06Baha'u'llah

6. BAHA’U’LLAH

Baha’u’llah is at the very epi-centre of the Baha’i Cause. Indeed, He is, as the Universal House of Justice described Him in a recent letter, "the most precious Being ever to have drawn breath on this planet."(Ridvan, 1990). I dedicate all that I have accomplished, all that is expressed in the resume in section 24 below, to this Being and the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the 'global undertaking'¹ which the events of a century ago set in motion.(¹Baha’u’llah, Baha’i International Community, Office of Public Information, NY, 1992.)

A REVIEW OF THE BOOKLET 'BAHA'U'LLAH'

PUBLISHED IN 1991:

There have been several major efforts to write a biography, a story, an account of Baha'u'llah's life. The one I enjoy reading the most is a publication of the Baha'i International Community published by its Office of Public Information in New York. The Bahá'í International Community is a Baha’i agency under the direction of the Universal House of Justice in Haifa israel. It has consultative status with several UN organizations. It was made available to all National Assemblies and could be purchased in Baha'i bookshops in 1991.

Some 16,000 words, 150 paragraphs and 27 pages with over 100 references it places the life of Baha'u'llah in several contexts that are timely in this fin de siecle and the new century that beckons. In 2001 I transcribed a review of this statement, a review I wrote back in 1991, onto this web page. For it is my own opinion that this brief statement published in 1991 is the most accurate and relevant statement, understanding, which the Baha'i community possesses of the life of the 'most precious Being ever to have drawn breath on this planet.' ¹

We are advised that this document is for our 'deep reflection' and 'contemplation.' It is also for our use in publicity and proclamation. The meaning of history and the prospect of the future underpin this entire essay. It is a work of exegesis, of interpretation, of hermeneutics as it is called in the field of sociology and religion. There is an orientation to action as there has always been in the history of exegesis beginning with the Guardian's writings in the 1920s.

There is an incisive perception, a versatility of analytical style and a power of definition that makes reading what has been made into a small book a pleasure. The classical literary tradition going back, perhaps, to Cicero and distilled by the Guardian continues on in the meticulous arrangement of sentences, in the creativity of the imagination, the respect for the meaning of words and the precise affect of paragraphs that the reader will find here, should he be willing to study this document.

Back in 1967, at Ridvan, The Universal House of Justice asked the Baha'i community to ponder on the significance, the meaning, of Baha'u'llah's life and His 'stupendous revelation.'. The question was asked in the context of the meaning of deepening and proclamation. I was just getting ready to pioneer among the Eskimos at the time. I was just about to finish my teacher training and get married. I found the questions provocative and challenging. After thirty years of attempting to answer these questions as best I could, I feel I have come across a statement that is, for our time, the definitive response to those challenging statements in that 1967 Ridvan message.

I read that Ridvan message in Fort William, the furthest point west in Canada I had then travelled. I read the booklet 'Baha'u'llah' living in Perth, the furthest west one can go in Australia. The questions and the booklet evoke a 'solemn consciousness' which is the 'wellspring of the most exquisite celebratory joy.'(The Universal House of Justice, April 3, 1991.) As we contemplate this man who, even when young, had "a faculty of speech like a rushing torrent,"²and who has left us with over 21,000 Tablets and letters in Persian and Arabic, we realize that future biographers will again recount this story in yet additional efforts, in a language as adequate as they can muster. For now, Hasan Balyuzi's definitive biography, gives us the high points of Baha'u'llah's life which are clear; this latest effort of the International Baha'i Community gives us a very readable and scholary product. The followers of Baha'u'llah, now over five million, await ever-more-informative studies which will integrate yet more pertinent authentic detail which time and study will unearth.

History is capable of underscoring the record, the transaction, of the past for the instruction of a future age. This document from the Office of Public Information contains much that could be seen as 'instruction.' The instruction that we receive could be said to come under the heading 'understanding' and 'the meaning of Baha'u'llah's Revelation.' There are so many examples, but I will return to this theme at a future date as I expand on this essay which I began ten years ago, back in 1991.

