiritual weaponry that
is impossible to quantify, to measure, but subtle and often powerful in its
operation. There are, though, some characteristics that fighting men and
women and Baha’is share in common. They involve at least three
disparate and even contradictory energies: inconsequential observations,
technical concentration and fear. For fear it seems is impossible to totally
eradicate from human interaction. The interplay of these energies are such
that after the events it is difficult for the individuals to produce a
conclusive and comprehensive account of their part in the activity or
battle. Any one battle or activity is a composite of the experiences of all
those who take part and any attempt to reconstruct the story as a whole
must be a synthesis of contradictions or, at the very best, a hypothetical
reconstruction based on near-agreement.-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Glenford Mitchell, “The Literature of Interpretation: Notes on the English
Writings of Shoghi Effendi,” World Order, Winter 1972-73, p.20; and
2J.E. Morpurgo, Barnes Wallis: A Biography, Ian Allan, London, 1981, p.
267.

The above prose piece is today’s prose-poem!


Ron Price, June 21. 2004.

BIG TASKS AHEAD

It is my hope that I can exploit whatever physical durability, whatever


strengths of constitution, whatever endowments conferred by birth that I
possess to their maximum advantage in the years and, perhaps, decades
that remain to me. Longevity is not always a blessing. But if God grants
me the years of a centenarian I will still be here in 2044, with more than
four decades of life left. If I am to be catapulted into international renown
such a rise to fame must take place in the first four decades of this new
millennium. The following prose-poem is a meditation on this theme of
fame among other things. I have been, by any measure of literary success,
a late bloomer. I have written three books in the first five years of my
retirement, age 55 to 60, and posted hundreds of essays, poems and
communications of varying length on the internet, but none of this will be
a source of fame and renown, at least not in this earthly life. As I head
into my sixties, I feel as if I have served my apprenticeship: as reader, as
writer and as a person who has experienced the world and what it has to
offer. I am ready for whatever big tasks lie ahead. Beside postings on the
internet, itself a bottomless pit of publication, I have no idea what the big
tasks are that may lie in my path.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, November 16th 2004.

THE EARLY BUDS ARE OUT

If this unearthly Love has power to make


my life immortal and to shake ambition

into some fitting portal where I brim

my measure of contentment and with merest whim

search, poorly, after fame, then ‘tis a Love

that I shall keep ‘til the call from above-

and then...

-With thanks to John Keats, “Endymion,” lines 843-47.

These things of beauty will be joys forever

and their loveliness will increase

far down the centuries and ages.

Eras will not see these wonders pass into nothingness.

Dreams and quiet places sweet and still

will fill these marbled flower gardens


binding us to primal points of holy seat

made for our searching. Such beauty

moves us far beyond incipient sadness;

takes this young sprouting freshness

canalized in energy-lamps everywhere

in the vineyard. Some created grandeur

cools in the hot season and sprinkles

our air with musk-rose blooms,

strengthening our loins in this

submissive and now natural worship.

Such wonder, too, for and with the dead

who have entered the garden of happiness,

now circling ‘round us in mystic intercourse,


yes, in circles here--all so dear like the moon

which haunts then cheers as clear bright light

seeming to bind our very souls subtle but tight.

This place, I prefer it have no name,

its music brings a joy to valley and plain.

The early buds are out now: milk in pails

is coming down the lane while lush juicy fruits

are being brought in by sail in little boats.

I’ve got one. I steer it in many quiet hours

down deeper streams where I hear bees

which hum in globes of clover over there.....

Autumn brings its universal tinge of sober gold

to this world on mountain side wherein I hold


such thought that can only be described as bliss.

The trumpets have already blown and, now, my path

is dressed in green, in flowers, indeed a marble bath.

Those assembled ‘round the shrines had looks of veneration,

‘twould be here for many years to come, each generation

would have its awed face, companions in a mountain chase.

I therefore reveal unto thee sacred and resplendent tokens

from the planes of glory to attract thee into the court

of holiness, nearness and beauty, and draw thee to a station...

I have been drawn into gardens of such fruit, such orient lights.

For here is the heavenly abode in the Centre of earthly realities

and here I am, as if led by some midnight spirit nurse

of happy changes toward some magic sleep, toward


some soaring bird easing upward over the troubled sea of man.

The words found here sound a strange minstrelsy,

have tumbling waves in echoing caves:

a silvery enchantment is to be found

in this mazy world with its new song,

its upfurled wings which renovate our lives.

Try them! You may open your eyelids

and feel a healthier brain. Some influence

rare goes spiritual through this Damsel’s hand;

it runs quick, invisible strings all over the land

making of fame and renoun far lesser lights

unless they be for the exaltation of this Cause1

and that attack to the very center of earth’s powers.2


1 From a prayer by Baha’u’llah sent to the author by Roger White.

2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977, p.48.

Ron Price

26 May 1995

Revised 16 November 2004

PS This prose-poem found its initial inspiration in a series of articles from


the journal Bookforum. When I come across a new journal on the
internet, I first make a quick survey of all available articles that I want to
read in the journal; then I make a list of the ones I want to photocopy.
Then I read and write from this photocopied base. This particular poem
was born in an article by Richard Wolin, Socratic Apology. It was about
the hermeneutical scholar Hans-Georg Gadamer who died in 2002 at the
age of 102. I had first come across this scholar in the 1990s when I taught
sociological theory-Ron Price, 16/11/04.

THE RON PRICE PAPERS

Should there ever be such a thing as The Ron Price Papers, they will be
somewhat like those of C.Wright Mills which are a vaguely indexed
collection of over 90 archival boxes containing a variety of documents
including:1 lecture notes, notes for his use when writing, notes on a wide
range of topics in the humanities and social sciences, clippings and
assorted pieces from newspapers and journals, much photocopy material,
correspondence to and from a wide variety of people over more than forty
years, letters and emails to publishers and internet sites where his work
was found and where he tried to publish, inter alia. Like Mills papers,
too,arguably these files are a manifestation of (his) method of working.2
-Ron Price with thanks to 1 and 2 The University of Texas Archive and
Kim Sawchuk, C. Wright Mills: A Political Writer and His Fan Mail,
Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol.26, No.2, 2001.

I really did not get going

until late middle age1

when teaching, all those meetings

and such a myriad collection

of lifes odds-and-ends

did not consume my energies

making it impossible to be

scrupulous, systematic, one-eyed

about all this writing and publishing.


I never rose at 4 am2 for coffee

except to have pee and hug the pillow,

especially after I was properly medicated,

but by 9 am I could get going

on what was, on average, a six hour day

and, at least, a forty hour week.

And I dont think you could

ever call the letters I received

fan mail, although some people

appreciated the letters I sent them.3

1 Mills, a famous sociologist and author of The Sociological


Imagination(1959), died at 46. It would be ten years after this, at the age
of 56, before my files began to emerge with anything you could call a
system.

2 Mills rose at 4 am habitually to work on his files.


3 The author of the article I draw on here is particularly interested in eight
archival boxes of mail in The C. Wright Mills Papers from people who
were only known to Mills on the basis of a texual relationship. This
author called these letters Mills fan mail.

Ron Price

1 October 2003

THE ICEBERG

The words of American writer Thomas Wolfe in the 1920s in relation to


his book Look Homeward Angel could very well be applied to my
autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Wolfe wrote: “I
have never called my book a novel. To me it is a book such as all men
may have in them. It is a book made out of my life, and it represents my
vision of life...”1 Whereas Wolfe’s book and his vision was put down at
the age of twenty, mine was defined more precisely and in great detail
closer to the age of sixty. -Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Wolfe in
American Literature Since 1900, editor, Marcus Cunliffe, Sphere Books,
London, 1975, p.55.

What have we here:


detached commentary,

social observation,

imaginative rendering,

sensitively-apprehended

experience, searching

for a life, my life,

which would have been buried,

private, individual, inner,

concrete and subtle.

In a world overwhelmed

by the accelerating pace

at this climacteric of history,

I have set it down, my days,


avoiding petty animosities,

malicious anecdotes,

brash narcissistic confidence

and its arrogant, unattractive

assertiveness.

Here is a document

to be judged only by its art,

not how many home runs I hit,

how many letters I wrote,

how successful or unsuccessful

I have been as a teacher over

what feels like several epochs.


As Hemmingway said back in ’37,

as that war was hotting up:

a man alone aint got no bloody chance;

and as Scott Fitzgerald said

in that same year that Picasso

launched his Guernica,1

rigorous selection was required

by putter-inners like me;2

seven-eighths of the iceberg

is still below the water.

1 Perhaps the most famous painting of the century was completed in


April 1937.

2 Dennis Welland, “The Language of American Fiction Between the


Wars,” American Literature Since 1900, Sphere Books, London, `1975,
pp.48-55.
Ron Price

9 May 2003

THE COMMONPLACE

Some writers, poets, have a deeply melancholic strain, theme or current


in their work, one that could be seen as an expression of a difficult
childhood and an adolescence of misery. The famous poet Philip Larkin
was such a man(1922-1985). He made his poetic debut in 1945. Larkin
was the most famous of the Movement poets in Britain in the ninth(1953-
1963) stage of history. He was undoubtedly the preeminent poet of his
generation, at least in the U.K. In the first two decades of the tenth stage
of history(1963-1983), Larkins fame continued.

Larkin never married. Philosophically, he saw life in terms of boredom,


pessimism and fear, especially fear of death. His vision of life was
imbued with the tragic. He focused on intense emotion, was obsessed by
universal themes, the commonplace and the often dreary details of his
life, as Thomas Hardy had been at the turn of the same century. -Ron
Price with thanks to Michael Walker,Just an Ordinary Muse,A Review of
Collected Poems, Philip Larkin; and Collected Letters, Philip Larkin,
editor Anthony Thwaite, Faber and Faber.
Part of the essence here

is the everyday

and the ordinary way.

There is darkness too,

but enough light

to make me feel

there is so much

that is worth recording

and soothes private

disappointments and

public tragedies,

that tells the wonder

of the simple things,

that is replete

with historical
and religious allusions

and takes place

when the inspiration arises.

There is hope, too, that

I will one day be read.

Age softens regret,

but increases its quantity.

Still I feel I found a place

where I could say:

this is my proper ground.

Here I shall stay

with that Special One

Who has an instant claim


on everything I own.1

1Philip Larkin, Places,Loved Ones.

2 September 2003

THE NECESARY CHOREOGRAPHY

I often call my work poetry but, in many ways, it is essentially the same
as my prose except that it is arranged on the page somewhat differently.
Once set down on paper my poems are sent out into the world and belong
to that world. Many things that are personal to me, that have meaning to
me, are to be found in my verse. True poetry springs from what a
particular man feels and thinks at a particular time in relation to some
particular thing, idea, event or person. For me, too, a particular mood
with its necessary choreography establishes much of the raison detre of a
poem. There is a Price associated with my essays, another with my letters
and still another can be found in my diary, in my attempts at a novel, at
history writing, at autobiography and biography. Of course, there is only
one Price and it should be kept in mind that the central vision that
informs all his work is a poetic vision. It is in his poetry that the reader
can begin to see Price whole, see his essence, if indeed the essence of a
human being can be seen in this earthly life. -Ron Price with thanks to
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems: 1923-1967, Allen Lane, London,
1972, pp.xiii-xv.
I have tried over the years

to write more clearly, plainly

and straightforwardly,

stripping away the ornate,

the ornament and the cleverly

inventive, aiming toward

a certain sanity,

a certain simplicity,

readability, pleasure

and enjoyment with tools

made of things akin to myself

like conviction, humiliation,

anguish1 and consecrated joy.2


1 ibid., p.259.

2 Abdul-Bahá, Secret of Divine Civilization, Last Lines.

Ron Price

15 April 2002

Thats all for now!

THIS IS NOT AN ARRIVING

Love is...a high inducement to the individual to ripen...it is an exacting


claim on him...love is burden and apprenticeship....(not) light and
frivolous play...something new enters us in our sadnesses...the future
enters into us this way in order to transform itself in us; therefore, be
lonely and attentive when you are sad. In this way, destiny goes forth
from within people, not from without into them. -Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet, W.W. Norton, NY, pp.54-65.

