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.

RonPrice

I like to think that, as the evening hours of my life close in toward night that the "invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts" which Bellow spoke of in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976 and "which binds together all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unborn" will increasingly find its apotheosis in the Faith that has been in my life for more than half a century, if I include the first decade of my association with it(1953-1963) when it was on the periphery of my life. For most of the twentieth century these noble-sounding words about solidarity which came from Joseph Conrad were measured against the millions of dead and, when uttered in our time, it was with a grain of skeptical salt.

In the Baha'i community and in my own life, this salt has certainly not lost its savour even if on occasion some of us seem "called by sorrow and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness." Sometimes, though, there is an "inevitable isolation and disillusionment" that "a really strong mind" experiences, like that of Shoghi Effendi. Perhaps it is, as Henry Adams once observed, something that happens to a mind "that combines force with elevation." Perhaps it is, as Adams concluded, built into "the romance and tragedy of statesmanship." Certainly for me, Shoghi Effendi combined both romance and tragedy; so, too did my own dear life. And the ideas which have captured centre-stage in this narrative will go on to fill the stage and to fill the stage long after I am gone for the future of humanity is deeply linked with these ideas. They have occupied me over several epochs.

About a year ago I read an article by George McLean called "The Call of Abraham." Shortly after reading the article I wrote the following essay about my pioneering venture and autobiography. McLean's article seemed to provide an entry point into the big picture of my life. What I am trying to do, among other things, in this article is to combine notions of the past with the exigencies of the present and produce, in the process, a design for living. Not that the Baha’i Faith needs any more designs, but we each have to work out our own design, our pattern within the great one, the great Plan, within which we live and work.

History, for me then, is a continuum out of which I emerge and to which I belong. A series of intricate and unbreakable strings which bind me to that history and to all others, especially those people whom I influence and who influence me. Writing my autobiography has been somewhat like playing those strings in as coherent and harmonious a fashion as possible and creating, while I write, a series of symphonies. It is like creating, too, one great variegated portrait, not so much by invention as many novelists do, but by analysis and synthesis, by giving substance and congruence to perception and experience, a substance and congruence my life would not otherwise possess. I try to see my life, my religion and my society steadily and whole; I try to fulfill the demand made on me by the historical context within which I find myself. It is a demand made largely by some inner tension, some inner need. I do this by examining the landscapes running through my life, my times and my religion and giving them a unity and a sense of relevant connection though various strategies of imaginative reference and revision.

There are still, after all this analysis and synthesis, ends left hanging loose and stories only partly told. There is in this large exercise a sense of vocation that William Faulkner called a “quest for failure” because, no matter how much I find the right sentence which crystallizes an experience there is, in the end, a futility to this self-imposed task. Through the agency of one’s prose and poetry one’s own particular sense of life can be externalized. But there is so much in life that "can not satisfy nor appease the hunger,” as Baha’u’llah once wrote. Futility is something that this voyage often reveals, but it is a futility worth facing. Now.....to that essay.........
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A PRIMORDIAL PERSPECTIVE ON PIONEERING
(Dedicated to Saul Bellow and Apologies)
(to those who do not like long posts on internet sites)
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The call of Abraham and of his subsequent pilgrimage has become part of the primordial journey of the Jewish people. "It is part, too, of that theophany, that appearance of God to man, that has been sedimented in narrative" writes George McLean and has become part of that biblical "primordium around which a people" has been shaped. This primordium, Peachey says, needs interpretation and application in the changing circumstances of time and place, our time and place. And that is what I am doing here.

Having embraced a new theophany and become a part of a new Faith community which claims descent from this original Abrahamic experience, I am in possession of a new tradition, now only a century and a half old, which possesses a richness of detail that was scarcely perceptible in that original primordium, but which has been enacted again in the life of Baha'u'llah. This new narrative, not unlike Abraham's, is of immense value to the international pioneer in the Baha'i community.

Contemporary religious practitioners usually have little direct engagement with that seminal Abrahamic-primordium of about 2000 BC. Tradition and its institutional configurations overshadow this ancient narrative. They are rarely animated by it. But, for me, in the Baha'i community, Abraham's story has found eschatological and apocalyptic significance in what you might call a contemporary rerun. In this globalizing, individualizing, pluralising world, a prophet, a manifestation of God, has been forced, not called, out of his country, taking his kindred with him on the journey. I find in my life and in 'pioneering over four epochs,' that the narrative of Baha'u'llah's exile, his journey-narrative, is one I can shape as I become more familiar with it and as it shapes me. The notion of exile has been widely appropriated in autobiography to express a distinctively modern sense of alienation and metaphysical homelessness. While there has been an element of exile, in my own journey, the language has been much more that of ‘homefront pioneering,’‘international pioneering,’ making my home elsewhere or, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes creating “a home where home did not exist before.” Inevitably, too, there are a multitude of dimensions to this experience that this account deals with in its multiform ways. And the writing process itself transforms, helps heal feelings of disruption, helps create a spirit of recuperation, reconnection, even intellectual transcendence. Indeed, it helps me to face and integrate the psychic rupture occasioned by so much of the various forms of violent uprooting that have taken place in my life and knits together the joys and sorrows of the whole experience, making me a quite conscious witness to history.


