04Philosophy

4. PHILOSOPHY/ SOCIOLOGY/ PSYCHOLOGY

In time these three subjects, indeed each of the social sciences and humanities which I feel some level of confidence to discuss, as a non-specialist, will have their own special section on this website. These are disciplines which captured my interest as an adolescent and in the years of my early adulthood(20-40) and the interest remained. Although my knowledge deeepened in these fields in my middle and late adulthood, helped along by teaching them in technical and further education colleges as well as colleges of advance deducaton and, for a short time, in two universities, I always remained far, far from any sense of having attained to what one might call a reasonable degree of "comprehensive knowledge" in any of these fields. They became fields that burgeoned in this New Age, in my time and before and even if one sat around reading from dawn to dusk one could never achieve that cmprehensive knowledge in just one of the fields. And so, this particular section will serve as a bit of a catch-all, at least for these three disciplines.

At the core of any of my understandings in philosophy, sociology, psychology and the social sciences and humanities in general, is a life of activity in the Baha’i Administrative Order. As the Universal House of Justice expressed it in a letter to the American Baha’is in 1988 about freedom and authority in the Baha’i community, this Order provides the very "structure of freedom for our Age," albeit for a still small section of humanity, about one in one thousand. At the core of my understandings of these disciplines is also a lifetime--some forty years--of work as a teacher and an extensive personal reading program: 1957 to 2007.

Here are some prose-poems very broadly related to social science perspectives and some of my understandings of the Baha'i Faith in relation to these perspectives.

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THE RECIPIENT

Since first coming in contact with the Baha'i Faith in 1953 I have seen much that was impressive and much that brought delight, as well as a long list of weaknesses and shortcomings, in its adherents. I have come to experience them as a fascinating mixture of humanity. This, of course, is true both of those I have known in this Cause and out. I have seen a certain charm and genius in her beautiful and commodious temples and administrative buildings around the world; I have enjoyed the hospitality and human contact with many of her believers in their homes across two continents; I have come to enrich my life through reading the literature of this Faith and appreciating its beauty and wisdom. In the process I travelled across wide rivers, seas and oceans, enjoyed fertile fields, boundless forests and mountains, and experienced the pleasures of many of the world's cities and towns. But not until I ceased to look at the words and deeds of my fellow mortals as a standard for the true understanding of the nature of God and of ultimate reality; not until I began to see the metaphorical nature of spiritual and physical reality, did I even begin to acquire a sense of certitude, a sense of a home, a home that was not always comfortable, for my doubts, my questions and my ponderings on the enigmas and pardoxes of life. I felt, as I approached the age of sixty and the years of my late adulthood(60 to 80), after more than half a century of an association with a Movement that claimed to be the newest of the great religions of history, that I had, indeed, become the recipient of a "grace that is infinite and unseen."¹Was it an unmerited grace that I felt, that was the source of these inner feelings and thoughts? I suppose it was many things; it was certainly a mysterious, a wondrous, process. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 8 October 2002; and ¹Baha'u'llah, The Book of Certitude, Wilmette, 1950, p.3.

Was it grace that brought years of success

and a power beyond anything I had known?

Was it grace that brought more anxiety and

pain than I had thought life could ever give?

Was it grace, infinite and unseen, that brought

these effulgent glories and that will take me,

one day, to the abode of an immortality that

is so utterly mysterious and that, all being well,

will flood my heart with light and will refresh my

spirit with musk-scented winds from that Realm?

Ron Price

7 October 2002

PRIVILEGED POINT

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes that "the point of gravity in spatial organization has been shifted from the question 'Who?' to the question 'From what point in space?'…There must be or should be, therefore, a certain privileged point from which the best perception can be attained…..the best mean(ing)…..supra-personal…capable of accomplishing the miracle, of rising above, and overcoming, its own endemic relativity."¹ Bauman's words reminded me of Canadian sociologist Hoonaard's closing two sentences in his history of the Baha'i community of Canada. He wrote that we need to see new religious movements from an international perspective not from the point of view of their local strength.² -Ron Price with thanks to ¹Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 32 and Will van den Hoonaard, The Origins of the Baha'i Community of Canada, 1898-1948, Wilfred Laurier Press, 1996, p.296.

The artistry of God beginning with holy dust

at the centre of nine concentric circles,

supra-personal, intimately spiritual,

holy-of-holies, awe-inspiring and yet,

paradoxically, with immense obscurity,

complexity, paralysis, tyranny and anarchy.

Freshness of vitality, coherence of understanding,

dynamic links, a change of time, a new state of mind,

the earth astir with deeper penetration, greater synchronizing,

crystallized sharing of a divinely driven enterprize and this Bread of Life.

Ron Price

14 September 2002

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THE LOUDEST PLACE

The nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Shopenhauer thought that the experience of the sublime could be obtained only at times of contemplation when the will was made to stand still and be quiet. Since so many millions are not capable of achieving the sublime in this way and need some kind of "stimulation" or "activity," civilization results in heightened barbarism. Some thinkers thought this tendency to barbarism and its violence could be countered by heightened sympathy and love. Perhaps this dichotomy is part of the basis for what Shoghi Effendi calls the integrating and disintegrating forces of our age. I'm not sure. Certainly the question of social control or social order is the primary problem presented to the social sciences by society for solution. The 'answer' to this issue, for Shopenhauer among others, can be found in their total vision of the human being and in the sociological and psychological, the distinctive and compelling, landscapes they create. -Ron Price with thanks to Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Barbarian Temperament: Toward a Postmodern Critical Theory, Routledge, London, 1993.