Go into yourself and cleanse.


The list is long and will keep

you busy with its regularity

and it must be done

or your house, your home,

will not enjoy effulgent glories,

infinite and unseen grace,

divine knowledge or immortality.

What is this cleansing? A scouring

of your memory and imagination

of what is idle in the talking department

and what you hear

on that internal telephone receiver.

Accept your aloneness here,

your trust in God


and your holding to him

and try to do what you know

you should do--simple, that simple.

Can you hear the tremulous after-ring

of memory clarifying the message

of all that is unclear, undefined,

unknown, pointing toward a fate, a destiny,

like a wide, wonderful web that is finally

threading your life with its tender hand

and binding you with a million

infinitely fine lines, to focus you

like some precisioned instrument,

ready now, although often bloody


in the exchange? But you clean it off:

the bright red imaginings,

hot with heart’s intensity;

washing worldly affections,

clean and smooth with flowing water

from the tap of your mind.

Can you clear your eyes of all those

perceptual confusions, sadnesses,

emotional tendernesses

that make you feel

so very useless and inadequate?

All is gestation and bringing forth,

pregnant with pain and soon-to-be-born,


hopes for the future; all is waiting

with deep humility and patience

for developing clarity, ripening,

waiting for the sap: no forcing here.

It will come. It will come.

This is not an arriving;

be unsuspecting

and love the difficult, the unsolved,

as you grow in and through them.

Use experience, here and now,

to rally toward exalted moments later,

toward the cleansing, the grace,

the quaffing of wisdom, the emptying out.

Life must be seen as difficult, serious


and approached with reverence:

not all this lightness, frivolity,

endless playing. Creative thoughts

come from many thousands of nights

and days of love and striving, endlessly:

filling thoughts with sublimity and exaltation.

The surface is so often bewildering;

go to the depths where meaning unfolds

like the petals of roses, a jacaranda

at last will be in bloom. Everyday

is a new beginning as we suck

the sweetness out of the trivial,

the profound and the funny;


while Thy servants who have gone,

work through us as part of our destiny,

as predisposition, as pulsation, gesture

rising out of the depths of time,

helping us hold to what is difficult.

Ron Price

FRESH CENTRE OF RICHNESS

I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty


years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-
Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on
the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House,
London, 1959, p.26.

Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;


confusing burying with repressing is understandable.

For me burying is an unconscious process

associated with memory, so that remembering

is like creating something anew,

not always mind you, experiencing it

for the first time, again and again.

If I have any gift as a poet it is this

and it extends from strong experiences

to minute observations. This is the fresh centre

of richness which feeds imagination,

feeds the present with charged particles,

with blood and bone, with glance and gesture

and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix

from ashes where emotion lies burried,


exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world

by some other me, as if for the first time.

Ron Price

17 September 1995

DISTINCTIVE VOICE

Distinctive voice is inseparable from distinctive substance...we will feel,


as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome....the
reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind....the true has about it
an air of mystery or inexplicability ........the subject of a serious poet must
be a life with a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself... -Louise
Gluck, “Against Sincerity”, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco
Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1994.

Every atom in existence is distinctive

especially these Hanging Gardens:

we’ve got distinctive substance here


and some of us have been waiting

a long time-try forty years-for this

apotheosis of the Ancient of Days

in a holy seat, at last a genuinely

holy seat in a world of seats, seemingly

endless seats: the light of the countenance

of God, the Ruler of the Kingdom of Names

and Fashioner of the heavens hath been

lifted upon thee.*

Here is a world where affliction is married

to ecstasy, suffering defined with virtuosity,

colour mounts on colour, temperatures mix

and pure gold comes from the alchemist,


pure fire, pure spiritual energy so that

my pages stain with apple-green;

my letters are written in chrysolite;

words find marble, gates and shrines

embedded in diamonds and amethyst.

What is this molton gold, ink burnt

grey, revelation writing? ....cheering

thine eyes and those of all creation,

and filling with delight all things

visible and invisible.* Yes and no,

always, it seems, yes and no.

Conflagrant worlds interacting:

the myth is tragic here. A grandeur

that is magnetic, but even here,


the meaning must be found.

Can you see the scars, the evidence:

there’s been emotion here to the

essence of our hearts. I try to name,

localize, master, define that scar,

but it is beyond my pen, beyond the

poignant inadequacy of my strategems.

No response of mine goes deep enough.

This poetry of functional simplicity

will never reach Zion, the City of God,

but I will try: May my life be a sacrifice

to Thee, inasmuch as Thou hast

fixed Thy gaze upon me,

hast bestowed upon me Thy bounty,


and hast directed toward me Thy steps.*

14/10/95.

* Tablet of Carmel

INFINITELY TENDER HAND

Give me anything which is from God. Desire or anger or communion of


saints or even hurt. But nothing any more of the dreariness and the
mechanism of man. -D.H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of D.H.
Lawrence, Harry Moore, editor,, 1962, p.950.

It is necessary, even good, to lie down in the rag and bone shop of the
heart, where all the ladders start, from kissing to horrid strife. -Paraphrase
of Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence,
Cornell UP, London, 1972, p.221.

Give me fresh rain and an ocean to see,

a waterfalls tumbling gown to the sea


near the dusky dwelling of my solitude

and the sweet-sounding lamentation

of the multi-coloured rag and bone shop

of my heart where surfaces bewilder,

multiplicity and complexity confuse.

I seek a tranquill voice deep down,

to lighten the burden of homelessness,

try to raise the submerged sensations

of an ample past in this state

of unutterable aloneness where

that after-ring of memory and

the wide web of an unfolding destiny

guided by an infinitely tender Hand.


Ron Price

10 October 1995

NO ENTRY-BY-TROOP

The poetic view of life consists in...the extraordinary value and


importance of everybody I meet....when the mood is on me. I....see the
essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet....splendid and
immortal & desirable.

-Rupert Brooke in: A Letter to F.H. Keeling, September 1910.

My productiveness proceeds in the final analysis from the most


immediate admiration of life, from the daily inexhaustible amazement at
it.-R.M. Rilke, Selected Letters.

In one Baha’i community where we experienced entry-by-troops I had the


experience I describe below. The poem is factually based, although an
element of poetic license trims the edges. -Ron Price, 5:50 pm., Saturday,
30 December 1995, Rivervale, WA.

She really was a beauty;


one of those women I always

wanted to take to bed with me.

And here I was in her lounge room,

late at night and alone and she

wanting it and telling me so.

It’s funny the sort of people

you attract to the Cause in these

early epochs of its global spread.

You think it might be those spiritual

types you read about, saintly women

who have always been waiting for the truth.

This bed-wise woman was


no Mary of Magdala, but she had

her garden of pleasure, her perfume,

her glistening hair, smooth-armed,

gold-bangled, fingers slender, knowing

the words men like to hear.

Marking me tonight, probably

knowing I was beyond her wiles,

part of some new marble dream

I’d brought to town with its words

of soft rain for the dry and stoney hills;

somehow she knew it could not be.

Not these words, they could not

penetrate her urgent desire,


her full warm breasts

and her endless curves

with that sweet new life

for which she could live

and some day die

in a greater fullness and joy

than she could imagine.

And so I passed her by;

my days of infidelity had not come yet.

Someone else would teach me the lessons

that could have been mine that night.

Ron Price
30 December 1995

DRY GRASS AND THE KINGDOM

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety


and precision approachable by no other means.-F.R. Leavis, New
Bearings in English Poetry.

If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself,
tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for
the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903.

I can remember those days when I was young,

dry grass under a tree where we sat in summer

and wondered what to do on long hot days:

you could only play so much baseball


and it was too early to go swimming.

We all sat there: George, Benny, Ken Pizer.

Life had hardly started yet--1953--

the beginning of an age, a Kingdom,

celebrated with Monopoly, Sorry,

swimming and endless sittings under this tree.

We were not troubled by war, women or

the wickedness of the world.

Scientific discoveries interested us not,

as long as we could watch our television

programs at the end of the day and

our parents didn’t argue.

Secret disquietudes, inner lonelinesses,

the tensions of a society on the edge of

self-destruction did not touch us


on this dry grass under the tree.

Ron Price

November 2001

TAKING ON IMMORTALITY

When One has given up One’s life

The parting with the rest

Feels easy, as when Day lets go

Entirely the West

-Emily Dickinson, number 853.

How many tears have fallen here,


how many little sighs.

There’s more to come of tragedy

and romance too beneath the skies.

They’re at the heart of human hearts,

as they wither and in time die.

They are the seed of solemn consciousness

without which joy would never come or fly.

Thank God for that joy; it rains

on some and washes sighs away.

For others sorrow dries them out.

Romance and tragedy lay their hands

on them and make them ready to depart:

they’ve died and can do no more,


but take on immortality.*

*I was thinking of Shoghi Effendi here. Ruhiyyih Rabbani, who knew the
Guardian in an intimate sense that noone else did, says seven lines from
the end of her Priceless Pearl that “The man had been called by sorrow
and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.” Henry Adams once said
in one of his letters(1) that “The inevitable isolation and disillusionment
of a really strong mind--one that combines force with elevation--is to me
the romance and tragedy of statesmanship.”(1) Letters of Henry Adams:
1835-1918, 2 Vols., Houghton Mifflin, 1930, Vol.1, p.314.

Ron Price

26 December 1995

ROOT OUT WEAKNESS

The sky wears masks of smoke and gray

The orchestra of winds performs its strange, sad music

Embittered wine rises from fowl deeds.


Its dregs can root out my weakness.
-With thanks to Emily Dickinson in Woman of Letters, Leaves
Turco,State University of NY Press, 1993, pp.40-1.

Some deeds are so lonely

they taste of bittered wine.

I’ve walked with them on back-side streets

sorting out their place and time.

I’ve sat with them to cogitate:

what brings them to the fore?

Like some disease they do attack

and peace goes out the door.

For me these lonely deeds are born

in the recesses of my heart,


in anger and depression

they found a good kick-start.

As the years go by I’ve learned

to avoid them like a lion,

but from time to time they come

and remorse takes me far from my Zion.

Sad regrets go to the root

and weed out a weakness

which seems endemic.

Life provides a practice field

for a process far from simple

verbal polemic.
One day, I trust, I’ll see this weakness

in a new perspective, a new strength

will have emerged

and me, much more selective.

Ron Price

8 July 1995

BLUSHING

Thomas Turners third of a million word diary has been reduced to one
hundred and thirty thousand words for this book. Turner kept the diary
from the age of 24 to 35...Drink and marital inharmony troubled him and
he tells us of his guilt and remorse. He wrote to record the
misdemeandors of others, to justify his actions and ensure they were
correctly remembered.His preoccupations were parochial as are most
diarists in most times. -Ron Price, comment on The Diary of Thomas
Turner: 1754-1765, editor, David Vaisey, OUP, NY, 1985.
Prices one to two million word autobiography, spread over several genres,
will be difficult to reduce, although a compendium of all his genres may
convey the most accurate autobiographical picture. He was never troubled
with drink, drugs or even money in any serious way. But ill-health and
marital inharmony kept him busy over the years from 1968 to 1999 at
different periods and in different combinations. These preoccupations, far
reduced in intensity, are evident in his diary, his poetry, his letters and his
journal. The preoccupations are not excessive. By the time he began his
writing in 1983 his health was excellent and his marital life far less
troublesome. New and not-so-new difficulties emerged in the 1980s and
90s: with personalities, with a certain weariness from overwork, in his
marriage and from the nature of lifes travail. These preoccupations are
not dominant in his letters and are essentially parochial ones.-Ron Price,
“Comment on My Autobiography,” Pioneering Over Three Epochs,
unpublished, 1999.

Gawler was right beside a famous

wine producing area: the Barossa.

But I was interested in a different wine

and I was as high as one can get

on some complex combination

of spiritual and material ambition:

not entirely unhealthy or healthy.