^{1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1990.
^{2 Quoted in David Ruhe, Robe of Light, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.xv.
Ron Price
14 June 1991/ Revised 22 July 2001
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MY PORTION
Certainly one of the many functions of this poetry is to bring together the words of different poets, the writings of the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith, the world I live in and my own dear life. In this instance, beginning with a poem of Emily Dickinson(#498) which I read last night just before going to bed, the content seemed to lead serendipitously to a Tablet of Baha'u'llah wherein He writes about nature. In the end, my poem became, as I see it anyway, a meditation on that Tablet. And so, twelve hours after starting to read Emily's poem "I envy seas, whereon He rides," and then enjoying a good sleep, a walk in the bush and a light breakfast, I have completed the following poem. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 15 December 2002.
I don't envy the seas where
His will flows on or the spokes
of wheels, great jet craft or
those mountains by the river—
all dispensations of Providence
ordained by the Ordainer for this
journey through noon and night
where I get my portion in those
chrysalite tablets that I may walk
above the world and find, as best
I can, those endless apt remarks.¹
1 See Baha'u'llah, 'Lawh-i-Hikmat,' Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p.149.
Ron Price
15 December 2002}}THE BENEFICENT POWER

"The function of poetry" wrote Robert Graves, "is religious invocation of the Muse....I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her."¹The Muse, in the case of this Baha'i, is something I am happy to personify with a capital 'M,' but this personification is based on, is derived from, has something to do with, several complex and interrelated factors. One is a certain obsessiveness which may have its origins in my bi-polar disorder. This is as close as I can come to "the inspired madman" that Plato refers to in his Phaedrus and his Letters. Dickens refers to 'a beneficent power' which showed him how to write. If such a beneficent power is helping me, and for the most part I am not conscious of it directly, that power may very well be those souls who have passed on to the next world and have the power to assist the arts and sciences in this world. This hypothesis, this causal explanation, is untestable. But Baha'u'llah says I "can benefit through them." Undoubtedly, I am dependent on fertile ideas 'coming' to me, on imaginative responsiveness and allowing ideas to take shape in my poems. I am even more dependent on a sense of wonder and on "new faculties" being created "as standards in the mind" from "the power of the influence" of the writings of Baha'u'llah.²-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Vintage Books, NY, 1991, p.672; and ²Horace Holley in The Ocean of His Words, John Hatcher, Wilmeete, 1997, p.3.

It seems to require all I have

to record my testimony, as you

say, Horace, to new faculties,

new standards in my mind,

any example of the power

of His influence or Theirs.

The beneficent power bringing

these ideas is quite beyond any

account I might give. Like alien

visitors They come to us from

another world. This is the Muse

spoken of in bygone ages requiring

that I become an artist myself¹and

so open that infinite resource within.

^{1 John Hatcher, op.cit., p.6.
Ron Price
24 February 2002}SECRETLY

Poetry, which C.S. Lewis says is impossible to define, is "the unique linguistic instrument"¹ our minds have to order their thoughts, emotions and desires."But poetry works so secretly and so insensibly that it is very difficult to trace the tracks it makes, the flowers that burst into blossom on its path or the lobes of balance it composes when old worlds are dieing and new ones are being formed, as they are so pervasively in our time. However secretly poetry works, these lobes of balance that I create possess an internal harmony and order derived from things unseen and from "the sweetness of a spiritual and imperishable fragrance"² which has been inhaled during the years of my life, during days of trying and testing when, perhaps, He did not let me alone. He is a mystery to me and, I am told, I am a mystery to Him. The prose-poems here are also a mystery to me as they unfolded during the building of the terraces on that Hill of God in the Arc Project. I can not evaluate these poems. They came. I wrote and I leave them to readers to make of them what they will. ^--Ron Price with thanks to ¹I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism, 1929 and ²Baha'u'llah, The Book of Certitude, pp.8-9.