This poetry creates a landscape

viewed at distance or close hand.

I wonder if my soul is here amidst

these words like sand they stand.

Belief creates a river and a mountain range,

viewed at distance their size is small, but close

they're rich, mysteriously deep and wondrously tall.

The days of life add up to make a painting or a book

and their loudest place I fill in the cellars of my soul

where they still take their toll, though long licensed....

to be still.

Ron Price

21 September 2002

THE HEALING ROAD

I first came across the ideas of sociologist Emile Durkheim while studying sociology at university from 1963 to 1967. Many of his ideas I have always thought were relevant to a Baha'i perspective. One thing he wrote certainly reflects my experience of intellectual, artistic and literary pursuits, what 'Abdu'l-Baha called "learning and the cultural attainments of the mind." Just as Baha'i administration was taking its first form under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi in the 1920s, Durkheim wrote that "the love of art, the predilection for artistic joys, is accompanied by a certain aptitude for getting outside ourselves, a certain detachment or disinterestedness….We lose sight of our surroundings, our ordinary cares, our immediate interests. Indeed, this is the essence of the healing power of art. Art consoles us because it turns us away from ourselves."

After forty years of pioneering

I find here my peace and supper

as if after a long day's work. Yes,

Emile, this is its own reward, yes!

Just a simple artistry in these poems,

part of my search for the right idiom

and the best ways of meet life's lot.

I do not feel like Frost, stricken,

intensely conscious, suspicious of

my struggle. A healing came, to me,

at last, and all that gloom, obsession,

temper, rage, depression softened

with the years and easy sleep

without the pain dulled, at last,

life's sharp and ragged edges.

And my style could lighten, take an easier road

without that heat and the tortuous heavy load.

Ron Price

22 September 2002

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WHISKING AWAY

Without life's struggle and its sharp edges, there would often be no poetry. Paglia writes about this in her analysis of Emily Dickinson and her poetry. Dickinson's struggle, Paglia writes, is with God and with society.¹ The following poem takes the theme of struggle from Dickinson's poem number 928 and turns it into a product of my own experience, understanding and struggle. My poetry, without doubt, profits from the great disparity between the Baha'i ideals and practice both personal and community, on the one hand, and between the immense beauty and complexity of this religion I have been associated with for half a century and the discouragingly meagre response of my society. I have whisked this discouragement and disillusionment into abstract and not-so-abstract poetry. I whisk it, not into the frigid, godless universe that the great poet Wallace Stevens conceived it, nor into the empty and absurd one as Kafka defined it. I whisked these and other tensions of life into a form that Baha'is all around the world are creating--a new world Order. I try to sort it all out drawing on "new faculties"² created by the writings of Baha'i Scripture. While I do this whisking, I sometimes feel a great weight and a fatigue and sometimes feel a sense of wonder and awe. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Vintage Books, NY, 1991, p.653; and ² Horace Holley quoted in The Ocean of His Words, John Hatcher, Wilmette, 1997, p.3.

The heart sits quietly on the shore

just above the waves. Sometimes

it's calm; it does not stir.

There is a peace it saves.

It saves that peace for troubled times

when devastation hits the heart and then

one waits mysteriously for a divine power

to impart.¹With this aid one reconstructs

that place along the shore. To heal a heart

convulsed, is often like trying to win a war.

Often on one's journey long a tempest

violence heaves, demolishing all calm

walls like a pile of wind-blown leaves.

For divine power does not leave the soul

beyond turmoil; wind-blown leaves and

life's fatigue is part of soul's good soil.

^{1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Introduction.
Ron Price
24 February 2002
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SORTING THINGS OUT IN HOT SUMMERS
In the early years of my pioneering life, beginning perhaps as early as 1964 living in Hamilton Ontario at the far west end of Lake Ontario, until my second or third year in Ballarat Victoria in 1977-8, I read every book written by Eric Fromm. He was a theorist that brought other theories together: Freud, Adler, Horney, Marx. He was part humanist, part Marxist, part Freudian, a large part existentialist. I read at least seven of his books, perhaps more, during these years. I remember trying to connect the Baha’i teachings to the ideas of this eclectic, synthesizing psychologist who argued that, among other things, one’s identity and rootedness come from one’s religion, one’s development as a person comes from a religious framework and philosophy, one’s choices not one’s memories block one's development and the aim of one’s life is to live intensely. I read and reread this stimulating psychoanalyst. He seemed to be saying so many things that my religion espoused in different ways with different words; things like: the psyche adapts to the dominant sociopolitical structure of society; character is the result of our solution to and resolution of existential needs for survival, relatedness, expression and meaning, character shapes instincts; and we need hope as well as spiritual teachers. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August, 2001, Internet, 25 November 2001, pp. 1-16.

We have the inverse of Christianity here:
not the individual changing society,
but society changing the individual.
I knew he was on to something;
it was just too good to be true.

The messianic view of history was here;
many words about liberation, the paradox
was kept before our eyes: that we were
the most important thing in the universe
but powerlessness, humility was our reality
before that utterly Unknowable Essence.