I got a kick in the spiritual teeth that year,

but hardly appreciated its true significance

as I headed for higher heights in places

I had never heard of and successes

I had not yet dreamed. The price I paid

were deep scars to my spiritual credentials,

irrecoverable, irremediable, part of the burden

of my sin, the source of my melting heart,

my boiling blood and my blushing soul.

Ron Price

28 April 1996

THE MIND, WITHOUT COPROREAL FRIEND


The Letter hangs there in the dark abyss of the Past: if like a star almost
extinct, yet like a real star, fixed; about which there is no cavilling
possible.

-Jane Welsh in The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle, Vol.1: 1812-


1821, Duke UP, Durham North Carolina, 1970, p.xii.

A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone


without corporeal friend.

-Emily Dickinson in Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story,


Jerome Loving, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1986, p.ix.

She lived on the edge of my life

where uncles and aunts live, mostly;

in a place I visited every so often,

up past the long hill in a town called

Waterdown, a funny name really, when

you think of it. I haven’t thought about

that town for years, really. She was


more my aunt when I was young, little,

just a little boy, an adolescent. Then I

moved and moved and moved, further

and further away until she became a letter.

She got old; she was already old; she became

a grandmother, then great-grandmother,

terribly old to a little boy, but I got older

and I became a grandfather myself, well,

a step-grandfather, really. And I, too, became

a letter: two fixed stars, almost extinct,

but real stars. And, if that’s all you’ve got,

that’s all you’ve got: something visible,

a picture of the soul, perhaps that’s bit strong,

agents of intimacy, yes, I like that; immortality,


the mind, without corporeal friend. That’s a bit

archaic(only Emily Dickinson would say that).

But it has a certain ring to it, the more you roll

it around in your mouth and your mind.

Ron Price

7 February 1996

STANDARD BEARERS

In its original version “I Love Lucy” debuted Monday October 15 1951 at


8:00 pm. It ran until May 6 1957. -Patricia Mellencamp,High Anxiety:
Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1992,
p. 322.
Shoghi Effendi appointed the first contingent of Hands of the Cause on
December 24 1951 and the final contingent in October 1957.-Baha’i
World, Vol XIV: 1963-1968, pp.449-455.

While you were laying the foundation

for the Kingdom of God on earth

in those, your final years,

another foundation was being laid

for an industry that would sweep the world by storm.

The three camera, living room, laugh track,

studio audience format has endured

all these years as have those contingents

now in their final days

having protected and propagated

for well-nigh half a century,


our standard bearers.

That zany, off-key, star, vaudeville comedian,

dispenser of popular culture in those years

when the Kingdom of God on earth

was getting its kick-star---Lucille Ball---

part of Desilu Productions,

the biggest production facility in the world, then,

was entertaining millions as you were writing

those brilliant letters telling us of our culture

and where it was at, then,

on the edge of oblivion,

and where our Cause was,

especially at its Centre


which you planned for them and us,

this Ark of humanity.

Ron Price

4 October 1996

THE BABE

The history of the career of George Herman(“Babe”) Ruth can be divided


into two basic stages: 1920 to 1927 and 1928 to 1935.....by 1935 Ruth
had left the Yankees and his youthful vitality, energy and hitting prowess
never returned. He died in 1948.-Ron Price, from a summary of Ruth’s
life in Collier’s Encyclopedia, Vol.20, p.306.

The development of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the


USA can be divided into two basic stages: 1922 to 1926 and 1927 to
1936....by 1936 the National Assembly...and the national committees and
Local Spiritual Assemblies were sufficiently strong to come together for
the execution of an international missionary program.-Loni Bramson-
Lerche, “Development of Baha’i Administration”, Studies in Babi and
Baha’i History, Vol.1, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, pp.260-275.
The year after He came west the Babe’s

career began and as that Order began to

take its first shaping in the late teens and

during that haitus, before the international

teaching campaign began, the Babe’s career

came to its maturity and end. His batting

average was .378 the year of the beginning

of a conscientious and active following of

Baha’i laws and teachings in 1924, just about

fully organized beyond a loose movement; and

as the “World Order Letters” came out year after

year his career slowly came to an end. As he came

to his retirement, the Cause emerged from dealing

with its endless minor problems to propagation and


unifying its own community in its Formative Age while

a beauty not matched by any domical structure since

Michelangelo’s dome on the Basilica of St. Peter emerged

as each of the 735 home runs were hit by the Babe.

Ron Price

23 December 1996

WHO I AM

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is


that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of
your character....There is the mortifying experience....the forced smile
which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to
conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously
moved.... grow tight about the outline of the face with the most
disagreeable sensation.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.


That is all very well, Mr Emerson,

if you do not live in, do not cultivate,

a community. The forced smile, the

undisclosed knowledge, the timing of

remarks, the suitability to the hearer,

the dead letters, moments, hours, days,

those smiles, the control of spontaneity,

the tight muscles---are all part of life

in community. But so, too, is the magnetism

of originality; its lustre is transferred to self-

reliance, the spontaneous baffling star shooting

its ray of beauty even into the trivial.


As you say, Mr. Emerson, the power men possess

to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No

man can come near me but through my act.* We

must resist our temptations and enter into a state

of war so that our prayers can become soliloquies of

jubilation not means to effect private ends. For the

secret of fortune is joy in our hands.and perserverence

which the angels themselves swiftly attend, even here,

even in my own home where I travel from in my mind

in the pursuit of self-culture, for that first attribute of

perfection. I have travelled for this Cause and found

the man I was and am, like some chiseled marble of Phidias;

now with the cumulative force of all life’s cultivation

a deep peace has come, a testimony to His principles,

and so, too, a weariness from years and years of work


and some of that sorrow and a strange desolation of

hopes**. This makes up some of my quietness, part

of who I am in community, my spontaneity and reserve.

Ron Price

24 March 1996

* Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.

** Ruhiyyih Rabbani, The Priceless Pearl, 1969, p.451.

Thats all for now

LETTER WRITING: THE PIONEER & A LONG TRADITION


I want to add this short essay as a sort of addendum to my comments on
letter writing, my letter writing and the letter writing of pioneers because
it provides some historical context particularly for me as a person of
Welsh ancestry and it seems particularly relevant to this autobiography. I
am indebted in my writing of this short essay which follows to a Bill
Jones and his article Writing Back: Welsh Emigrants and their
Correspondence in the Nineteenth Century in the North American Journal
of Welsh Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, Winter 2005.

Jones points to a remark made by Eric Richards in relation to British and


Irish people who moved to Australia in the nineteenth century that
migrants were “more likely to reflect on their condition and their lives
than those who stayed at home.” I’m not sure if pioneers in the Baha’i
community did more reflecting on their condition and lives than those
who stayed at home, but there is no question I did a sizeable amount of
reflecting and I documented a portion of it in my letters and, after about
1995, in my emails. I am also inclined to think that, as the decades
advance and as collections of the letters and emails of pioneers take form,
they will reflect mutatis mutandis Eric Richards’ comment.

As is true of most European peoples whose histories took on an


international dimension as result of nineteenth-century migrations, that
emigrant letters became the largest and arguably the most important
source for an insight into the mentalities, activities and attitudes of
ordinary migrants. Commentators have long emphasised the importance
of emigrant letters in illuminating the human and personal aspects of the
experience of migration. The comparison and contrast between emigrant
letters and those of Baha’i pioneers is heuristic.
Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first
being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in
Canada--a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and
collected. A continuity of little to no significnace to the outside world or
even within the Baha’i community at the time was taking place, a
continuity that began in Wales in the 19th century. Perhaps, in the long
run it would be a continuity with some significance. Time would tell.
Alan Conway’s collection, published in 1961, The Welsh in America:
Letters from the Immigrants appeared just as my own collection was
taking in its first letter. By the time H. S. Chapman’s article about letters
from Welsh migrants “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in Transactions of the
Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club and Letters from America:
Captain David Evans of Talsarnau, my own collection of letters were
beginning to assume a substantial body of material for future archivists
and historians, writers and analysts. I belonged to a religion within which
the letter had assumed more than an insignificant proportion and those
mysterious dispensations of Providence would determine whether my
letters and those of other international pioneers would take on any
significance. As a non-betting man, I was inclined to the view that one
day they would.

This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that
collections of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace,
although I hope what I write here contributes in a small way by
conveying something of the diversity and complexity of the subject. I am
only discussing somewhat impressionistic- ally a few of the functions of
the letters of pioneers and the relationships between them and certain
aspects of the process of pioneering. I also want to discuss certain
features of the letters as texts, examine some of their contexts and
subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in which this
correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are limited,
though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a general and
personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-researched or
extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the experiential
aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer
letter/email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in
which I was myself an international pioneer.
A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth
century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the
colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world
migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and
reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key
contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in
which their letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase
in literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based
education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-
writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together
with the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural
and educational pursuits.

In the case of my letters, only a few were written back to my country of


origin and the few that were were not written essentially to explain to
anyone or convince anyone of the value of this new country as a pioneer
destination for them. My letters, for the most part, were produced and
intersected with developments in my country of destination. The affects
of the spread of media technology: TV, coloured TV, DVDs, video and by
the 21st century large-screen plasma TVs, the computer; social and
political developments locally, nationally and internationally; the decline
of letter writing and the increase in the use of the email; the expansion of
the Baha’i community from, say, 200 thousand in 1953 to, say, 800
thousand in 1971 and to nearly six million in 2003, indeed, the list of
influences is and has been endless. This brief statement can not do the
subject justice. I leave that to future writers and students of the subject of
letter writing and pioneering in the Baha’i community.

Numerous scholars have emphasised that the writing and receiving of


letters had a high priority for those emigrants who engaged in
correspondence over 100 years ago. Without denying the importance of
emigrant letters in any way, however, we should be careful not to
exaggerate and over-romanticise their significance to all emigrants and to
the emigration process in general. This is equally true of the letters and
the emails of pioneers in the last half of the first century of our Formative
Age: 1971-2021. Undoubtedly they have immense importance as the
main, if not the only, practical method of keeping in touch with relatives,
friends and neighbours back in the Old Country or country of origin. Yet
letters and emails also had certain limitations that undermined their
effectiveness in these regards. Not every emigrant or pioneer wrote letters
and emails. The pleasure taken in the act of writing was not universal. In
the 19th century not everyone could write; in the last half of the 20th
century virtually everyone could write, at least in the western world, but
new influences kept many from writing more than the perfunctory
communication.

Some emigrants in the 19th and pioneers in the 20th wrote only very
occasionally and the number who wrote regularly in both centuries was
perhaps smaller still. The email certainly resulted in an explosion in the
sheer quantity of written communication from pioneers and among the
general population and I am confident that this sheer quantity would one
day be reflected in the letters and emails of pioneers. Further, the
importance attached to the act of writing to people on either side of the
Atlantic and/or the Pacific varied from family to family and changed over
time. For so many families, one of the most intense consequences of
emigration was disintegration or, perhaps the word ephemeralization, is
better. The situation was often created in which connections with family
and friends were broken or they became tenuous at best. There were also
other important elements to the process of maintaining correspondence
that could complicate matters and even restrict the letter’s effectiveness in
keeping families together and keeping friendships alive. If letters were
chains that bound distant kith and kin and connections with Baha’i
communities of origin, they were often fragile or poor links for many a
pioneer. Even when the links were strong, the letters and emails were
often thrown away and became of no use to future historians.
Pioneer and migrant correspondence was a multi-faceted, complex and
sometimes ambiguous, even contradictory phenomenon. There is no
doubt that the relationship between the letter writing of some emigrants
and some pioneers was characterised more by apathy, neglect and
avoidance than by emotional intensity and deep psychological need.
Some people preferred gardening, watching TV and engaging in any
number of a cornucopia of activities that popular and elite culture had
made available in the late twentieth century. The hobby apparatus of
many a leisure time activity became immense as the 21st century turned
its corner. So many people really did not like to write and when they did
they saw its only significance in personal terms, in terms of their
relationship with the person they were writing to. This was only natural.