"Learning the existing story, its language and its logic," says Peachey, "enables individuals to experience on their own in the terms of that story or to use it as a foundation for new and expanded experience.” Learning the story is like learning a language. Learning and becoming a part of a religious tradition is also like learning a language. Learning this language is essential if one is to function within that religion's parameters. The story of Abraham is the beginning, the first chapter, of the Israelite narrative; the story of Baha'u'llah is the end, the last chapter, of this same narrative extended into our time, our age.

From the father, the first patriarch, the birth, of the Hebrew people about 4000 years ago right up to today in the person of Baha'u'llah, this pattern of leaving one's country and going to another land is, in some ways, the basic myth, model, metaphor, for the international pioneer. The Baha'i pioneer goes and makes his home "to develop the society God calls" Baha'u'llah's followers to build. "I will make of you a great nation,” God says to His people in The Bible. The pioneer is also in the same position, only he is at the beginning of a global, a planetary, system, a world Order, that he is helping to establish. This is the core of the pioneer's service to humanity. God will train both the pioneer and the Baha'is, it would appear, following the metaphor right back to Abraham, in a series of sacred-historical events different from, but similar in other ways to, the great literary-metaphorical history that is the Bible. Abraham's leap of faith is ours, too, as we walk into history.

Baha'u'llah's exile over forty years took place only once, as did Abraham's journey, but each inaugurated the history of a divine-human relationship which will go on unfolding for centuries, millennia to come. Just as Abraham had little comprehension of the nature of his call or of his destiny at the beginning, so,too, are we in a similar position, although we do have some glimmering of the future given to us in the Baha'i writings. At the very start of the building of this World Order of Baha'u'llah, it is difficult to fathom the process, the reality, the meaning. The narrative takes unexpected turns; uncertainty enters in from time to time. Faith is at our core as it was for Abraham.

But history, for the Jewish people, and for the Baha'is, is seen as an extended course of instruction filled with lessons and tests by which God seeks to educate us for our redemptive work. In this narrative is found the meaning and purpose of our lives. To help establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Just as Abraham went from his country, kindred and father's house so does the international pioneer, launched on a mission to other people, to all people, wherever he goes. The journey has gone on in our own time in the life of Baha'u'llah. That great journey of the Abrahamic peoples is the paradigmatic, the metaphorical, vehicle, that the pioneer takes on board as he becomes a part of a wondrous tradition that weaves its way through the holy scriptures of four of the world's religions. For the pioneer's story is the story he will find there in that holy writ. Therein will he find his life's meaning and purpose.

Back in 1974, while teaching at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, I came across the writings of a specialist in the history of childhood, Lloyd deMause. I always found deMause provocative. I include here a short essay I wrote on deMause and his ideas because of the relevance of deMause's ideas to the life of the pioneer and to this autobiography.

SOME 'PSYCHOHISTORY PERSPECTIVES' ON THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In trying to understand my life and especially my pioneering life over these four epochs a book like Lloyd deMause's The Emotional Life of Nations, particularly his chapter four, is a helpful one. It places the importance of understanding emotions, individual motivation, interpersonal relationships within the family and child-rearing practices at the very centre of any attempt to understand self and society. Indeed, deMause's philosophy of history places these factors right at the centre of any genuine understanding we might achieve of history. Not economics as Marx would have it, not religion or bureaucracy as Weber would have emphasized, not sex as was Freud’s focus, but an intimate and personal domain within the family is where we must go if we want to understand history and ourselves. While not wanting to abandon the family, as Plato does to a significant extent; while appreciating its central role in society, I am aware that the narrow privacy, the tawdry secrets, its conflicts and its discontents but, most importantly, its tendency to become people's world in toto, seem to keep so many from ever developing a wider loyalty beyond the micro-world into which people are born.

Cultural determinism, deMause argues, can account for only some of our behaviour and our life. "The environment," "the culture," being the pervasive, all-embracing, entities that they are, I can keep pretty busy analysing this complex explanatory matrix and how my life is a bi-product of it. But this matrix does not cover the whole story. Indeed, inner meanings and motivations, relationships and parenting, must be seen as a crucial, if not 'the' crucial, focus of causation in your life and mine, particularly insofar as autobiography is concerned. This is the certain and central core of any attempt to secure a real and illuminating autobiography, as far as the DeMause thesis is concerned. It is not my intention here to go into detail on these aspects of my early life. Hopefully, I will do so at a future time.