There was a great split between
the ideal and the actual in life,
much of which we had to accept.
There was a dialogue with Fromm,
with the Central Figures of my Faith
for a dozen years in hot Canadian summers
and hotter Australian summers as I tried to
sort out the dynamics, the intellectual parameters,
the paradigmatic shifts and bases of a new religion
that was emerging slowly from its chrysalis, from its
obscurity into the glaring light of public recognition.
Ron Price
26 November 2001
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SOUND AND FURY
Some of the last writings of Erich Fromm were published in 1994 in a book The Art of Listening, some fourteen years after he died and nearly forty after I first read his writings. I came across this book just the other day and I gobbled it up. I'd always loved Erich Fromm. He'd been with me for most of my pioneering journey, but I had not read one of his books for twenty years, since the late 1970s with his To Have or To Be. The following poem is a reflection on some of Fromm's ideas in this new book. In particular, he tells me in his clear and easy prose, that I should not take an inordinate interest in myself. Interest in oneself, concentration on one's own problems, "should and must go together with an increasing enlargement and intensification of one's interest in life,"¹ in music, the arts, walking, the great ideas, the best of what has been written and thought. Only then do we come to form a set of directions, goals, values and convictions "which are not put in oneself by others."² For the general goal is to penetrate through the surface of life "to the roots of existence."³-Ron Price with thanks to Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening, Constable, London, 1994, ¹p.166, ²p.167 and ³p.171,
We all must overcome our narcissism;
we must struggle with it, understand it;
it's a lifelong task this battle with self,
the insistent self, He called it. And I'm
not talking about that affirmative, loving,
attitude towards oneself called self-love.

And one must recognize the non-experiences
that people, here, call parties¹where there is
no closeness, just a three-ring-circus, short
conversational concentrations, throw-away
one-liners, smiles and chuckles, endless edibles
and drinks, enough to float away on, leaving
your brain completely drained, a deep-emptiness,
as if you've been to a war, not of guns and swords,
but words, popping all over like those cap-guns
you used to buy as a kid which never made
anything happen, just a lot of strikes and sounds
signifying nothing at all to the last syllable of
recorded time—making our yesterdays just
lighted fools on the way to dusty, arid death.
^{1 Fromm describes this 'American habit'(ibid., p. 178), but it is found here in Australia and approached with the same enthusiasm.
Ron Price
8 December 2001

COLONIZATION OF MY LIFEWORLD
The sociologist, philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, the major writer, the inheritor of the mantle of the tradition of 'critical theory' in sociology, writes in a useful way for the poet, at least this poet. Habermas says that narrative makes it possible for people to create coherent scenarios, for groups and individuals to define themselves. I do this in my poetry and in my prose. There is, too, he writes, an emancipatory potential in social analysis. Much of my writing is social analysis. Habermas argues that our "lifeworld" is "colonized through rational, purposively organized, system imperatives." My lifeworld, as expressed in my poetry, is colonized by the system imperatives of my own life, my society and my religion. "The exercise of our ability to communicate," Habermas says, "is part of and constitutes our consciousness." I see my writing as a form of this "exercise of my ability." -Ron Price with thanks to Jurgen Habermas, "The Tasks of A Critical Theory," Notes from 'Sociology for Human Service Workers,' Ron Price, Thornlie Tafe, 1998.
The project of the Enlightenment:
to ground our world, our society,
in a secularized, non-metaphysical,
non-religious ethic--has failed.
Still, you¹ are trying, passionately,
in your massive corpus, your science
for a crisis, your sociology’s interpretive
schemata with your dialogue partners
all the way back to Marx, to overcome
this problem......so am I, passionately,
in my own massive corpus, my religion
for a crisis, my poetry par excellence,
my interpretive schemata, with my dialogue
partners going all the way back to Shaykh
Ahmad and the Bab, to overcome the crisis
of our times and set the foundation
for the Kingdom of God on earth.
^{1 Jurgen Habermas
Ron Price
19 October 2001
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LIFE-GIVING FACT
The philosopher Ayn Rand(1905-1982) had a conception of art that has some parallels to my view of poetry. Both of us see artistic expression, and hence poetry, as the concretization of the widest metaphysical abstractions and of our own particular philosophy; as broad brush strokes that assist in developing an integrated world view; as an exercise in contemplation; as an art form which depends not on the extent of our knowledge but on the means by which we acquire it; as a form whose value lies primarily in the process of cognitive integration it affords, as the mechanism, the means, for providing an integrated view of existence; as an art form whose sense of life is the product of philosophic conclusions; as an art which offers "life-giving fact" and "moments of metaphysical joy and of love for existence," which confirms our view of existence;" as something which satisfies the needs of our cognitive faculty; as an indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal; as an activity in which one can learn a great deal about life; as something that induces a sense of life through the work itself; as an act whose roots lie in the nature and requirements of our mind and in an objectification of our view of man and of existence. -Ron Price with thanks to Michelle Marder Kambi and Louis Torres, "Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand's Theory of Art," The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol.2 No.1, Fall 2000, pp.1-46.

Seeking a quiet place
and, then, a quieter place
for this profoundly satisfying
bit of philosophy made concrete,
point of sanity in an anarchic world.
With my broad and fine brush strokes
trying to bring it all together
in what you might call
cognitive integration,
with a sense of finding
life-giving-fact,
moments of metaphysical joy,
of love for existence,
satisfying my cultural sensibilities
and the requirements of my mind
defining that integrated world view
that I became associated with
insensibly in those years
when Lenny Bruce was writing
about how to talk dirty and influence people.¹}and the average American family
was consuming about 1000 cans
of food each year and new teflon pans.²
1 Bruce, a popular commedian of the time, published a book by this name in 1962.
^{2 Teflon pans went on sale in December 1960.