Personal preference and circumstances as well as factors far beyond the


control of emigrants/pioneers and their families could limit the
effectiveness of the letter/email as a means of communication. Yet, for
other transnational families, the letters received in and sent from the
country of origin were all as precious as life itself. Written
correspondence was the principal means of sustaining that
transnationality and a future age would collect and analyse this sustaining
force and this often ephemeral reality.

The practice of writing, receiving and responding to letters in the 19th


century and, say, until what Baha’is called the ninth stage of history
beginning in 1953--to a country of origin from, say, America, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Patagonia, South Africa and elsewhere was an
essential element in the process of emigration and pioneering and the
lived experience of emigrants/pioneers. It had a centrality that was lost,
though, in the second half of the twentieth century and the second half of
the first century of the Formative Age(1971-2021) as the letter was
challenged by mass use of the telephone and, later, e-mail, and by cheaper
and faster overseas travel. I would suggest that because of their richness
as literary artifacts, their symbolic importance and their revelatory power,
the position that the written communications of pioneers beginning in the
nineteenth-century and continuing until, say, 1953, should occupy, is
prominent. These letters should be found, if not the very best place in the
house of the Baha’i literary heritage, then at least a significant one that
might draw the visitor’s eye as the threshold is crossed. Further, like
families and friends in nineteenth-century, we need to bring emigrant and
pioneer letters out to study them more often, to pass them around and
scrutinise and discuss their contents. My view is that it will be some time
before this kind of scrutinizing takes place. In a very real sense those
large and laden letters that take wing across the oceans, still await — and
deserve — our responses—perhaps our children’s children!

PIONEEING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

VOLUME 11 PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE

With the opening of this arch-lever file of personal correspondence there


now exists eleven volumes of personal letters to individuals for future
biographers, analysts of embryonic Baha’i institutions, communities and
interested parties of various ilk. This volume of letters opens the 24th
year of my extensive letter collecting and the 47th since the first letter in
this collection found its place in volume 1 and was dated November 27th
1960. For the most part these letters are a casual although, to some extent,
systematic collection. These volumes of what I have called personal
correespondence are part of a wider collection of letters to and from:
(I)Baha’i institutions,(II) publishers on and off the internet, (III.1) Baha’i
magazines and journals,(III.2) Non-Baha’i journals and magazines, (IV)
individuals: (a) in Canada and (b) particular/special individuals in my life
like Baha’i writers, inter alter, (V) places of employment and (VI) family
and friends regarding annual letters/emails.
More than two dozen arch-lever files and 2-ring binders are now part of
this collection containing only communications with internet sites in their
myriad forms. Some dozen or more files are found in connection with the
other topics/subjects listed above. Unlike telephone calls and
conversations, letters can be bundled, tied with ribbons, stored for
decades or, as in my case, placed in binders of different sizes and kept
fresh, dried-out and worn but enduring—each one unique—to tell a future
age about these epochs I have lived in and through.

Although I have never made a numerical count of all these


communications, my guesstimations would be: 6000 emails and postings
on the internet and 4000 emails and letters to friends and others. I leave
the exercise of counting this collection to future students of the Cause
should the subject be of any value and interest. Whatever future students
and casual readers do with this resource it is much more than voyeurism..
The person or persons who make some selection of these letters for
publication purposes will perform a type of exercise in literary
archaeology disclosing layers of a past, their past, to reveal who they are
and how they came to be who they are, at least in part.

In recent years, especially since my retirement from full-time work in


1999 and especially since bringing part-time work and most of my
volunteer work to an end at different times in the years 2001 to 2005, I
have added more non-epistolary material because it seemed appropriate
and I will leave it to future assessors to sift this material, to set up and
separate out a series of relevant appendices, to simply include this non-
epistolary resource as part of a varied type of letter/communication or to
delete it as desired and if preferred. The decision as to how to organize
this assortment of resources I leave in the hands of anyone who takes a
serious interest in these resources in the years ahead either before or after
my passing, as the case may be. To decide what to do with it all will
belong, in the end, to others than myself. Of course, whether these letters
even become an addition for some future understanding of what made up
the Baha’i community and its people back in the early epochs of the 10th
stage of Baha’i history, remains to be seen.

The Day of the Covenant, November 26th, is an auspicious occasion in


the Baha’i calendar. It has been my intention to open this and future arch-
lever files of personal correspondence, each one numbered in a
successive numerical series, on this special day and, perhaps, or so it
seems from the collections in recent years, on an annual basis. But after
nine months of collecting letters/emails in this volume of letters, I came
to a decision that had been insensibly forcing itself on my epistolary life,
namely, to keep all correspondence electronically. My wife has been
concerned at the burgeoning nature of the files in my study and the
adjoining spare bedroom. The rest of this collection will, then, be kept—
not in these paper/hard cover files—but in cyberspace, as they say.

I would like to be able to give a certain specialness to my letters other


than their association with this embryonic World Order. If I could do, for
example, what Julius Caesar did when he wrote letters while in battle,
I’m sure such an exercise would give a patina of significance to what
many may find to be a dry-as-dust collection. In war he had disciplined
himself to be able to dictate letters while on horseback. He gave
directions to others to take notes, as Oppius informs us. Baha’u’llah, we
are also informed, often kept several secretaries busy when He revealed
letters among other genres. ‘Abdu’l-Baha often stayed up all night
writing letters. It is thought that Caesar was the first who contrived a
means for communicating with friends by cipher or code when the press
of business left him no time for a personal conference about matters that
required dispatch and there was some urgency to his matters. Indeed, the
history of epistolary communication is filled with interesting anecdotes.
My anecdotes, suffice it to say, are simple and far from exciting.
Although I often felt a sense of urgency while writing my letters, the
matters were hardly earth-shattering when viewed in a wider, a societal,
context.
Some readers may find the narrative part of my autobiography, now in
four volumes and 2500 pages, overly analytical, even alien and remote.
Perhaps these letters may bring the real current of my life and times alive
and with that once rare gift for self-revelation, a gift that seems now to be
more common, more evident. With Carlyle, it would be my wish that
these letters would preserve as full a record of my life as possible. Carlyle
knew the value of letters in biography as I know only too well; he knew,
too, that collections of letters often went unread. Carlyle had much to say
about the value of letters, but I will not draw on his many views of letters
nor quote from the 6000 letters in his extant collection. I will note,
though, Carlyle’s opinion that ill-health, fatigue and overwork strongly
detracted from the quality of his letters. Indeed, I rarely write at all when
these situations visit me.

Some writers take great pleasure in conversing with old friends and
associations; it helped to distract him from his depressions and other
physical and psychological maladies. Samuel Johnson was such a
conversationalist. But he disliked writing letters. Many other litterateurs
disliked taking up the pen to write a letter. I, on the other hand, enjoy
writing letters and, with the years, have come to prefer it to conversation.
I have for years taken pleasure in the verbal arts, but I came to tire of
conversation. I rarely write to anyone now whom I used to know in
Canada before 1971, except my first wife. I rarely write to anyone I knew
before the 1980s. I seem to have written letters more copiously after the
age of 50, after 1994. I would like to think that the recipients of my letters
might cling to them and to my memory as the recipients of the letters of
Henry James. But, alas and alack, I think it most unlikely. In our age of
mass communication with a burgeoning of messages of every sort, letters
and emails I think, even interesting and entertaining ones, get lost in the
avalanche. The collection of Henry James’ letters constitutes one of the
greatest self-portraits in all literature. My letters are not in James’ league,
although the paint brush of life can play on the canvas with some success.
As I can not say too frequently, the value of this portrait is only insofar as
it is part of the growth and development, as it contributes to the
understanding, of the Baha’i community over these several epochs.

My letters, too, contain an Australian-American simplicity that is


essential in much of my communication. Whatever simplicity is there I
acquired in the hard knocks of the classroom and Bahá’í community life.
There is some complexity, some delicacies of feeling and intricacies of
mind, that can be found across the pages of my letters. Some of that
complexity I acquired in my reading. If life is no mere succession of facts
and much more “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 oneself could dream of undertaking
to paint,” then my letters come close to that painting. They are also, as the
Globe and Mail informed us in 2002 in introducing the book The Book of
Letters, “history on the fly….unselfconscious witnesses that bring history
gloriously to life” or, I might add, ingloriously.

In the same way that James created his life in his writing, I feel I do the
same. This is true in my letters in its own peculiar way and in my poetry,
in a sort of poetic fashioning of experience. There was an incessant
adventure, an inner cycle of vivid activity, by the time I took up writing
as a full-time passtime at the turn of the millennium. And this is reflected
in my letters, at least that is how I felt and experienced this epistolary act
—increasingly as the decades ran their natural course and as letters
became a more copious outpouring. As many-sided as my letters may be,
they tend to show only one side of my self. This is my impression,
although I leave this assessment to readers--for it is difficult for me to
comment on this facet of my letters.
As I have pointed out before, there is much in life that never appears in
my letters. In recent volumes of my letters, though, my life possessed a
calm it had not had before. I’m not sure this reality, this fact, is obvious
from reading my letters. A new happiness has unquestionably entered my
life since the turning of the millennium and the sheer quantity of the
correspondence that I have kept has increased partly owing to this very
pleasant feeling. That the main source of this happiness was due to first
an anti-depressant medication in 2001, then a combination of an
antipsychotic medication and a new anti-depressant medication in 2007.
For those who crave context and history, these letters may function to
serve that purpose, not so much as a series of sensational, humorous or
even especially interesting events that I document, but more as a part of
some rounded culture, some personal life and its passions, manners and
some of its intimate flavours.

I’d like to think my letters were something like those of Alistair Cooke
over the years 1946 to 2004, conversation that was conveyed in prose, the
journalism of personal witness that never loses touch with narrative, with
the letter-writer as storyteller. But I am not in Cooke\\\\\\\'s league. I am
an amateur compared to Cooke and I do not have an audience of 22
million; I do not possess a flattering readership. The great bulk of my
emails and all my letters have an audience of one. Like Cooke, though,
even when the content of a letter is about some crisis or other; even when
it was necessary that I must wax solemnly about the times in society or
events in my own life which have grave/sad implications, I never felt that
I was intended to put off those things in life I was presumably designed to
enjoy. And so my letters probably have a bias for the positive rather than
the melancholy, the entertaining and the somewhat intellectual rather than
the trivial and the tawdry. But readers should not expect too much
entertainment in my letters; there are other mediums to seek out if they
want entertainment.
In the end, though, I find as I browse through all this epistolary stuff, that
I am glad to leave it to someone else to make special selections of my
letters, to see what it all means and to provide a base for some marketable
commodity. I have absolutely no interest in commenting on any of the
specific letters other than the occasional explanatory comment as I slip a
letter into the collection. And now that the rest of this collection is in an
electronic form perhaps there will be a new spirit, a new ethos, a new me.
We shall see.

Ron Price

26th November 2006

Updated:26/8/07

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 12: 26/11/'07-26/11/'08

Beginning with volume 11 of Division 1 of my personal correspondence


and as the final months and days of that volume came to an end on 26
November 2007, I started to keep the bulk of my archival correspondence
in electronic form. Hard copy of emails became electronically kept in my
Dell computer(Pentium 4) Model-optiplex GT280 and its operating
system WindowsXP. No longer did my printer, a Xerox Docu Print Model
N17 have to copy material, although readers of this file will see a wide
variety, indeed, a cornucopia of non-email-non-letter material. Some
emails are, for various reasons, included in this file but, for the most part,
they have been excised from this hard-copy collection of letters of varied
resources and collected items.
My monitor, an Acer-LCD-type/model-Al1715 with a screen resolution
of 800 x 600 pixels and a screen size of 17 inches, showed me other items
to keep in this file and then, seeing their potential relevance for the future,
I placed a copy in this 2-ring binder.

Inevitably, much that was incoming did not lend itself to electronic form
or to placement in this file and was simply deleted. This has been the case
with much/most email resources since I began receiving this new form of
communication some twenty years ago, 2008-1988, circa.