I'm trying to record,

order reactions to life,

amazement and wonder

in a way that I can not

possibly do any other way.

It's just some lively feelings,

life, situations and ideas

I yearn, struggle passionately

to express and which I feel

acutely and abundantly,¹

some deeper birth in solitude.

A passive quality, trained

sensitiveness, imagination's child

operating as it does on the streaming

chaos of impressions through which I

hourly move and have my being here.

There's a cultivation of the private

in the midst of an immense world

of public entertainment, vulgarization--

the world's and mine--sin and abyss,

a fragmentation and a unity with

confusions and disparities transcended

in this locus of expression--the poem:

mine and His.

^{1Walter de la Mare, 'Dream and Imagination,' Behold the Dreamer, 1939.
Ron Price
7 January 2002
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, let's say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2007 I produced 61 booklets of some 6500 poems. It works out to a little more than two poems a day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of eighteen with a friend, a 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 White's poetry. I don't 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, a new hoe, or bacon or bread.
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 habitation, a name---
something more than airy nothing.
Ron Price
May 12 2004
BRILLIANT INSIGHTS
Max Weber wrote his Sociology of Religion between 1911 and 1913, while 'Abdu'l-Baha was on His western tour. In that sociology Weber outlined his theory of charisma and its routinization. The timing was perfect. 'Abdu'l-Baha represented the beginnings of that routinization as well as some of that charisma. Weber's particular view of the sociology of religion was published posthumously in 1922. By then, it could be argued, the charisma of Baha'u'llah was fully routinized in the person of Shoghi Effendi or at least routinized in stage one with stage two of the routinization, the institutionalization, of that charisma in the Universal House of Justice. It was not until the late forties to the late seventies that Weber's theory of the sociology of charisma and its routinization became available in English. -Ron Price with thanks to Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Fontana Books, London, 1996, p.17.

Was it just fortuitous......
...that the words for a theory,
a sociological theory of religion,
came into existence as the representative
of that full Force, charisma, was giving
a service of such heroic proportions¹}

that it was unparalleled in our first century?

.....that it burst forth from the fertile mind

of perhaps the greatest sociologist in its history?

......that it was published just as The Force

was fully routinized in the person of that

priceless pearl from those Twin-Surging-Seas?

.....that we who became identified with this

precious Faith could read and underpin,

could reinforce our vision, in the several

epochs of the Formative Age, when we

served and strove to understand thanks

to that exegete of exegetes, his insights

and his brilliant dramaturgical rhetoric?

^{1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.279.
Ron Price
29 December 2001
SOME POETRY ON THE SUBJECT OF THE BLESSED BEAUTY
CRYSTALIZING A BEAUTY
Once a man has had a vision of eternal beauty while wandering on his way, he can never cease to be haunted by it. He is doomed to be unquiet forever. For such men their only rest is an attenuated wandering. Price, after a series of 32 moves over more than fifty years years from 1947 to 1999, was faced with such an attenuated wandering. His wandering after 1999 was largely in his head rather than place to place. He would wander in that garden of a Baha’i consciousness that had emerged in a particular form in 1979 by means of the poetry of Roger White after twenty years of various moves and a slow cross-fertilization of ideas in the years 1959-1979.
What had been a virtual tabula rasa, perhaps as far back at the 1970s and before, at least insofar as the garden of poetry was concerned, was being filled up to overflowing by Baha’is and others who were poets, present day and historical, around the world, by simple and constitutive ideas that he anticipated would continue to evolve in the twenty-first century, in the years into his old age. Price would create his own plot, his own section, of the garden during this attenuated wandering. In this vahid(a 19 line poem) which follows he describes the origins of his vision, his garden plot ofpoetry -Ron Price with thanks to J. Hillis Miller, Six Reality Poets, The Belknap Press, Cambridge Press, 1965, p. 80.
That vision seemed to come in bits and pieces:
over cheesecake and coffee on cold Canadian
evenings, in stories about birds flying over Akka;
from the lips of a mother I loved, from lounge-rooms
filled with a bewilderingly strange concatenation of people
who would never go away, but only change their names
and would continue to haunt me forever, in a fire whose
roaring flame kept my mind unquiet as I wandered across
the face of the earth getting alternatively burnt or frozen.