I will examine, too, in more detail my relationship with my father, my mother, my grandfather, my extended family, specific friends and the Baha'i community which gradually became an important part of my psycho-social life from the age of nine onwards. In the process it may be that my autobiography and those of others, other minor figures like myself, will tell future historians more about our times than the lives of major historical figures. These common and familiar aspects of my experience can serve as a helpful entry-point for any study of the fine structure of Baha'i experience, as a source of primary materials for any attempt to integrate the intellectual and the institutional narrative, the personal and the community aspects of this emerging world religion. But no matter how extraordinary or how ordinary individuals like me turn out to be, they all have mothers and fathers, extended families, interests and activities and they appear to enter into history in much the same way, pulsing with the most ordinary needs, drives, and passions. How useful, then, a detailed description of these aspects of my life may be to those now living or in the generations ahead is, it seems to me, questionable at best. There has been an explosion in histories of the family in the last decades and I’m not sure I want to add one more study to the pile.

The field of developmental psychology suggests strongly that there is more to an explanation of human behaviour than simply self-interest or idealism. There are many powerful human feelings other than greed and devotion to a Cause that shape our lives and we must explore these feelings if we are to explain our lives to any significant extent. I feel that my autobiography has only partially dealt with these factors, thusfar. Perhaps society is the flawed product of both an evolving and flawed psyche and the evolving and flawed units of social organization in which we are all enmeshed. Certainly an examination of my early days will, must, deal with these flaws.

I have just reread my notes on motivation and attitudes from a psychology course I taught in Perth in the early 1990s. I could very well examine, say, each of the dozen major theories of motivation summarized there and see how they apply to my own life. It seems to me, following deMause, that it would be useful to understand the psychological origins of my behaviour and specifically the content and psychodynamics of my negative memories. It is difficult to unwind the attitudes, beliefs, values, motivations, negative memories and see my life in a developmental perspective, one that is psychosexual and/or psychosocial. The exercise is, to say the least, complex. I have examined this theme to some extent elsewhere, both on my website and in this autobiographical account focusing as I have on Erik Erikson and his model of human development.

DeMause argues that the sense of 'self and other' is one of the most creative achievements of humankind over the last several thousand or hundreds of thousands of years. It has taken humankind millennia to accomplish this sense of self, this sense of identity. From a Baha'i perspective this internal, this ego, this 'self-sense' must also include a sense of the physical environment, the human environment and the environment of unknowns dealt with by religion and philosophy among a range of humanities and social sciences. This sense of self is acquired through the actualizing of potentials, an actualizing that occurs through the acquisition of competencies in several areas: psycho-motor, perceptual, cognitive, affective and volitional.

I should go on to say that, underpinning this sense of self, is a philosophy that Jordan and Streets call "a philosophy of organism." Creativity guided by purpose and expressed by two fundamental capacities "to know and to love" is the basis of this philosophy. This is part of the rationalization of the vision that is at the core of the Baha'i teachings. The integration of knowledge and belief and the transformation of experience into attitude is also taking place here within the framework of this philosophy. These are all part of the underpinnings of my philosophy, a philosophy which tries to give "logic and coherence to what"1 I see and do and helps provide the rationale and standards of explanation for what I see that counts in my world. It is my world view, my Weltanschauung.

One of the obligations of the storyteller, the bard, the poet, is to tell his own story, tell who he is and tell it intelligibly. He has to share his own story, his interests, his perspectives, his needs, his loyalties, his beliefs, his loves, his frustrations. For all he has is his story. Some writers tell their story through novels or short stories; some through poetry. In addition to this narrative, I write what is openly autobiographical poetry. This is how I tell my story. I would not bother to write if all I was doing was providing sophisticated entertainment, but what I am doing is many-fold: clarifying a commitment, capturing an inward, private world for public consumption, probing the mystery of artistic creation, explaining me to myself, expressing human life at a deeper, more intense, clearer-sighted way than I ever could in my daily life, recounting a lifelong spiritual pilgrimage, inducing change, explaining the turning points in my life and in life and trying to arrive at a just characterization. People can find out much more deeply in my works what, for the most part, they could never find out from me in real life.

The titles of each of my booklets of poetry, over sixty now, are drawn from recent experience in the Baha’i community often in connection with the Mt. Carmel Project. What is happening on Mt. Carmel, I often feel, is very much something that is happening to me. For community, shared community, is largely and most intimately experienced alone, no matter how much of the experience is shared in group interaction. In this poetry the reader will see how I people my solitude, how I am alone in a crowd and how I achieve that degree of virtue proportional to what I am worthy—always an unknown quantity--but one can try to take account, guesstimate where one is at. The writing of autobiography is one way of doing that guessing, taking that account. I must be resigned, indeed we all must be, to the possible and fearful disclosure that indeed in time, even in my last breaths, I might take the wrong spiritual turn thus making a life, my life, replete as it has been in many ways with victories, swallowed by defeat. This is a sad note to end on but there is no more room; site posts here are limitied to 20000 words

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married and a teacher for 35 years -and a Baha'i for 48.

dusio

Very well said...

dusio

I've just found some of your poems...I really do like "Yellow Leaves"...and the other too...

Stiv

Have you heard about young scientist from Serbia who invented a cure for Parkinson's disease?

I was impresed when I read that... His is 16 years old,and he invendet something that is huge for medicine and for science as well..
I admire him...
If someone has some information about him,let me know...

His name is Milos Vujic.

brali