It has become obvious with this new development of an electronic letter


archive that much material which 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” file, was a collection of a sort of hotch-potch of stuff. At
a future time, I may evaluate where to go with this new development of
non-epistolary material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in such
a file. But, for the time being, the elimination of much epistolary material
and various memorabilia--that had formerly been placed in the first
eleven volumes of personal correspondence—has meant a significant
reduction in the size of the file, from an arch-lever to a two-ring binder.
There is still, I feel, too much material being kept and, hopefully, I will
reduce the size of these files even more in the months and years ahead.

Ron Price

26 November 2008

LETTER WRITING: THE PIONEER & A LONG TRADITION

I want to add this short essay as a sort of addendum to my comments on


letter writing, my letter writing and the letter writing of pioneers because
it provides some historical context particularly for me as a person of
Welsh ancestry and it seems particularly relevant to both my
autobiography and my collection of letters. I am indebted in my writing
of this short essay which follows to a Bill Jones and his article Writing
Back: Welsh Emigrants and their Correspondence in the Nineteenth
Century in the North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 5, No.1,
Winter 2005.
Jones points to a remark made by Eric Richards in relation to British and
Irish people who moved to Australia in the nineteenth century that
migrants were “more likely to reflect on their condition and their lives
than those who stayed at home.” I’m not sure if pioneers in the Baha’i
community did more reflecting on their condition and lives than those
who stayed at home, but there is no question I did a sizeable amount of
reflecting and I documented a portion of it in my letters, after about 1995
in my emails and after I retired in 1999 in posts on the internet. I am also
inclined to think that, as the decades advance and as collections of the
letters and emails of pioneers like myself take form, they will reflect
mutatis mutandis Eric Richards’ comment.

It is true of most European peoples, whose histories took on an


international dimension as result of nineteenth-century migrations, that
emigrant letters became the largest and arguably the most important
source for an insight into the mentalities, activities and attitudes of
ordinary migrants. Commentators have long emphasised the importance
of emigrant letters in illuminating the human and personal aspects of the
experience of migration. The comparison and contrast between emigrant
letters and those of Baha’i pioneers is heuristic and, I would think, an
inevitable exercise in any exploratory study of the role of the letter in the
evolution of the Bahai community and its embryonic Administrative
Order.

Just at the time when the collections of Welsh migrant letters were first
being published in the 1960s, my first letters as a Baha’i pioneer in
Canada--a pioneer with a Welsh ancestry--were being written and
collected. A continuity was taking place of little to no significance to the
outside world or even within the Baha’i community at the time, a
continuity that began in Wales in the 19th century. Perhaps in the long run
it would be a continuity with some significance. Time would tell. Alan
Conway’s collection of letters from Welsh migrants published in 1961,
The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants appeared just as my
own collection was taking in its first letter, a collection at the time that I
was not even aware I had begun amassing. By the time H. S. Chapman’s
article about letters from Welsh migrants “From Llanfair to Fairhaven,” in
Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club and
Letters from America: Captain David Evans of Talsarnau, my own
collection of letters were beginning to assume a substantial body of
material for future archivists and historians, writers and analysts. I
belonged to a religion within which the letter had assumed more than an
insignificant role, indeed, a very prominent one, and those mysterious
dispensations of Providence would determine whether my letters and
those of other international pioneers would take on any significance in
some future epoch. As a non-betting man, I was inclined to the view that
one day they would.

This brief analysis can not do justice to the many dimensions that
collections of letters from Baha’i international pioneers embrace,
although I hope what I write here contributes in a small way by
conveying something of the diversity & complexity of the subject. I am
only discussing somewhat impressionistically a few of the functions of
the letters of pioneers and the relationships between them and certain
aspects of the process of pioneering. I also want to discuss certain
features of the letters as texts, examine some of their contexts and
subtexts, and try to explain some of the complex ways in which this
correspondence came into existence. My remarks here are limited,
though, for this is a short essay and deals with its subject in a general and
personal way making no attempt to be comprehensive, well-researched or
extensively analysed. I seek to shed light on some of the experiential
aspects of emigrant letter writing over two centuries and pioneer letter
and email writing and receiving in the period: 1971-2021, the period in
which I was myself an international pioneer.

A collection of letters like my own are so unlike any of the nineteenth


century collections from European or United Kingdom migrants to the
colonies, the new world, any world outside of the Eurocentric world
migrants had been born in. Their letters, their history, production and
reception, intersected with, contributed to and were shaped by key
contemporaneous developments in that part of the nineteenth century in
which their letters were written. These included the conspicuous increase
in literacy, the emergence of mass print culture and formal state-based
education, the expansion of the postal service and of reading and letter-
writing in general, the social and cultural practices of the time together
with the growth of instructional literature devoted to a range of cultural
and educational pursuits. In the case of my letters, only a few were
written back to my country of origin and the few that were were not
written essentially to explain to anyone or convince anyone of the value
of this new country as a pioneer destination for them. My letters, for the
most part, were produced and intersected with developments in my
country of destination. The affects of the spread of media technology: TV,
coloured TV, DVDs, video and, by the 21st century, large-screen plasma
TVs, the computer, inter alia; social and political developments locally,
nationally and internationally; the decline of letter writing and the
increase in the use of the email; the expansion of the Baha’i community
from, say, 200 thousand in 1953 to, say, 800 thousand in 1971 and to
nearly six million in 2003, indeed, the list of influences is and has been
endless. This brief statement can not do the subject justice. I leave that to
future writers and students of the subject of letter writing and pioneering
in the Baha’i community.

Numerous scholars have emphasised that the writing and receiving of


letters had a high priority for those emigrants who engaged in
correspondence over 100 years ago. Without denying the importance of
emigrant letters in any way, however, we should be careful not to
exaggerate and over-romanticise their significance to all emigrants and to
the emigration process in general. This is equally true of the letters and
the emails of pioneers in the last half of the first century of our Formative
Age: 1971-2021. Undoubtedly they have immense importance as the
main, if not the only, practical method of keeping in touch with relatives,
friends and neighbours back in the Old Country or country of origin. Yet
letters and emails also had certain limitations that undermined their
effectiveness in these regards. Not every emigrant or pioneer wrote letters
and emails. The pleasure taken in the act of writing was not universal. In
the 19th century not everyone could write; in the last half of the 20th
century virtually everyone could write, at least in the western world, but
new influences kept many from writing more than the perfunctory
communication.
Some emigrants in the 19th and pioneers in the 20th wrote only very
occasionally and the number who wrote regularly in both centuries was
perhaps smaller still. The email certainly resulted in an explosion in the
sheer quantity of written communication from pioneers and among the
general population and I am confident that this sheer quantity would one
day be reflected in the letters and emails of pioneers when such
collections were eventually made. Further, the importance attached to the
act of writing to people on either side of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific
varied from family to family and changed over time. For so many
families, one of the most intense consequences of emigration was
disintegration or, perhaps the word ephemeralization, is better. The
situation was often created in which connections with family and friends
were broken or they became tenuous at best. There were also other
important elements to the process of maintaining correspondence that
could complicate matters and even restrict the letter’s effectiveness in
keeping families together and keeping friendships alive. If letters were
chains that bound distant kith and kin and connections with Baha’i
communities of origin, they were often fragile or poor links for many a
pioneer. Even when the links were strong, the letters and emails were
often thrown away and became of no use to future historians.

Pioneer and migrant correspondence was a multi-faceted, complex and


sometimes ambiguous, even contradictory phenomenon. There is no
doubt that the relationship between the letter writing of some emigrants
and some pioneers was characterised more by apathy, neglect and
avoidance than by emotional intensity and deep psychological need.
Some people preferred gardening, watching TV and engaging in any
number of a cornucopia of activities that popular and elite culture had
made available in the late twentieth century. The hobby apparatus of
many a leisure time activity became immense as the 21st century turned
its corner. So many people really did not like to write and when they did
they saw its only significance in personal terms, in terms of their
relationship with the person they were writing to. This was only natural.
Personal preference and circumstances as well as factors far beyond the
control of emigrants/pioneers and their families could limit the
effectiveness of the letter/email as a means of communication. Yet, for
other transnational families, the letters received in and sent from the
country of origin were all as precious as life itself. Written
correspondence was the principal means of sustaining that
transnationality and a future age would collect and analyse this sustaining
force and this often ephemeral reality.

The practice of writing, receiving and responding to letters in the 19th


century and, say, until what Baha’is called the ninth stage of history
beginning in 1953--to a country of origin from, say, America, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Patagonia, South Africa and elsewhere was an
essential element in the process of emigration and pioneering and the
lived experience of emigrants/pioneers. It had a centrality that was lost,
though, in the second half of the twentieth century and the second half of
the first century of the Formative Age(1971-2021) as the letter was
challenged by mass use of the telephone and, later, e-mail, and by cheaper
and faster overseas travel. I would suggest that because of their richness
as literary artifacts, their symbolic importance and their revelatory power,
the position that the written communications of pioneers beginning in the
nineteenth-century and continuing until, say, 1953, should occupy, is
prominent. These letters should be found, if not the very best place in the
house of the Baha’i literary heritage, then at least a significant one that
might draw the visitor’s eye as the threshold is crossed. Further, like
families and friends in the nineteenth-century, we need to bring emigrant
and pioneer letters out to study them more often, to pass them around and
scrutinise and discuss their contents. My view is that it will be some time
before this kind of scrutinizing takes place and, when it does take place, it
will be in some academic environment not in popular circles. In a very
real sense those large and laden letters that take wing across the oceans,
still await — and deserve — our responses—perhaps our children’s
children!
In his introduction to a collection of 840 of Waughs 4500 letters of
Evelyn Waugh, Mark Amory makes the point that one of the ideal
conditions for letter-writing in our time is any one or a combination of:
adventure, boredom and idleness. While these three conditions virtually
never coexisted in my life; boredom and idleness did in my late
childhood, when I was 10 or 11. It was other ideal conditions than these
that led to my letter writing. Amory also notes that letter-writers often
have libellous passages which must be taken out. I should not think this
will be a problem with my correspondence. Although libel is not a subject
that has entered my mind in my letters and I am confident that it will have
no place in the future of my letters, the subject of friendship has, indeed,
occupied my mind as a letter writer and it is to this subject that I now turn
to close this subject here at the BARL.

SOME THOUGHTS ON FRIENDSHIP IN: LETTERS/EMAILS AND


INTERNET POSTS

These many volumes contain letters and emails, communications with


many a person over many a year. The correspondence with some barely
exists; there is at most one letter from many individuals over many years.
The correspondence with others takes place off and on for varying
lengths of time. Robert Risch, a student of writer Ernest Hemingway,
describes the letters between Ernest Hemingway and Evan Shipman, a
correspondence with a particular type of person who got on with
Hemingway, a difficult chap at the best of times or so it is said. I include
the following two paragraphs of Rischs words here as an opening note on
the subject of friendship in letters, emails and internet posts.

Evan Shipman’s letters to American novelist Ernest Hemingway(1899-


1961) reveal a strong kindness running through his actions and his
manner. Ernest Hemingway and Evan Shipman shared many of the same
interests and activities and they are apparent in their correspondence:
“Paris in the 1920s, being short of money, loving art, writing and
adventure, reading the same books, Spain, war injuries, friends doing
well, friends doing not so well, families of culture, mothers they
disappointed, fathers with whom they bonded, having their work
criticized at times unkindly,”1 are but a few. Most of th e time, each man
reacted to these things in very different ways, yet they remained friends.
Hemingway may have lost as many friends as he found in his life, but the
friendship he shared with Shipman went the distance.