The vision stayed gradually crystallizing a beauty
that was my very food and drink, but not always
tasty: indeed at times it was bitter, as Rumi says,
because it was my life.
Ron Price
8 January 2002
_______________
BEAUTY OF THE HONEYED MUSE
A curious tension exists between poetry and belief, idea, principle, or reason. That is, while we hear a good deal about poetry’s need to be based upon an explicit view of the meaning of existence, we are often very bored and exasperated by the poetry which testifies to such a view. That is why I think poetry, indeed the arts in general, must strive to be fresh, original, full of surprise, inventive, stimulating. This is not easy to do. I only achieve this sometimes. -Ron Price with thanks to Howard Nemerov, Poetry and Fiction Essays, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 1963, p.7.
What is this beauty that I see?
A medium of spiritual communication,
told of by the honeyed muse, rooted in
both law and reason, raised in imagination's
structure and eternal archtypes, patterns and
rules, rich in insight and suggestion, with a
high degree of unity, a pervasive, single,
individualizing quality, a consummatory
impulse, a continuity with the past and future
and a controlled dynamism and order,
its concentration of energy, deliberately created,
symbolic of the whole, of ontogenic significance,
due to artistic will, part of the aesthetic self-creating,
meta-statement on truth, dancing on the void, making
us artists of our own existence, full of the promise of
some immediate knowledge and beauty everywhere.
Ron Price
8 June 1997
ONE ROSE AND ONE HYACINTH
This morning I read a poem by Charles Baudelaire(1821-1867) written some time during that fate-laden period after 1844. It was called Hymn to Beauty. Baudelaire's poetry exerted an unparalleled influence on modern poetry. This particular poem inspired me to look up the word 'beauty' on the Mars for Windows computer disc. There were over 350 references to beauty. This poem is a synthesis, a combination, a mixture, a bi-product, a wedding, a cross-fertilization, of perhaps forty of these references and Baudelaire's poem. -Ron Price, 11:00-2:00 pm Saturday, 23 May 1998: In Celebration of the Declaration of the Bab, 154 years ago today and the wondrous developments taking place now on Mt. Carmel as a result of the life of the Blessed Beauty, Baha'u'llah.

Do you come from some cord of creation,
some melody of eternity, O Beauty?
I see you in my solitude and cry to you
in my joy. I murmur your pleasure in my
grief and in my weariest moments you are
like a wine, quaffed from the clearest chalice.
Your eyes are brighter than the dawn and more
breathtaking than a glorious sunset. Your kisses,
which touch me all my days, are a drug that has
intoxicated my spirit and your mouth I can scarcely
imagine without swooning away. Fate, like a spaniel,
follows at your heel as you seem to sew haphazard
fortune, despair and a world of creative thoughts.
Your world, of such infinite Beauty, seems to attract
corpses and death, shame, murder, war, carnage,
the flame of dissension and the taste of honey mixed
with poison. Even the wick of your many-millioned
lovers and their loves which daily flutter, crackle and
cry, only gives them a taste of your paradise and hell,
your appalling Beauty which is revealed in your eyes,
your smile and your feet of steel, so subtlely precious
and so utterly mysterious.

I mirror forth your Beauty, wear your robes
at your wondrous fountain, knowing my thirsty
tongue shall one day be no more and the Sun
shall shine forever with its light of Beauty from
its Dawning-place of the Divine Presence.
I blush to lift up my face to your Beauty, to your
deathless tree behind its veil of concealment, where
the Beauty of the eternal sings with the melody of a
nightingale and a fragrance which goes deep as I pass
the Beauty of this Rose and the Hyacinth of this assembly.
Ron Price
23 May 1998}

BAHA’U’LLAH

The early work of Australian poet, John Shaw Neilson, is undistinguished enough to give any aspiring poet hope.¹That is also true of Price’s work, as this poem among many of his juvenilia attest. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹H.J. Oliver in John Shaw Neilson: Poetry, Autobiography and Correspondence, editor, Cliff Hanna, University of Queensland Press, 1991, p.xxiv.