Ron Price
25 October 2001

THE CRITIQUE GOES ON

A 'critical theory' of society emerged in June 1844 with the Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx. Marx had been working on his Manuscripts in the months before and after the Bab's declaration to Mulla Husayn in May 1844. Critical theory lay dormant after 1848 until 1917. The term 'critical theory' was not coined, though, until 1930 by Max Horkheimer. The first systematic philosophy of history or social theory, the precursor to Marx's critical theory, was Hegel's. Put another way, "the methodological basis of the critical theory of society" is to be found in "the dialectical logic of George F. Hegel."¹ Hegel's first major works in philosophy were composed after Shaykh Ahmad had arrived in Iran to continue his work as a precursor of the Bab. Hegel died in 1831, five years after Shaykh Ahmad's passing.
The entire history of critical theory, one of modern sociology's major theoretical orientations, has, for me, an interesting comparison and contrast, an interesting juxtaposition, with the history of the Babi and Baha'i religions and their precursors -Ron Price with thanks to ¹R. George Kirkpatrick, George N. Katsiaficas, Mary Lou Emery, "Critical Theory and the Limits of Sociological Positivism," Transforming Sociology Series, Red Feather Institute, 1978, pp.1-21.
You¹ got a new lease on life
in the late teens,
say 1917 to 1921,
when George Lukacs' work
History and Class Consciousness,
was published and promulgated,
when the Frankfurt School
was born with its centre
at Columbia by 1934.

We, too, were articulating
our architectural ediface,
our institutional framework
in these years up to the mid-'30s,
not on a Marxian foundation
as it was with you, with your critique,
but on an ediface of some 75 years
of infallible, authoritative, guidance.

Yes, our world collapsed in the trenches.
Liberalism had proved useless
and socialism's death knell
would be wrung.²}When all hope seemed lost
in that decade of disillusionment,³}critical theory was born anew.

And we had found our
institutional form, then.
In time, you had your Habermas⁴}

and we had our House of Justice

to provide the context for the search,

the adequacy of perspective,

the blending and harmonizing

of salutary truths, the generation

of spiritual nerves and sinews,

tapping as they do

the roots of motivation

and the meaning of this Revelation.

^{1 Critical Theory
^{2 many sociologists have pointed out the end of socialism and liberalism, some say by the end of WWI, others by the end of WW2 and still others at various stages in the post-WWII period. Of course, there are many who still find hope in these 'isms. Perhaps what I say here is said in the booklet Baha'u'llah(p.1) a little differently: "a succession of ideological upheavals.....have exhausted themselves."
^{3 1930s
^{4 leading writer in 'critical theory.'

Ron Price
18 October 2001}}}}

THE DRAMA OF INVISIBILITY

In 1959, Alfred Ayer, the foremost advocate of logical positivism, published an anthology of essays written by bright men earlier in the century who had committed themselves to reconstructing philosophy uncontaminated by metaphysics. The book was called Logical Positivism. In the next three years several books were published demolishing the pretensions of positivism. Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions were two of these books. Philosophy swims in metaphysics like a fish swims in water. At the time, the years 1959 to 1962 being my first three as a Baha'i, I was beginning to swim in new metaphysical waters. I knew nothing of logical positivism or metaphysics, but I was clearly attracted to the poetry and the narrative I found in the Baha'i Faith. It was poetry and narrative that invited reflection on the nature of my culture and humanity itself. -Ron Price with thanks to Evan Cameron, "Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies," Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 21, No.2, pp.492-494; and Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1981.

The story was simply there,

like life itself:

international,

transhistorical,

transcultural---

not really a problem,

rather--a solution.

Helped me translate

knowing into telling,

took my life, what I'd done

and fashioned a form,

structures of meaning,

but slowly, faintly, like a star.

The story was translated

into my world in southern Ontario

by the lake on Seneca Street

where I played baseball

without fundamental damage

to me or the story.

And so it was that I began that drama,

only possible with those whom

you share a common history,

a drama of the invisibility

of interior experience,

the place where feelings lie hidden

and we have few words, if any,

for what happens inside us,

where we feel defeat

at the problem's enormity,

where we have trouble naming what we see. ....Ron Price 7 September 2001

SOME POEMS/MORE POEMS/AND YET---EVEN MORE POEMS

A RECREATION AND A RECKONING

Given the failure of humanity to respond to Baha’u’llah’s message or to respond only meagerly in Europe, North America and Australasia-those places where I have been involved in promulgating its teachings, I am inclined to agree, at least in part, with Wittgenstein who wrote in 1930 of "the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the previous century." Wittgenstein says his book is written to ‘the glory of God’, in order to have ‘a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings’ and to help people acquire ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections.’-Ron Price with thanks to Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p.301.

Nearly all your writing-and mine-

are private conversations with ourselves;

and that degeneration you spoke of

has continued apace these past seventy years

in the midst of a rebirth, a regeneration.

And so I write, too, to the glory of God

in the midst of a series of testing experiences

needed, apparently, to weld the world

into a single people.

I write of a recreation and a reckoning.