Men like Hemingway make up their own rules because they need to win;
they think they know it all, such was the view of Philip Kolb in his study
of the letters of another writer. They are difficult to please and friendships
with them are arduous. If Hemingway and Shipman had been on a sports
team, Hemingway would have no doubt led the team in scoring and
probably penalty minutes. The media would have camped out in front of
his locker. Shipman would have led the team in assists and would have
come and gone without many people noticing. But even the Hemingways
of life need good friends. Without them the game is not worth the play.1

This correspondence between Hemingway and Shipman tinctured as it is


with fame and literary renown, was totally unlike that between myself
and the recipient of this very short essay, John Bailey. This man, to whom
I have written more letters than any other person in my several decades
on this mortal coil, could always be relied upon to send me in his letters:
quotations from the humanities and social sciences, words of wisdom
from known and unknown sources, elements of the quotidian,
reminiscences from our common experience in the teaching world and the
world of Western Australia where I spent 13 years and accounts of his
annual trips with his wife after he had retired. He was a type of
correspondent, as I found all of my correspondents, unique unto himself.
He was not demanding. I have written to demanding personalities; I have
written for demanding personalities and even now, after the evolution of
more than two decades, I think of that writing to the demanding, the
critical and those who were usually pushing some barrow of a partisan-
political nature with distaste, coolness and some degree of emotional
alienation.
The only competition John Bailey had from other correspondents in my
epistolary life, in terms of frequency and duration of writing, was with a
poet who has now passed on, Roger White. Roger and I corresponded
from 1981 to 1992. John and I have been writing now from 1996 to 2007.
Roger, too, was not demanding, not judgmental; there was a lightness in
his authorial step even when dealing with serious content. This was also
true of the letters I received from John Bailey.

Acquaintances and familiarities, occasional contacts, some little


intercourse, wrote the essayist Montaigne over 400 years ago, these are
what people commonly call friends and friendships. But he says, these are
not friendships. Friendships involve: being mutually taken with one
another, being endeared, being confirmed by judgement and length of
time, one soul in two bodies. Friendship of this type is remote and rare.
I’m not sure if I have ever experienced such friendship. Indeed, after
these many years, I’m not sure I would even seek out such a friendship. I
think the type of friendship I have and which I cultivate in my letters and
emails, is a friendship that lies somewhere between the two types that
Montaigne describes. The subject is a complex one, though, and requires
more time than I desire to devote at this juncture.

One of the extensive, if not interesting, letter writers in history was one,
Horace Walpole. For some time he contemplated writing a history of his
times but after twenty years of consideration, he gave the idea up and
decided to write another kind of history based on letters.2 Each of the
friends he wrote to was “particularly connected….with one of the
subjects about which he wished to enlighten and inform posterity.”3
There is little doubt that I could approach a history of my times through
the vehicle of the letter. But it would be a particularly idiosyncratic
history, not your comprehensive view of an age. It would be a more
personalized, more subjective, exercise. I would have to approach it
through the vehicle of those I knew, knew in varying degrees. After only
a brief reflection I think such an exercise would be beyond my capacity
and, more importantly, my interest.

Sadly, if not thankfully, most people who have taken the time to write to
me have done so infrequently and I am not sure if I could add much to an
understanding of my times through their meager correspondence. Most
people prefer gardening, watching TV, reading, arts and crafts, various
forms of exercise, nice long sleeps and good food. Epistolary activity is
not on their list of enthusiasms. Then, too, I often wonder if one ever
really knows anyone in life even when one shares a good deal of ones
correspondents enthusiasms. If one wants depth and breadth, one just
about needs an afterlife. And for that purpose I think many would still
decline the offer and prefer the quiet, obscure and unemotional dalliances
of oblivion. This side of the grave, it seems, we know in part and we
prophesy a much smaller, an infinitessimal, part.

Recently I came across the letters of Petrarch(1304-1374), poet and


historian, precursor to the Renaissance. He wrote, to my surprise, letters
to dead figures in the past. I had already begun to think of what Virginia
Woolf called posterity’s “featureless face,” those not-yet-born, as I
approached the age of 50 over a decade ago. Generations yet unborn
insensibly became part of my perspective. During the years, what I now
think of as my warm-up years of letter-writing, 1957 to 2007—50 years, I
became more interested in posterity, in those not-yet-born, in the
generations that would come after me. The idea had germinated, but the
idea of writing to those who had died or those not yet born had never
crossed my mind. I would have to sit on these ideas for the moment.
Many of my notebooks, more than 300 now in total, consisted of
photocopied material and I am not sure what relevance they would have
to a future age. But my correspondence—that is a different subject. Time
will tell what eventuates in this direction, the direction of letters and
emails, friendship and letters, those from the past and those not-yet-born.
I don’t like writing novels, short stories, scripts for the media, advertising
pieces, nor books except on a very few topics. It seems the letter at least
has found a place in my life amidstmy poetry. If I only write to those now
living while being inspired by those who have left this mortal coil and
while keeping one eye on the future this will take me to my final end.

Ron Price

December 19th 2005

(updated 27/11/07)

1 Ron Price with thanks to Robert Risch, “Evan Shipman: Friend and
Foil,” The Hemingway Review, Vol. 23, No.1, Fall 2003.”

2 Horace Walpole, Letters, Vol.1-16, editor, Paget Toynbee, Yale UP.

3 Virginia Woolf, Collected Letters, Vol.1, 1966(1925), London, p.102.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND LISTS OF 4000 INTERNET SITES FOR


POSTING: 2001-2008

Preamble:
I have tried in what follows--in this 21,000 word document--to provide
both a developmental outline of my site acquisition and posting process at
websites in the years 2001 to 2008. I also try to provide reasonably
comprehensive lists of websites where I have posted my writing, made
postings with Baha’i content and responded to people about some aspect
of the Bahá’í Faith and other and often related issues. Some of the sites
are ‘information only’ sites, perhaps as many as 10% of the total found
here, mostly in list #1 of the five lists, but they are information sites
which have a potential for posting Baha’i content down the track and/or
provide information relevant to this internet task of Bahá’í teaching or so
it seemed at the time I placed the site on the list.

The information below is, for the most part, for my own record. I do not
expect the average person who reads it to take it all in. I have sent a copy
of this list to a very small handful of people/institutions: (a) whom I
thought would find it useful and/or (b) have asked to have a copy of this
list. Readers should not make any attempt to grasp the detail here since it
goes to 110 A-4 pages as of 1 July 2008. Their interest, if they have any
at all after they have seen it as an email attachment, would best be in
terms of a general overview and each person will get a different sense of
that overview and its meaning and relevance to the teaching work.
Readers are advised to just pass on when the going gets tough, when the
labyrinth of information gets too twisted and complex to take in. They
should just try and obtain the most general of pictures of what they find
here and the 1000s of hours of time represented by what is located on
these approximately 4000 sites.

In addition, there are many sites where I post my writing and engage in
Baha’i-related dialogue on issues and with content which are not included
here. When one deals with a number of sites of the order of 4000 and
when they are listed and commented on briefly as I do here, it is only too
obvious that the exercise is a massive one involving literally millions of
words. The processes involved in my internet publishing are complex and
extensive and I try in this document to provide a comprehensive picture
of my activity for anyone who is interested. Keeping a detailed, accurate
and comprehensive list of all my postings has become beyond my
capacity or interest. But a sketch is found here for anyone taking some
general interest, a sketch of these 110 A-4 pages, and the sketch is
sufficiently detailed to be of use to anyone who does take a serious
interest in my work on the internet.

I have taken only a mild interest in record keeping, an interest which


leads to maintaining a modicum of order within this vast system of
writing on the internet, writing as I say which involves literally millions
of words and the equivalent of many books. What is found here is,
therefore, not totally comprehensive, but provides a reasonably complete
picture. The following five(5) lists are intended to sketch this general
picture of my work on the WWW, give those interested in what work I do
a perspective on how they might locate my writings and, hopefully, see
for themselves the wonderful teaching opportunities that are available to
them should they desire to post on the internet as well or just survey what
I have done for whatever reason they may have and for whatever reason I
have sent them an email copy of these five lists.

I have written what follows for my own interest and record keeping so
that I may find information I need to keep up with utilizing my particular
pattern of internet posting. Without some record accessibility of data, to
what I have done and what I might do in the future is not as easy and
convenient. The following outline is one I have written and revised
several times in the last seven years: 2001-2008 to keep it up to data and
because I really think I am onto something very valuable in the teaching
work. It is exciting to me and, if I can transfer some of this excitement to
others, that would be valuable in its own right.

My story on the internet began insensibly in the 1990s. The story goes
through to 2008 with a special focus on the two Five Year Plans: 2001-
2006 and 2006-2011. There are now, as I indicated above, about four
thousand sites involved in this exercise and, given this massive number of
sites, my presence at most of them is relatively thin because I try to
scatter the seeds wide, so to speak. This is not always the case, though,
and at some sites I have a strong presence and literally thousands of
people access my writings.
There are 110 A-4 pages of: (a) descriptive prose explanation and (b)
internet sites to give readers a taste, a sample, of the sites involved1 and
how I go about what I am doing on the internet. These lists1 will serve as
my base for a future of internet posting and teaching that I find very
satisfying. Teaching the Faith, the Bahá’í Faith, has always been a very
important part of my life. This list will serve, too, as a base/framework
for any interested person to find out more about this internet work, the
latest chapter of my individual teaching initiative.-Ron Price-Updated
1/7/’08.

___________________________________________________________
________________________________

1 The listing below of internet sites is set out in an organizational form


that divides the sites into Lists 1 to 5. It incorporates earlier lists in my
computer as far back as 2001. It takes the process of site listing to 1
March 2008. The 1st list began in 2001; the 2nd list was composed
mainly in 2002-2003; the 3rd in 2004-5. The 4th and 5th lists were made
mainly from 2006 to 2008 for my convenience and the convenience of
readers. Anyone wanting these lists, now contained in this single
document of 110 A-4 pages, can write to me and I will send them by
email.

___________________________________________________________

INTERNET SITES: STAGE 1:

LIST #1 2001-2004:

After two decades(1981-2001) of keeping a rather small collection of


publishers and relevant files for the purpose (a) of publishing a book of
my own, (b) of publishing Baha’i material in magazines and in the
periodical press or (c) of simply buying hard/soft cover books written by
someone else, I began in the Australian winter, June to August of 2001,
forty days from the start of the Five Year Plan of 2001-2006, to keep what
became in the next seven years an extensive collection/series of arch-
lever files and two-ring binders. I recorded publishers and websites that
were useful in my work to promote my prose, my poetry and the Cause.
By July 2003, two years into this file and site collecting exercise, I had a
list of a large number of sites and publishers, several hundred locations,
more than I could log onto regularly. I also acquired and listed many
other sites in connection with various subjects, topics and disciplines
much of which I have listed here and much of which I haven’t. The total
number of sites came to more than 1000. In some ways this is not
significant given the fact that the number of sites on the internet now
numbers well over a trillion if not trillions.

In July 2003 I divided this large list into several subsidiary lists, created
to give some specificity, some individual subject location, to what had
become a burgeoning, unmanageable, list. These subsidiary lists, taken
together, were still unwieldy, but it served as a sort of library of locations
when and if I wanted to draw on the information or log into a site and do
a posting. These subsidiary lists are now located in various files: religion,
the Baha’i Writings, Canadian poetry, Australian poetry and Baha’i
history, inter alia. This list below served as the core, the outline, of my
site acquisitions or site activity two years after I had made a start with
that original list of internet sites in the winter of 2001.

In May 2001 the 2nd edition of my website went online and the Baha’i
World Centre officially opened the Terraces and the Arc Project. I use this
date as a measuring time/rod/demarcation point for my work on the
internet in these early years of my retirement from the teaching
profession, 1999-2007. This 2nd edition of my website did coincide with
the onset of my record keeping. In fact both my website and my
recording began within the ten day period: 21/5/01-1/06/01.