The puppets danced and bobbed.

A wedding feast so gay foretold

a life on strings of God to which

His life would play.

The seven wives did dance;

the concubines served tea,

with one brother and two sisters

left this Brother’s family.

His mother had thought them short

for a boy of seven, but father Buzurg

knew His mind was sent from heaven.

The dreams He’d had of birds and fish

when He was five or six had confirmed

His father’s views that He’d resist

the kicks of pricks. The learning of the

schools and books He was not inclined

to tend. The horse, the sword, the gun

tutored Him and the Holy Book as friend.

Such unparalleled exposition grew for a boy

of fourteen years, never assertive, always kind

His words were sweet and dear. His anger was

aroused when God’s Messengers were wronged.

His ire would rise and in defence His words were strong.

Ron Price

July 1991(ca)

________________

RADIANT AXIS OF BEAUTY

Pilgrimages must have begun to be made by Mankind whereever and whenever one single shrine came to surpass its neighbours in prestige to a degree that moved the regular local votaries of the neighbouring shrines to reinsure their claim on the good graces of the numina by paying occasional or periodical visits to the preeminent shrine as well.-Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 1963(1954), Vol. 9, p.97.

Haramayn, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya,

Najaf, Karbila, Mecca, Medina----

cynosures of worlds apart through time.

Wu-T’ai Shan, Omei, too, gradually

accumulating mana, while Canterbury,

Walsingham, Kurasan, Lourdes, Lisieux

gave birth to shrine worlds on pilgrimage—

horizons, holy grounds like Nazareth or

Bethlehem, pristine sacredness, soul-resorts,

spurs to superhuman effort, to deft practitioners,

to protocols of piety, rehearsed petitioners,

who even now, as they enter that rare Presence

on this sacred mount, feast their eyes,

gathering memories for the time when they

must leave Carmel’s bony spine

and this radiant axis of beauty.

Amidst the sandy convolutions of this landscape

and its grainy, parched surface where hot winds

mutter apocalyptically a gleaming world arises.

Ron Price

26 December 1997

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SWEET NEW LIFE BORN OF BEAUTY

...a Revelation which, flowing out, in that extremely perilous hour, from His travailing soul, pierced the gloom which had settled upon that pestilential pit, and, bursting through its walls....infused into the entire body of mankind its boundless potentialities.-Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By(1957), p.93.

The last twenty-five years(1971-1996) have been jam-packed with massive quantities of communication, very successful much of the time, not so successful at others, extensive seed planting, but a meagreness of outward results, much joy and not a little despair. I have tried in this poem to capture this process within the context of perspectives gleaned from The Tablets of the Divine Plan and God Passes by. -Ron Price, 5 January 1996, 9:15 am.

Sharp and clean, right through,

heart to heart, man to man,

person to person, straight shooting,

we know where we stand, as much

as anyone knows this sort of thing

given that we are talking about human

communication. For a most wonderful

state of receptivity is being realized*.

I’ve seen it, experienced it at least since

the new horizon, bright with intimations

of thrilling developments** and then the

new paradigm of opportunity, the silver

lining and its dazzling prospects.***

We tried to be heavenly armies, freed from

the human world, divine angels, with that

trumpet, that Israfil of life, blowing the breath

of life but we got trapped by the defects of nature

and the promptings of the human world and could

not conquer nor array that innerlife and private

character with the fresh leaves, the fruits and

the blossoms of that consecrated joy.

Ideal forces and lordly confirmations

did come to our aid and it may be that

we will be crowned with brilliant jewels

which may irradiate upon centuries and

cycles.(4) But there was so much to which

we did not attain; we burned out several

times trying, trying on this often dry earth.