Ron Price

18 September 1999

WONDROUS LUSTRE: THE GESTALT

It’s been developing as a field of psychology along complex lines since Baha’u’llah passed away and His soul was able to "henceforth energize the whole earth to a degree unapproached at any stage in the course of its existence on this planet."¹The stress in this sub-field of psychology, this area of theory, is on: organic wholes, patterns, shapes, organizing perceptual patterns, the determining or causative nature of perception, perception’s central role in increasing awareness and hence energy and poetic insight, as far as this writer is concerned. Mental processes and organic wholes in Gestalt theory are seen as dynamic, structural units unique to each individual and much more than the sum of their parts. Complexity derives from differentiation not summation.-Ron Price with appreciation to Harry Helson, Collier’s Encyclopedia.Vol.11, pp.75-6; and ¹ Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.244.

The centre, here, of this perceptual whole,

is partly known and partly unknown,

the one out there in the holy seat, the Word

and a thousand perspectives, on a thousand

issues; and the other inside, as mysterious as God,

perhaps it is the indwelling God, valued, precious,

so remote with an ecstacy of perception coming at

the end, after the long road. The more I pursue

the prize, the more it increases in value, with eternity

my greatest Friend and poetry, an endless experiment

in the precarious world of spiritual possessions,

their fleeting perceptions, their transience,

their formlessness and the wondrous lustre

of their distilled essence, their gestalt.¹

Ron Price

9 June 1999

^{1 Emily Dickinson, Perception and the Poet’s Quest, Greg Johnson, University of Alabama Press, 1985, p.117.
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MARTIN BUBER’S ‘UNITY OF MANKIND’

True address from God directs man into the place of lived speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another, and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the eternal partner. We are willed to a life of communion. Part of this communion is what addresses me, what occurs to me, a concrete world reality, a creation, that reaches out to me, as part of the world-happening. It is part of my road, it is on the road, to God. It includes the body politic. It is sometimes called the world. It can never be definitely formulated for it includes so much that is and by its very pervasiveness,extent and complexity, simply beyond formulation, description and understanding.
From all this world-happening, this participation in the body politic and in a world of solitude, a unified and responsible person, a unity of a lived life, of an emerging character as an organization of self-control, a system of interpenetrating habits arises. A unity of mankind can be created from this interaction but only if some noetic integrator, some agent, some philosophy, religion, some complex system of fixed and relative truth interpenetrates the world and comes down into the everyday.-Ron Price with thanks to Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, The Fontana Library,London, 1947, pp.9-146.
Men will yearn for the pure form,
a vision of the believing and hoping
generations of humankind, genuine
community which we are only at the
beginning of as process and which
seems to involve some tension, both
within and without: we are a problem
to ourselves. And poetry comes along
to announce that, in solitude, on the
narrowest ridge, the mind of man is
thinking of the Other, of Being,
of Something-Not-Itself,
of a perplexing presence, of being
visited, of blessedness, of Thou,
of an ancient eternity of essence.
Ron Price
14 June 1999
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SHAPING
The individual, according to Carl Jung, is possessed of a set of mythic symbols that relate to him or her alone. They are the by-products of having a unique history.(1)Another way of conceptualizing this idea is in terms of the metaphorical nature of physical reality. In this scheme we each assign a meaning to individual objects that cross our path, from their mythic meanings to their more simple, practical and often quite unadorned meanings. Success for writers and poets is not measured by the popularity of what they write, but by meaning, inward feelings and the simple desire to keep writing. A proactive stance and attitude, a taking what comes that can’t be changed, a sensitive play and utilization of the dichotomies of solitude-social, nature-nurture and activity-passivity and what can be changed all become quite significant. One does not seek a balance; one seeks what seems appropriate, timely, suitable to the spectrum of needs, wants and complex motivations in both oneself and in others in one’s immediate sphere of social interaction.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography, Heinemann, London, 1994, p. 135.
In Latin fictio means ‘shaping’,
fiction’s first meaning: shaping.
And so I shape. It’s all shaping,
life’s endless material into form,
small forms, page after page,
a literary whole, so many little
things and great vistas and a future
that has only had its first shaping:
a shaping that’s called vision.
Ron Price
15 June 1999
POETRY: A NEW WORLD FOR HISTORY
History is philosophy teaching by experience. -Carlyle in Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution, , Barton Friedman, Princeton UP, 1988, p.17.
The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world. -D.H. Lawrence in Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Sandra Gilbert, Cornell UP, London, 1972, p.5.
Historical knowledge rendered meaningful
by conformity to some teleological model,
some linguistic construct which we actualize,
reconfigure as we read, shooting the present
with chips of messianic time, my consciousness
with ever higher levels of connectedness,
shooting my life with questions which recreate
some microcosm in its depth, breadth, beyond
the narrow, distorted into vistas, multiple dimensions,
in the theatre of eternity; for written history is always
‘history-for’, never divorced from complicating contexts,
condensed, chosen, displaced, elaborated, rationalized,
structured, emphasized, extrapolated, vantage-pointed,
like the images of a dream intending some manifest content,
some knowledgework, analogous to life: far beyond some
sequence of rosary beads, some simple linearity, neutral facticity.
Ron Price
22 October 1995
A NEW ORPHEUS
Poetry was always meant to be an instrument of immense power with a scarcely foreseeable but wholly positive future.
-Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, Yale UP, New Haven, 1960, p.51.
A new Orpheus has come with golden touch
to soften steel and find the mystic bone,
to tame the tiger, uncover mysterious stone,
create new leviathan, to dance on sand,
to draw all things to Him, especially man.