By 2004 I had added many more sites and developed what I came to call
my Publishing Volume 12. This Volume 12 can now be found in 18 Parts
which I will refer to later in this account. This second list, this Volume 12,
is a list I refer to in my computer directory as “List #2." I devoted most of
my internet site attention to this Volume 12 as the early months of 2004
advanced. By April 2004 I was devoting virtually all my time to Volume
12. By October 15th 2004 Volume 12 had more than 500 additional sites,
by June 30th 2005 it had more than 1000 and by April 21st 2006, five
years into the original exercise, I stopped counting.1
I write all of this, as I say, largely for my own information, just to keep a
record of how this exercise evolved. I realized, too, that: (a) what I was
doing had a significance to me that I had not anticipated and (b) a written
statement might be useful one day if, in fact, what I was doing did take on
a significance that I was already strongly intimating. The story is here if I
ever need it for some purpose. I have sent, unrequested, copies or partial
copies to several individuals and Bahá'í institutions just to give them an
idea of the work I am doing. Thusfar, I have received only one
encouraging response, from the NSA of the Baha’is of Australia Inc. on 9
October 2007.

___________________________________________

1 This List #1 below of 1000 sites(not included here) is not complete and
as time goes on it becomes more incomplete as more sites get added. I
update this List #1 infrequently. I have lost interest in keeping my
computer file completely up-to-date because of the very burgeoning
nature of the exercize. It has proved difficult to keep an exact figure of
how many postings I do at each site and when and what the content was
at each site. This is due to the number of sites on all the lists, that is, List
#1 to List #5. With well over 4000 sites in all the lists it is unlikely that
most readers will have any interest at all in the names of the sites or, for
that matter, this general outline. But I write this overview for the reasons I
have already indicated.

Ron Price

1 July 2008

STAGE 2: A Comment
1. Introduction:

By 1 July 2008 when the new teaching Plan(2006-2011) was two years
and two months old(April 2006-June 2008), the process of searching out
sites, forums in the social sciences and humanities, in popular culture and
to a lesser extent in the biological and physical sciences, forums for
posting and publishing various items of my writing, various material in
relation to the Baha’i Faith, responding to issues raised on the sites by
others and engaging with specific individuals at these sites, had
developed far more than I had anticipated on 21 May 2001 at the start of
the whole process.

At the start of this site and internet searching process seven years
before(2001-2008), I simply had no idea of what it would lead to in the
teaching work. My own website went into its second edition on May 21st
2001, the date of the official opening of the Terraces. My website’s first
edition went from 1997 to 2001 and had virtually no value in the teaching
work.

In the embryonic years of my internet life, the decade 1991 to 2001, I had
no idea of the potential for placing my writings on this world wide web or
interacting with others in relation to the Cause, my writing or, indeed, any
other subject. In those years the internet was essentially a source of
information and a basis for emails.

As the seventh year of searching out sites for posting or publishing items
was coming to its end, I found myself keeping only a very general record
of my postings at sites where I was a registered member. To even log in to
all the sites, as I have pointed out above, at a greater rate than once/month
had become impossible even if I devoted, say, 10 to 12 hours to this
internet process each day. I do not possess the energy or enthusiasm for
this extended type of application.
This activity, of acquiring and servicing sites principally, especially, for
Baha’i teaching, came to occupy my time intensively in 2003 & 2004. In
early 2004, after completing my third book, the fourth edition of my
autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I looked for an extensive
writing outlet and the internet satisfied this search. From 2005 to 2008
my activity at websites actually decreased, though, because: (1) of what I
can only call internet fatigue and (2) I had turned to non-internet writing:
poetry and autobiography.

I kept going back to this posting process when I was unable to work on
my book or books, when I was not moved to writepoetry, when I got tired
of reading and when I wanted “little writing and posting jobs” that I knew
would contribute in their own way to the teaching work. During these
internet-posting-days-or-hours I usually spent from 2 to 10 hours; the
variation was and is large. Although it is possible to quantify the time I
spend posting poems, essays and comments of various kinds on what are
called threads at internet sites, I do not keep an actual daily time record.

It is more simple to say I have three main activities: writing, posting and
reading and I alter them to preserve my sanity and because I simply get
tired of any one activity if pursued beyond a certain length of time. The
average is, as I say, about 8 hours a day devoted to these three activities
in total.

2. Developmental Background:

The first edition of this particular list of sites, sites especially devoted to
publishing and posting(1) in 2001/2 was a very short list consisting of
only a small handful of locations. A second edition in 2003 became a
third edition in April 2004. That original list of a few sites in 2001 had
burgeoned to over 800 sites by January 1st 2005 and to over 1000 by May
21st 2005. The contents of what became eleven files(8 arch-lever files
and 5 two-ring binders) and well over 1000 sites is now divided into 18
parts, a division that evolved naturally and was not based on any inherent
system. As the sites were contacted and their forum outlines copied, filed
and used for recording my postings, the collection of resource/site
information, et cetera was brought together into these several volumes.

This list, like the first list described in the first document(List #1)
became, as I say above, too lengthy a list to really service properly. It
required the work of other Baha’is and so I placed a notice/article in the
Australian Baha’i Bulletin which appeared on October 12th 2004 across
Australia. I also presented a workshop at the Tasmanian Summer School
on “The Art of Using the Internet.” There was no response to my notice
in The Bulletin and no evidence of any increased presence of Baha’is
other than myself at the vast majority of the sites, except of course at
specifically Baha’i sites, ten months after the advertisement. The
participation of Baha’is at websites is difficult to assess when one is
talking about 2000 sites. The sheer magnitude of the task/process, the
number of sites and the vast quantity of participants over all these sites is
simply beyond any one person to assess participation levels by the
thousands of Baha’is on the internet.

I have given this entire package of 15 arch-lever files and 7 two-ring-


binders, in 18 parts, the label Volume 12: Publishing because the total
exercise is one of publication in some form or another on the Internet. I
made several copies of an earlier list of sites for those attending the
workshop on “the use of the internet” at the Tasmania Baha’i summer
school in February 2005. Volumes 1 and 2: The Baha’i Faith and the
Arts(1.1.,1.2, 2.1 and 2.2) and Volumes 3 to 17: Publishing(excluding
Vol.12) contain a large body of sites on: Australian Poetry, Canadian
Poetry, Cinema/Media Studies and several collections involving The
Baha’i Faith and the Arts. These subjects contain a burgeoning list of
sites, sites which I acquired and serviced during the first three
developmental years 2001 to 20042 but which, at least for the most part
and at least since Ridvan 2004, I have come to service or contact
relatively infrequently. This latter category of sites, while being devoted
to posting and publishing as well, as the titles on that list indicate, is also
devoted to obtaining information.
At this stage of development, these sites serve as an archival base that I
service periodically as the need, interest and desire arises. Sections like
(a) Canadian Poetry, (b) American poetry, (c) diary/journal sites, (d)
literature and (e) cinema/media sites I try to service more frequently but
this, too, has become impossible on even a regular basis.

3. Future Development

In the months and years that lie ahead I’m sure this base of over 4000
sites will be extended into further parts and volumes. I hope, too, that the
other 1000 or more archival/information sites will find my presence there
more extensively than thusfar. But, as anyone can appreciate, well over
4000 sites to post Baha’i material in some kind of teaching capacity is too
much of a bite to chew, as one might put it colloquially. This activity is
clearly a publishing and teaching device that has assumed impossible
dimensions. There is always work, publishing work and teaching the
Cause in the process. Perhaps, too, I will develop a system for servicing
the sites with more frequency and thoroughness, especially if others
become involved in this activity which I am confident they will in the
years ahead even if this involvement is not part of any coordinated
exercise and even if, at present, I have not engaged anyone else in a
similar level of activity.

There is necessarily a life other than posting stuff on the internet. It could
be argued that I spread myself too thin and should aim for depth and not
breadth and that may be true. Posting at sites has a certain serendipitous
quality just like teaching the Cause in everyday life. On the internet, so in
life, I have scattered seeds far and wide, but not necessarily deep/in one
place. Depth, of course, is always difficult to measure and all I want to do
in this brief outline is give readers a general picture of my website
activity.

Since the completion of my autobiography by Ridvan 2004, I have had no


specific idea/plan for another book, although intimations of a book to
write occur from time to time, but I do not seem to have the inspiration,
the specific direction, to take on a book. I spend some time occasionally,
as I said above, working on the sixth edition of my autobiography and
developing ideas for other books. But, in the main, I now work in this
milieux of over 4000 sites3 when the spirit moves me. These sites
provide enough to keep a marathon runner-writer busy into perpetuity,
well into several more Olympic games or, in terms of the Baha’i calendar,
at least to the end of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021 or
even the end of my own first century in 2044 and two Baha’i centuries.4

___________________________________________________________

_______________________FOOTNOTES________________________

1 The term ‘publishing’ refers to systematic posting of essays and, indeed,


a variety of other material on the internet, material like: emails/letters,
parts/chapters of books, poems, prose-poems, reviews of films books,
inter alia. In addition this List #2 is comprehensive but not absolutely
accurate due to the sheer number of sites involved.

2 In the six year period before the first edition of my own website, from
1991 to 1997, and the four years after the creation of the 1st edition of my
website, from 1997 to 2001, I began to search out and contact websites.
This was the first decade of my use of the email facility as well. These
were embryonic years and I have no record of any results, any sites listed
from this decade of beginnings. Of course I was still employed
professionally as a teacher in Tafe until 1999 and as a volunteer teacher
with a School for Seniors until 2004 or actively engaged in community
work of different kinds until May 2005. I dropped these involvements at
various times in the years 1999 to 2005.

From 1999 to 2001, during the first two years of my retirement, I began
to set up my systems: files, categories, internet order and form, etc. here
in George Town for future writing and work on the internet. In these first
two years I really only began to see, insensibly for the most part, the
potential for publication and teaching in this medium. But as the 2nd
edition of my website went on-line in May 2001, at the start of the Five
Year Plan(2001-2006) and at the same time as the opening of the
Terraces, I began to see the internet potential for ‘seed planting.’ By April
2006 I was spending virtually all my time reading and posting on the
interent; and in writing articles, essays and books generally.

3 A team of several people could be kept happily employed servicing


these sites with a minimum of regularity and a periodicity of once a
week, fortnight, month or whatever frequency, depth and breadth; indeed
many more could also be employed should this exercise be seriously
taken up by a group of Baha’is, especially/only people with skills at
writing and depending on the time they could devote to this exercise. No
coordination would be required for such an exercise, although if it was to
be done in a sophisticated way that is another question. It would be too
onerous and complex a task for me to enagage in from this remote
backwater. Perhaps a small team of two or three would be best. In
addition, there are many more sites which will be added to this list as
time goes on. I think this idea, this proposal, is unlikely to be taken up in
the short term, in the immediate years ahead.

4 I hope this brief essay provides a useful base of information, a useful


outline, to anyone expressing interest in this activity of internet posting. I
have written this introduction, as I say above, partly for my own use
simply to outline just how this activity has developed in recent years and
partly for interested others who think they might like to give their writing
skills and their interest in teaching the Cause on the internet a good
workout. Readers should not concern themselves unduly with the above
process of development that I have outlined. It is essentially a sketch for
my personal purposes and interest. But, as I have also said above, my
interest in this process of record keeping is minimal and my reason for
outlining the process has had, thusfar, little interest and value to anyone
else.

___________________________________________________________

STAGE 2: LISTS 2 & 3:

List #2:
INTERNET SITES IN 19 PARTS (15 arch-lever files & 8 two-ring
binders)

A SUMMARY STATEMENT

Most of the internet site information below was gathered after I stopped
writing the 4th edition of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs at Ridvan 2004. In late May 2004 I initiated the 5th edition of that
book and a copy was placed in the Baha’i World Centre Library. Work on
that 5th edition has continued from time to time as inspiration and
relevant content has come to mind. Posting on internet sites came centre
stage in 2004, but after several months of posting the spirit became
exhausted with the process and had to move on to other activity. What is
found here on this list below in Volume 12: Parts 1 to 19, was initiated in
2004 and continues to 1 July 2008 as I make this summary statement.

On 23 May 2008 I will have been engaged in this exercise for seven years
since the opening of The Terraces(23/5/01), the opening of the 2nd
edition of my website and since recording my postings on the internet.
The internet site titles/ headings from over 4000 sites now in 2008 I have
listed in a document of some 110 pages. They can be obtained from me
under separate cover. As the months and years go on, of course, more
sites, will be added.