But, thanks to him, vision now has form

up on that mountain side and all that work

going back those decades has been revitalized.

It is as if that maiden who spoke to Him in the

depths of the Siyah Chal was giving us, too,

a sweet new life born of beauty for our own

hour of extreme peril and its miasmal ooze.

Ron Price

5 January 1996

* ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan(1977), p.41.

** Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1971.

*** Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1988, 1990.

(4) ‘Abdu’l-Baha, op. cit., p.48.

_________________________

LOST GENERATIONS

In The Sun Also Rises(1926) Christianity is no longer part of the inner lives of people. A small core of the North American population by 1926 had found a new basis for community in the teachings of Baha'u'llah, but it was not until the 1960s that the numbers in this core became anything more than miniscule. In 1960 there were still under 1000 Baha'is in Canada and only several hundred in Australia. When I began my pioneer life in 1962 the Baha'i community had been expanding significantly in many places in the world for a decade. Many people found a new dynamic, a new basis for community, in the Baha'i teachings, but the work was slow and arduous. -Ron Price, an attempt to place the origin and growth of this new Order in the perspective of his own life.

Just asyou¹ were bringing that Order

into its first form the world, the world

which got His Tablets,² was getting turned

upside down by cars that took people away

and away, planes that took them up and away

and radios that took their old world away

as did urbanization which made it difficult

to know who your neighbour was in cities

of thousands and anomie spread to every root

and branch and they rushed into a new age

with a new poetry, a new music and a new

beauty—and more sound and words written

than ever before--and the cars and planes got

faster and the lost generation of the Twenties

was lost again in the Sixties as they³ brought

that Order further into view--and the spiritual

malaise got deeper and that was really what

you had to fight in the third war which never

came as the old community died and this new

one was slowly, unobtrusively born.

But it was no garden party either.

You had to give it all, at least sometimes,

to keep the spark of belief from dieing out,

being asphyxiated, in a tempest of incredible

complexity, speed and unpredictability.

^{1 Shoghi Effendi
^{2 'Abdu'l-Baha's document, foundation, for the spread of His father's teachings(1916-17)
^{3 Universal House of Justice
___________________
Ron Price
March 9, 1996.
NEW FLIGHTS
Autobiographical is a name invented by Robert Southey(1774-1843) for the narration of one's life. -Anne Ferry, The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, p.10.
Introspection was not used to mean examination of one's thoughts until 1695. -ibid., p.46.
By the time the Bab and Baha'u'llah wrote their profoundly introspective works some two and a half centuries of literature, poetic and otherwise, had been focusing on the inner life and private character of human beings. A radical distinction between our inner and outer life had been increasingly defined and described. It was this inner life that Shoghi Effendi said must manifest the truths of this new Revelation. This inner illumination was what would secure the triumph of this new Cause. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, March 23, 1996, 11 am Saturday.
I write these verses, songs of praise;
they seem the best that I can raise.
I tire now of other forms, of acts
that I do for Thee like tired facts.

I go to Feasts, read what They say
and I to Thee do fly, but one day
I'll do far more than this; with blissful
joy I'll take on some great new fistful.

After what seems like a billion words
from a thousand conversations--birds
of life don't fly as high as they once did;
they often seem a little thin, can’t get off
the ground. New flights more sweet exist
in these latter years and they are all within.
Ron Price
23 March 1996
AT LAST CONVERGING
Literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies and passionless meditation, unless it is constantly flooded with the passion and beliefs of the past and, of all the fountains of passion and beliefs of the past, Baha'i history has again and again brought the vivifying spirit of excess into a Baha'i consciousness in the arts. The history of the Bab and Baha'u'llah, the seemingly endless martyrs, the life story of 'Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi and the accounts of many of the great teachers now over several epochs, are slowly creating a new literature and changing the very roots of people's emotions by the influence of this long history, its sense of oneness and the metaphorical nature of its physical reality. -Ron Price with thanks to W.B. Yeats, Source Unknown, 23 March 1996.
Most of life takes all that I am,
its many roles and stages;
the candle of my days burns low
while I strut and fret between the pages.

