RonPrice

This will be news to the vast majority of people at this site who have never read his lecture. He gave it in 1976 for his prize in literature. What I have done here is comment on his lecture. It is very interesting.
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THE DEAD THE LIVING AND THE YET UNBORN

“I was a very contrary undergraduate more than 40 years ago. It was my habit to register for a course and then to do most of my reading in another field of study.” Such was the opening sentence of American writer Saul Bellow’s Nobel Lecture in December 1976. At the time I had been living in Ballarat Australia for nine months and lecturing in the Social Sciences at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education. I knew very little, if anything, about Saul Bellow. But I could write that opening sentence of Bellow’s now; these words of Bellow’s could very well apply to me. For in my 4 undergraduate years at university, 1963-1967, I often found myself reading in other fields of study than in those I was enrolled. Indeed, I often think it was a miracle I ever passed into post-graduate work and the field of employment. My contrary reading habits, my bi-polar illness, my sexual frustrations, the death of my father, the sadness of my mother, the distractions due to my enthusiasms for and activities in the Baha’i community and the eccentricities associated with my laziness, mood swings and general immaturity---like driving a car without brakes, eating chilli-con-carne four times a week and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day--all militated against my academic success. But, in the end, I got two ‘B’s(67%) and two ‘C’s(59%) in my 4 undergraduate years. In September 1967 I proceeded to try and teach Eskimos, an eccentric activity at the time, if there ever was one.--Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, February 8th 2006.

I appeal, like Conrad, to that part of us
which is a gift, not an acquisition,
to our capacity for delight and wonder,
our sense of pity and pain,
to the latent feeling of fellowship
with all creation, to the subtle but
invincible conviction of solidarity
that knits together the loneliness
of innumerable hearts and binds
together all humanity---the dead,
the living and the yet to be born.1


1 These ideas of Joseph Conrad, quoted by Bellow, were written in the 1890s just after the passing of Baha’u’llah. And I, like Bellow, offer them with a few grains of additional comment. Bellow said he felt no need in 1976 to sprinkle Conrad's words with any skeptical salt. Nor do I. Individuals, many argue, have been wiped out in the 20th century. The early 21st century which we have inherited is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise and fall of certain men of certain families, or heroic individuals.
While I agree that institutions are crucial to our survival, I think the individual has not been lost in the woodpile.

Characters, Bellow emphasized, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. I am not a novelist and I can only create characters in my poetry. I have found many in the Baha’i community because I have got to know many in lounge rooms, over cups of tea and in endless discussions with individuals and in groups. Indeed, talking and listening to my fellow Baha’is and my students and fellow students over 50 years, 1955 to 2005, wore me out, burnt me out. Bellow says that finding such individuals is not easy. I did not find it so. It was for me too easy and it resulted in a excess of speech. Although I did find, as Bellow states, that the condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. I agree with him that we are in an early stage of universal history. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of a new state of consciousness. This new state is partly defined by the Baha’i teachings as: the oneness of humankind.

The ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin in his book on the Church compares the modern American to Michelangelo's sculpture, The Captive. He sees "an unfinished struggle to emerge whole" from a block of matter. The American "captive" is beset in his struggle by "interpretations, admonitions, forewarnings and descriptions of himself by the self-appointed prophets, priests, judges and prefabricators of his travail," says Martin. For to emerge whole is to experience that oneness.

What is at the center now? At the moment, neither art nor science but humankind determining, in confusion and obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species, everybody, has gotten into the act. At such a time it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift. We must hunt for that under the wreckage of many systems. The failure of those systems may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from an over-defined and misleading consciousness.

No one who has spent years in the writing of novels like Bellow has can be unaware of this. The novel can't be compared to the epic, or to the monuments of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now, says Bellow. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice. What Conrad said was true: art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential. This is equally true of my poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1976.

Criticism is a necessary
corrective to self-inflation;
to be ignored, however
undesireable, helps to keep
the ego in bounds. I write
out of a sense of obligation
which compels me to pen
words as the lightening flashes
and I laugh at my coursings over
two continents, aware of my fancies
and illusions, my endless analysing. –Ron Price, February 8th 2006.