This new Orpheus Who sings for all
to science, philosophy and poetry,
He has come and issued His clear call,
having been raised up by some
Most Great Spirit descended,
personated by a Maiden and I
have heard this Orpheus’ call.

It is this call that makes me yearn
toward a philosophic song and
cherish those times when time is reborn,
when a certain luminosity, deep coolness,
takes me back to myself, turning the visible
into the invisible and some inner breath.

The wondrous Orpheus of this new age
urges a harmony of science and poetry.
Dear Wordsworth in his The Prelude

did strike this harmonic chord and describe
an organic growth, its unity, timelessness
and ours in the exquisite chamber, the deep
recesses of my heart, the seat of the revelation
of the inner mysteries of Vision, of God, of Mystery.
It is here that we must free ourselves of the shadowy
and ephemeral attachments, to hear the piercing
sweetness of music unloosed when we free ourselves
of love and hate, detach and renounce and free our
tongues from excess or idle speech and imbue ourselves
with such a spirit of search that Orpheus, like some
Mystic Herald from the City of God, will endow us
with a new heart , a new mind, a new eye and a new ear
and we will gaze with the eye of God.
Ron Price
24 September 1995
OUR NEW HOME
We have here a centre of gravity, some ideal of the rounded fullness of life in all its variety, a normality, a natural condition in which men can feel easy and at home. There is something trusted and familiar here, an inner battle but not a man divided against himself, or against others, or against nature. There is skepticism here, deep and pervasive, necessary, a collirium. There is a single doctrine, a coherent conceptual schema which explains life and offers solutions to the human condition in all its staggering complexity. But it is not easy, not simple; it demands all we have as individuals and as a society. We have here a high idealism and the essence of pragmatism, an intellectualization of practice. We have a new, richer, deeper form of collective self-knowledge of what men are and can be. It is a branching out in a new direction, tidy in some ways, messy in others, still hesitant. It is not random, haphazard or chaotic, but there is tragedy here and a solemnity beneath the joy. There are many burning issues, but within a framework of conception, of definition, of order, of choice. There is something complete and cogent, growing and illuminated by a half-light, formidable and massive, yet unobtrusive and a symptom of a basic sanity in our time. -Ron Price with apprecation to Roger Hausheer for his Introduction to Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas-Isaiah Berlin, Hogarth Press, London, 1979, pp.13-53.
Here is a vision so novel,
so complex; here am I
spellbound in its grip,
in its constellation of forces,
in its richly suggestive doors
of perception, engendering
a perspective for what is
distinctive here, re-examining
the bases of modernity and
its underlying philosophy.

How can one sharply, succinctly,
say what is distinctive here?
Reason and revelation in an embrace
the like of which the world has never seen.
A vision of the world, unique, sublime,
relative to our age, in the words of
an incomparable, brilliant writer
now witnessing the triumph of civility
and we watch good men being made,
albeit slowly, in institutions, at last,
blessed, in a modern oasis amidst a sea
of aridity, imprecision, suspicion, technical
virtuosity, conformity, monotony, military--
industrial complexes, bureaucracy and
a craving for a new Gemeinschaft.

The crooked timber of humanity is being made
straight before our eyes in an amazingly complex
process while the heavy weight of recent centuries
of nationalism at last is loosened while we find
a true international friend in our own home.
Ron Price
1 December 1995
SHAPING INNER LIFE
The act of intuition is...an act of perception whereby the content is formed....turned into form.....a work of art is essentially in the artist’s mind...there is an intuited Gestalt...there is contemplation of the complexities, simplicities, import....meaning is synthetically construed...there is candid envisagement....there is clarification and organization of the intuition.....In the process the reader’s imagination of external reality can, in fact, be shaped...a revelation can occur to the reader’s inner life....because of some fresh formulation of their felt life, life which is at the heart of their own culture.
-Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1953, Chapters 20 and 21.
Thank you, Susanne, for helping me define
just what I am doing, trying to do,
as I write all these poems, trying to
express all this trying, this doing,
this feeling, this thinking, this imagining,
this memory, this intuiting, this defining,
this clarifying, this organizing, this shaping,
this formulating: to see with my own eyes

hear with my own ears know of my own
knowledge¹, so that others may do the same.
^{1 Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words.
Ron Price
November 2001
________________________
A LIVING AND BREATHING COMMUNITY
By its definition, a world view and its complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings is necessarily highly unified and coherent: yet art is frequently the exact opposite, striving to depict the complexity and plenitude of life through an open-ended form saturated with different levels of meaning. This tension between a unity of world view and a richness of multiplicity finds expression in social life, in history, in philosophy. Much of the estrangement and alienation, the suffering, in our experience of everyday life finds its origins in this tension, this tension between world vision and coherence on the one hand and the bewildering variety of stuff in the everyday on the other. -Ron Price with thanks to Alan Swingewood, "Theories of Aesthetic Form", Sociological Poetics and Aesthetic Form, St. Martins Press, NY, 1987, pp.3-76.
There’s an act of confidence here
in the birth of this writer, this writing,
which is never born in the minds of
most men, but in that still-birth a breath
of freedom is still-born for me through others,
through the interpretive meaning and consumption
of the few, a precious few. Here lies its destination,
its real unity in a field of complex social forces,
out in the collectivity, complete at last, living,
used in one great swarm of culture, history
and individuality intersecting and creating
great art or nothingness in tradition’s acute
defining consciousness which is impossible
to assess except in a very limited way.