There is within this tempered sword
which I use to carve these lines
and wield it daily for this work
a quiet, gentle sense of eternal times.

The past collapses into these moments
and I create a world of leaves which hangs
upon my boughs, leaves quite green and shiney,
yellow, few, some with quite distinct tangs.

These verses are no crown, or banquet;
they are not part of a dance or play.
They aren't meant for entertainment,
not part of a song, renoun, or suit today.

I feel as if something great is emerging
far beyond these lines from my own mind.
A civilization is at last converging
with this adventure that I slowly unwind.
Ron Price
23 March 1996
A GENERATIVE MATRIX
Baha'u'llah's Writings, indeed the works of all the Central Figures of this Faith, as well as those of the Guardian and the Universal House of Justice, represent a powerful literary institution of self-reflection slowly becoming embodied in the central cultural practices and ideological milieux of an emerging global civilization, a civilization still in its infancy and barely visible in a model of community that has just stuck its head above the ground. This vast corpus of print will one day come to saturate humanity's social life with imagery and self-representation as the Homeric epic came to saturate classical Greece.
The miracle of Greece, the Hellenic spirit, found its origins, its source, in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The miracle of this new Order, now just in its embryonic form, its nucleic spread, finds its origins in the Twin-Manifestations of the nineteenth century, the Bab and Baha'u'llah. -Ron Price with thanks to Barry Sandywell, The Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age: Logological Investigations Vol.2, Routledge, NY, 1996, p. 50.
We codified our sense of identity,
idealized vocabularies of conduct
in the generative matrix of a Prophet's
art, a unique enterprise, effectively
inaugurating a global act that would
translate a spiritual kingdom into a
physical form, begin a new type of
communicative institution, at the
beginning and end of civilization,
a brilliant supernovum of a collapsing
galaxy, history's supreme monument
of Revelation writing, of jewel-like
emanations and effusions from an
indefatigable pen, God's artistry.
Ron Price
13 December 1997
AN IMMORTAL GATE
There was a power and fire in Brahms' compositions by the 1850s. Perhaps this fire was kindled from the same source that kindled Mirza Aqa Jan when he describes the affect of Baha'u'llah walking towards him on the roof of a house in summer in Karbila.(God Passes By, p.116): "...with every step He took and every word He uttered thousands of oceans of light surged before my face, and thousands of worlds of incomparable splendor were unveiled to my eyes..."
A wondrous sound he heard
during Your days, like some
music of the spheres, thousands
of suns blazing their light, like a
mountain ring, a horn, like his girls
who sang. He suffered long and in
his generosity he found Your gifts
and Your sound revolutionizing his
world.²He found some immortal gate
to paradise where he hoped to go and
dwell with his sweet Clara forever, far
from this darksome, narrow world,
immersed in that land of lights free
of earthly bonds, floating, fulfilled...
at last.
^{1 Johannes Brahms(1833-1897), great German composer.
^{2The process whereby the potency of the twin-revelations of the Bab and Baha'u'llah had, by the 1850s, begun to exercise its transforming affect on the planet was mysterious; although "(t)he process whereby its unsuspected benefits were to be manifest to the eyes of men was slow, painfully slow, and was characterized....by a number of crises which at times threatened to arrest its development and blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered. -Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.111.
Ron Price
November 30, 1997.
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A SENSE OF DESTINY
Catherine Anne Porter in her Notes on a Criticism published in 1940¹ wrote that Thomas Hardy believed "that neither act, nor will, nor intention will serve to deflect a man's destiny from him, once he has taken the step which decides it." In attempting to apply this thought of Hardy's to my own life, it seems to me there have been many steps which, collectively, have decided my destiny: joining the Baha'i Faith(1959); moving away from my home town and my mother(1966); coming to Australia(1971); marrying first Judy and then Chris(1967 and 1975, respectively); teaching in various places(1967 to 1999); and starting to write poetry seriously in 1992. These are certainly highlights, but there are also other factors, other steps, involved in determining this 'destiny.' The poem below tries to deal with what seems to me to be a complex issue with so much that is provisional, uncertain and dependent on those Brides of inner meaning.² -Ron Price with thanks to ¹"Notes on Thomas Hardy," Internet, 4 January 2002; and ² Baha'u'llah, The Book of Certitude, p.175.
This sense of destiny did not begin
to materialize in my mind with any force
until the end of my young adulthood,
at least two decades into pioneering
and, having begun, it has been slowly
evolving in these my middle years¹}connected as it is with the mystic world
at the very centre and ground of my being,
where archaic mysteries have been restored
before my eyes with a revitalizing spiritual
energy released and wafted over all creation.²}
I certainly see myself, now, after six decades
of life, as the inheritor, potential bearer and
promoter of historical forces struggling for
emergence, consciousness, fulfilment and
communication, part of: the greatest drama
in the world's spiritual history in which I arise
resolutely and unreservedly to play my part;³}yes, indeed, in this strange eventful history