There are some 1000 sites(a guesstimation) put together from 2001 to
2008 which are for the most part only information sites. No posting is
done to these sites, no dialogue, no interaction—just information is
obtained. This list is comprised of both Baha’i sites and other interest
group sites for information and publication and I have not included it
here.1 I have subtracted these 1000 sites from the total of all my sites
giving a working base of some 4000 sites at which to post, interact and
teach.

Each Baha’i who makes the effort to register and post at internet sites will
obviously do so on the basis of his or her own interests and capacities.
My list inevitably will not be another person’s list. But the following list
of sites will give anyone who is interested in posting Baha’i material and
what for them is ‘Baha’i related material’ an idea of the sites on which I
am ‘working.’ Feel free to write to me for more advice on how you might
take advantage of this immense teaching opportunity. -Ron Price, 1
March 2008.

___________________________FOOTNOTES____________________

1 There are several lists of sites now which taken together come to over
five thousand sites. Some are Baha’i information sites and some useful
sites for posting Baha’i related material. I have not included them all
here; they are available to anyone who is interested. I have included
here(above and below) a total of some 110 pages of A-4 size(font 14)
material.

2 Given the range and extent of the internet sites I have posted at; and
given the limitations of time and energy, the presence of the Baha’i Faith
at most of these sites is still (a) embryonic, (b) slight and (c) requires
much more development/interaction/postings to be noticeable or
significant in any quantifiable sense. To put it another way, the Baha’i
presence at these sites is still coming out of obscurity. But, for the most
part, the history of these sites is coextensive with my own involvement.
The years 2000/2001 and after were, in many ways, beginning years for
many, if not most, of the sites. I am pleased that I was able to get
involved in these foundation years.

3.17 THE BAHÁ'Í FAITH AND THE ARTS

VOL. 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2.1(Volumes 1 and 2):

These five arch-lever files had their origins decades ago, but it was not
until the formation of a Working Group for the development of the Arts in
the Australian Bahá'í Community in 2003 that these particular files came
into existence. Now in 2008 after five years, these resources have their
present form as set out in their respective Tables of Contents.
Volume 1.1 deals with film sites; volume 1.2 with general Baha’i sites.
Volume 2 consists of section 2.1 contains material from Mark Foster’s
Site. Volume 2.2.1(Volumes 1 and 2) has resources from the
Jollyroger.com site. Volume 2 is not concerned explicitly with the Arts in
Australia. There is a broad relevance of Jolly Roger and Mark Foster to
the Arts as I see them and work with them on the Internet. It was this that
inclined me to include them here under the head: The Baha’i Faith and
The Arts.--28 February 2008.

A.1 WORDS TO TYPE INTO SEARCH ENGINES eg….GOOGLE-


ETC.

TO GET ITEMS OF MY WRITING BY TOPIC:

1. Type my name Ron Price(with or without a space between the names)


followed by any of the following subjects/topics/words.

2. The following code indicates the frequency with which the topic has
listed item/posts that I wrote.(Excellent:E;Very Good:VG; Good/Fair:G;
Average:A; Poor:P; No use:N)

Journal-P Universal House of Justice-G Buddhism-P


Diary-F The Báb-G
Hinduism-GLiterature-G Bahá’u’lláh-G
List of writers in the classical-G tradition-F Poetry-g/E
Shoghi Effendi-G List of philosophers-F/G
History-F Abdu’l-Baha-G
astronomy-F Ancient history-F epochs-E
interviews(P) society-G Sociology-F education-other RPs
democracy(P) Psychology-F Politics-P schools-other RPS
cinema(F) Anthropology-P teaching-G/F Geography-P health-
F TV(F) Bahá’í-G/E
mental health-N radio(F)
Religion-G/E bipolar(+bipolar disorder=F)(depression=F)
mental health-G

Philosophy-G/E lithium-F
George Town(E)

Media Studies-P writing-G


Christianity(F/G)

Pioneering-E creative writing-G


Australia(G)

Popular culture-P classical poetry-P Canada(F)

Thucydides-F essays-F
Belmont-F

Herodotus-F movies-F Virgil-P/F Great


Books-G

TV-F Letters-other RPs cinema-F/G Autobiography-G/E westerns-


PBiography-G Plutarch-P Social Studies-F Islam-FWar-P
Jolly Roger-G Toynbee-F/g Launceston-GGibbon-F/G
Zeehan-G Shakespeare-F/G Ballarat-G

Dickinson-F/G Melbourne-F Wordsworth-f/G


Katherine-F Radio-FEpic-F/P South Headland-FNarrative-F/G
Perth-F Pioneering Over Burlington-F Four Epochs-G/E
Windsor-F

There are also many writers, thinkers and people with other skills and
under other topic areas as well as many other subjects one could add here,
too many to list. Here are a few more:

Food sub-topics in history and many of the humanities and


social sciences

gardenssport: baseball, hockey, golf, etc. teens aged (PTO)


____________________

A.2 SOME SPECIAL TOPIC-SUB-SECTIONS

ON THE INTERNET with extensive listings:

RonPrice....................................500 sub-sites in the first 600 sub-sites

pioneering over four epochs…..200 sub-sites in the first 250 sub-sites

Pioneering Ron Price………….200 sub-sites and then slow fade out

Bahá’í Ron Price………………300 sub-sites and then fade out

Poetry Ron Price………………dozens of sites

Literature Network......................80 poems

Literature Ron Price....................many sites

Great Books&Literature Forums.80 poems

Baha’i Library Online.................100s of poems; dozens of sites.

Jolly Roger Great Books.Forums..80 poems

A.3 Total List #5: 1350. I have selected 1000 as a working base for list #5
to bring the grand total of all my lists/sites to a total of 5000. I find it
difficult to come to an accurate number/total for lists #4 & #5. My guess
is that list #5 could be anywhere from 1000 to 15,000 or even many
more.

_____________________

Total Sites: Lists #1-4-=4650-update 1/10/08;

Total List #5: 1350(less 1000-info only sites)

Grand Total: 5000(updated: 1/10/08 to 5000-6000 a guesstimation)


There are dozens of other topics I could add here. The list of internet sites
in Section B of this report could all be added here. The site listed in
section B, if preceded by my name and typed into the search engine
search box, should enable the reader to locate my material. This is not
always the case since internet sites have a certain dynamism; that is, they
change their content, their layout frequently and it is often difficult to
locate my material unless you are highly specific in your request.

Generally, though, there is enough information provided here for anyone


to access many of my postings/writing to assess its relevance, its
suitability, its quality, its role as a teaching tool which is, of course, its
main purpose. The above lists provide a broad and sufficiently detailed
outline for anyone to draw on, for anyone to extend to topics of personal
interest by inserting some other topic/name and evaluate my activity on
the internet, if desired and for anyone to get some wide-angled view of
just what I do on the Internet.

INTERNET POSTINGS NOT EXPRESSED ON THE ABOVE LISTS

A SUMMARY OF RON PRICE’S INTERNET PUBLISHING

“HIS CUP OF PUBLISHING TEA”

I have outlined below several categories of my writing, my writing


projects of varying sizes, genres and subjects on the internet. You can
gradually get into whatever categories of my work you desire, if at any
time you do in fact desire, over the next few days, weeks, months, years
or decades. Most of the following items went onto the internet in the
period 2001-2008. Most of it is free of any cost, although some of the
self-publishing material costs anywhere from $3 to $20. There are three
general categories of printed matter I have placed on the world wide web.
These categories are:
1. Books:

1.1. The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The


Poetry of Roger White. This 400 page ebook is available at Juxta
Publishing Limited and can be downloaded free of charge.

1.2. A paperback edition of the above book is available at Lulu.com for


$11.48 plus shipping costs from the USA. This self-publishing site also
has a four volume work, a study in autobiography, entitled Pioneering
Over Four Epochs which is 2500 pages long(four 600+ page volumes). I
will be making it available as an ebook and in paperback for $10 to $20
per volume very soon after it is reviewed/approved by the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Australia, Inc. The cost of these
books is set by Lulu.com.

2. Internet Site Postings:

Essays, poems, parts of my autobiography and a wide variety of


postings/writings in smaller, more manageable, chunks of a paragraph to
a few pages are all free and can be accessed by simply: (a) going to any
one of approximately 5000 sites or (b) typing some specific words into
the Google search engine as indicated in the following:

2.1 Approximately 5000 Sites:

I post at a wide range of poetry, literature, social science and humanities


sites across a diverse mix of subjects, topics and intellectual disciplines in
both popular and academic culture. The list of these sites is available to
anyone interested by writing to me at: ronprice9@gmail.com. But a sim
pler method for readers to access many of my postings would be to:
2.2 Type Sets of Words At Google:

There are literally hundreds of sets of words now that will access my
writing at various sites. If you type, for example, Ron Price, followed by
any one of the following words or word sequences: (i) poetry, (ii)
literature, (iii) religion, (iv) Baha’i, (v) history, (vi) Shakespeare, (vii)
ancient history, (viii) philosophy, (ix) Islam, (x) Australia Bahai and (xi)
pioneering over four epochs, et cetera, et cetera, you will get anywhere
from a few sites to over 150 sites arranged in blocks of ten internet
locations. This last site, “pioneering over four epochs”, is a particularly
fertile set of words to type into the google search engine.

The main problem with this latter way of accessing what I have written is
that my work is side by side with the items of other writers and posters
who have the same name as mine and/or the same topic. I have counted a
dozen other Ron Prices and I'm sure there are more. You may find their
work more interesting than mine! There are some wife bashers, car
salesmen, evangelists, media celebrities, a pornographer or two, indeed, a
fascinating array of chaps who have different things to sell and advertise
than my offerings.

3. Specific Sites With Much Material:

Some sites have hundreds of pages of my writing and these sites are a
sort of middle ground, a different ground, between the two major
categories I have outlined above. The Baha’i Academics Resource
Library(BARL) for example, has more of my material than at any other
site. My writings are listed there under: (a) books, (b) personal letters, (c)
poetry, (d) biographies and (e) essays, among other categories/listings.
The Roger White book is at BARL under “Secondary Resource
Material>Books>Item #114.” I find this site useful personally, but some
of the poetry is not arranged in a visually pleasing form. Some readers
may find the layout annoying.
There are some sites at which my writing is found in a very pleasing form
with photos and pictures and general settings to catch the eye. Some site
organizers have their location beautifully arranged. I leave it to readers to
read what pleases them and leave out what doesn’t. When one posts as
much as I do one often writes too much, says the wrong things or upsets
an applecart or two. It's part of the process. In cyberspace, as in the real
world, you can't win them all. The pioneering over four epochs word
sequence is, as I’ve said, a useful word package to access some 150 sites
with my writing and has no competition from other ‘Ron Prices.’

Concluding Comments:

I had no idea when I retired from full-time employment in 1999 to write


full-time that the internet would be as useful a system, a resource, a base,
for my offerings as it has become. There are literally millions of words
now on this international web of words that I have written in the last
seven years(2001-2008). From the early eighties to the early years of this
new millennium(1981-2001) I tried to get my writing published in a
hard/soft cover and to get some coverage for the Cause or my own
writings, but with little success. My guess is that in the years ahead the
world will be awash with books and various genres of printed matter
from millions of people like me posting various quantities of their
writing. This is becoming obvious to anyone who examines the internet
seriously even now.

What I write may not be your cup-of-tea. In that case drink someone
else’s tea from someone else’s cup. There is something for everyone these
days in both hard and soft cover and on the intertnet. If you don’t like my
work or someone else’s go to sources of printed matter you like. One
hardly needs to say this, but I do not expect what I write to be everyone’s
cup-of-tea.

For those who already do or may come to enjoy my writings, I hope the
above is a useful outline/overview. For those who don't find what I write
attractive to their taste, as I say, the above will give you a simple handle
to avoid as you travel the net. I wish you all well in your own endeavours
in the path of writing or whatever path your travel down.

Ron Price

Last Updated

.....10/9/’08

_______________________

That's All Folks!

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