Here the reality of contemporaneity
places its poetry, seeks to rise above
any spurious unity and closure of an
official culture, and lives in a struggling,
striving community of doing, being and having.
Ron Price
14 September 1996
__________________________
STANCE AND WITHDRAWAL
History, for the poet, is a series of snapshots with the poet in every scene.....Genuine narrative must (i) respect time, (ii) locate elements of private or collective struggle and (iii) observe without sentiment, escaping if it can the unconscious conventions of society. These are the basic elements of a genuine political consciousness. This consciousness is sensitive and enriched by a great wealth of science, philosophy, religion, in a word, culture. In this wondrous milieux is found the new poet. His home is one of solitude and inwardness, emotion and reason, many selves and many moods. -Ron Price with appreciation to Frederick Pollack, "Poetry and Politics" in Poetry After Modernism, Robert McDowell, editor, Story Line Press, Brownsville, Oregon, 1991.
Poetry is, in essence about something;
this poetry seeks a public voice
commensurate with its political
subject-matter. And, so, I try to connect
with other stories. What I create is a record
of oblique, hesitant approaches to a new politics,
a new stance and withdrawals from that stance.¹}Ron Price
26 November 1996
^{1 Robert Lowell, major American poet of the 1950s and 1960s, wrote poetry that tried to be political in this way. See ibid., p.9. This describes, in some ways, my own poetics of the political and so I include Lowell’s view/words here.
_________________________
ONE OF THE GREATEST PUZZLES
Know thou of a truth that the soul, after its separation from the body, will continue to progress until it attaineth the presence of God, in a state and condition which neither the revolution of ages and centuries, nor the changes and chances of the world, can alter. -Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.155.
How is it that the same looking cells-
with the same genetic blueprint-
early in the development of the human
embryo become different tissues?
It’s one of the greatest puzzles in biology.
The recipies are genes; the cookbook
is the chromosomes and the chefs the
protein molecules on DNA which switch
genes on and off—so the story goes which
I read in some biology text—but I understand
it not....does anyone?

How is it that the same looking people
with the same basic human physiology
for the first phase of their existence-
some four score years and ten-
have such different soul experiences
after their separation from the body?
It’s one of the greatest puzzles in
the history of religion, philosophy
and theology. The recipies are the
specific theologies of the afterlife;
the cookbooks the Holy Writings
of the great religious traditions
and the chefs the prophetic Teachers.
Ron Price
4 January 1996
_______________________
THE EYE
....the compound eye of the male horsefly....arrays about 7000 lenses in crystalline rows like a microscopic honeycomb....they register the movement of any visible object passing from lens to lens with such efficiency that a fly may accurately judge the speed of anything from the minute hand on a watch to a swooping bird or a flashing tail....This also explains why honeybees are particuarly attracted to flowers swaying across their line of sight. -Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration in Science and Philosophy, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1978, p.184.
Have you ever wondered why
the cat and owl look straight ahead
and the rabbit and dear see sideways?
Their eyes are set stereoscopically
coorindinated ensuring 360 degree vision.

Have you ever wondered why
some human beings see truth
everywhere they look and others
seem to be blind as well as deaf?
They seem to have turned on the
lamp of search and striving, even
devotion to learning, turned on....

The owl can swivel its neck more
than a full circle in a tenth of a second.
The much-hunted woodcock has eyes
in the back of its head; a gecko’s eyes
look like four diamonds and kingfishers
have eight times as many cells in their
retinas to notice fish or mice for the great
downward swoop and the great catch.

Humankind is endowed with the
greatest of tools for the rational
faculty: the eye. He has eyes to
see but sees not and ears to hear
but hears not. He sees with the eyes
of his neighbour, but not his own eyes;
and knows from the knowledge of
others but not his own knowledge.
Ron Price
5 January 1996
_________________________
ENGENDERING A PERSPECTIVE
We make these observations.....to open up lines of thought, to encourage a re-examination of the bases of modern society, and to engender a perspective for consideration of the distinctive features of the Order of Baha’u’llah. -The Universal House of Justice, Letter to the Baha’is of the United States of America, 29 December 1988, p. 6.
I have thought, for years, read and read
and read about the bases of society---
ancient and modern, stone age and
middle age---I’d like to summarize,
as difficult as that is, in a short poem
the fruit of many years of that labour:

It seems to me, there are two lines,
two pillars, two great edifaces,
of thought on which the whole
of society is based: traditional religious
and political thought. These traditions
are the bases of society everywhere
on earth---now, then and in future.

The perspective this basic understanding
engenders in considering the features of
the Order of Baha’u’llah is to see it as
grounded entirely in the Writings of its
Twin-Founders and Their appointed
Successors over a century and a half.

All the world of writing in political and
religious philosophy over the last two to
three millennia serves to help us examine
the bases of modern society and sharpen
our insights into the nature of this distinctive
Order and our own complex global world.

When one begins to look at these great systems
of political and religious thought one is faced with
an enormous corpus of material, enough to spend
one’s whole lifetime pouring over for points for
comparison and contrast with this new Order for
our day and for our survival into humankind’s future.
Ron Price
4 December 1996
___________________
DEFINING THE WHOLE BUSINESS
Life is a dangerous bridegroom and to survive we need to approach each day as if we were going to war. We must take our battle to the very centre of the earth and defeat the right and left wings of the hosts of all the countries. We must be faithful to our principles. In these three sentences I have drawn on John Cowper Powys, ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Carl Von Clausewitz in an attempt to synthesize their attitude to life insofar as it is a struggle, as it is a war.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, December 15, 1996.
John Cowper Powys wrote a book
that came out in that Holy Year¹}with a beautiful articulation of much
that is a Baha’i philosophy about:
driving off the evil of self-worship,
being a good companion to ourselves
accepting our loneliness, the power of
belief and wishful thinking, never getting
angry, laughing at life and ourselves,
travelling lightly and simply, keeping our
spirit up, as far as possible, drawing on
poetry to deal with those slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune and as a natural gesture
of both defiance and enjoyment, but still---
we must all decide what is this whole business.
Ron Price
15 December 1996
^{1 He finished the book in 1952 and it was published in 1953---In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyone. That Holy Year spanned November 1952 to November 1953.
___________________________
A SEISMOGRAPHIC RECORD
Dante had at his disposal a comprehensive and intellectually consistent image of the cosmos and its relationship to God.
-Harold L. Weatherby, The Keen Delight: The Christian Poet in the Modern World, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1975, p.5.
In an age profoundly infected with philosophical scepticism the problem of writing sacred poetry, the great song, requires that we recapture a genuine science of invisible things. This can be done through a grasp by the poet of both the external and internal worlds. The poet conveys his creative intuition into a receptive intuition -ibid. pp.123-149.
The poet, who is a member of the Baha’i community, has before him every atom in existence and the essence of all created things¹. There is no break between nature, art, poetry, science, religion and personal life. It is all one, a dynamic unity amidst multiplicity, amidst an organic body of ideas. On the basis of a vast corpus of sacred Writings this same poet has before him a massive body of literature. Individuals who possess fully developed and comprehensive knowledge of the major issues of many fields like: systematic theology, philosophy, epistomology, ontology, aesthetics, theophanology, history and psychology are, for the most part, rare in our present age and hard to come by and expertise must be narrowed. The foundation exists for a rich and fertile global literature to evolve within a fusion of opposites, within a fusion of perspectives on some ladder of reflection and, inevitably, amidst a complex cross-fertilisation. -Ron Price, The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature, Unpublished Manuscript, 1996.
You get enough principles here
to build a cosmos in your brain,
to wander with Dante through
his world of keen delight,
to rebuild his model,
a reconstructed universe.

This is far more than mere living,
of simply amusing oneself, more
than some restless dilettante spectator
on the lounge room couch; this is
appreciation, deep and full, far beyond
a momentary touch of sorrow; this is some
vortex spinning with ideas, driving, hopefully,
its readers into their own memory, back into
a reverie, past depths and the vagueness of
past-times into a oneness that is slowly sweeping
the face of the earth, a search that is one’s own
self-expression in the deepest of deep wells.....

This universe, this cosmos, this self, its likes and dislikes,
comings and goings, faults and weaknesses are one entity,
even in its contradictions: the oneness of a microcosm in its
egotism and limitations, walking backwards or forewords,
in some new Rome at the crossroads, in some solitude and
aloneness which is necessary and unavoidable, it seems,
bringing the past and the future into now, with delicate scents,
pulsations, unnameable tactile sensations, with an anxiety
surrounding my moments of tranquillity but with light as the
basis of structure and darkness always at the periphery
on an inner lifeline of such complexity, such a seismographic
record and sensibility, such a breadth of compass within the
distilled sphere of these words and their fusion of opposites.
Ron Price
18 August 1996
^{1 Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words.
CROSS-FERTILIZATION
No summation of the field of psychology and the Baha’i Faith, insofar as both this academic discipline and this new world Faith relate to my experience and my years of study, would be a faithful record of what has been especially meaningful to me through their cross-fertilization, if I did not include the psychological theories of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung. This new world religion emerged at the spiritual low-water mark in human history just as the field of psychology was itself emerging out of a long history of philosophy and what might be generally called ‘the history of ideas’ for convenience. I do not want to attempt even a summary of the contribution of these three theorists in psychology: such a summary would itself lead to prolixity. Although the Baha’i writings are themselves silent concerning particular psychological concepts, there is much room for common ground, for further study, for comparison and contrast and, in the process, illumination of the lives of human beings.-Ron Price with thanks to Laura M. Herzog, "A Preliminary Analysis of the Baha’i Concept of Mental Health," A Clinical Research Project for The School of Psychology Chicago Campus, May 1998.
I’ve always liked the idea of salvation
as motion rather than a spiritual homeo-
stasis, a steady-state-theory.I’m saying:
some kind of individual and collective reflection
where I am a process not some thing, entity,
but a flow, a life-changing-not-fixed down--
a river to the sea, part of a whole and yet
separate, a yin-and-yang idea here folks---
some other world stretching-out and all this
stuff here reflecting another world....a using
this world to understand another...the next,
to explain the unfamiliar by the familiar......
abstract in terms of the concrete, extracting
our own meaning, no imposition thank you
very much—had enough of that!—a self-
choosing, independent search in context,
a dramaturgical, metaphorical exercise--
high and low drama, for that is our life
and light, our discomfort, tests, our growth.¹
1John Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality, Wilmette, 1987.
Ron Price
11 June 2007
End of story—for now....}}}