which seems like a vapour in the desert.⁴
1 young adulthood: 20-40; middle adulthood: 40-60.
^{2 This idea comes from (i) the opening lines of the Tablet of Carmel and (ii) an article in World Order(Summer 1983) on the poetry of Robert Hayden.
^{3 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p.26.
^{4 Shakespeare, As You Like It; and Baha'u'llah, Writings.
Ron Price
5 January 2002
LIVING THE LIFE
I think it was in the late 1960s, perhaps the early 1970s, that I first heard Williams Sears, Bob Quigley and some of the Baha'i friends in California on a cassette tape. The subject was "living the life," a study class on teaching the Cause. I again heard the tape in October 2003, this time on a CD sent to Baha'is in Australia by the National Assembly. I remember my general reaction to Bill Sears and company in an Australian context just after I first arrived here. He and the whole modus operandi of the tape seemed "too American" to go down well. This time, thirty years later, the content and style of the material seemed quite fitting. Indeed, it seemed spot on.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, October 8th, 2003.
Did I hear your honesty back then, Bill?
Your little band of men--and women—
said it so well. Explained why things
take time: the inner life and private

character however much they change
always seem to leave so much to be desired...
always so much perfecting needing to be done.

And my tranquil heart, so much more tranquil
than it ever was back then is still rocked by the
sea of life: inner life and private character

still has so far to go to mirror forth in their

manifold aspects those eternal truths
proclaimed by Baha'u'llah.¹
1 Shoghi Effendi, Guidance for Today and Tomorrow, quoted on the CD: "Commemorative Service for the William Sears Prayer Pavilion."
Ron Price
October 8th 2003
A GLORIOUS EMERGENCE
1937 was a big year for Dizzy Gillespie. It was a big year for the Baha'i community. 1937 was the year that the formal and organized teaching Plans of the Baha'i community began. In 1937 Dizzy went to New York. It was here that he met Charlie Parker who also came to New York three years later in 1940. The Seven Year Plan, 1937-1944, saw a secret musical energy or fire develop in the jazz world, especially toward the end of the Plan when Charlie and Dizzy played together. It was all part of an exceptional moment in jazz and they called that moment--swing. It was full of innovation, experimentation, improvisation, heart and soul, a new artistic emotion. Dizzy represented the intellectual core of this new music. By 1942 a new phase, a second phase, in the history, the life of jazz, had begun. The first phase had lasted from 1917 to 1942 or so argued Ken Burns and the producers and directors of this new TV series on jazz. The following prose-poem, I should add in conclusion, draws on the words of Shoghi Effendi in the collection of his letters: 1932-1946. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "Jazz: Swinging With Change-Episode 7," September 21st, 2003, 5:00-6:00 pm.
It was one of the most brilliant episodes
in the history of the Formative Age.
The structural basis of the Administrative
Order had been firmly laid by these champion--
builders in the greatest collective enterprise
and the first half-century had ended.

It had been trumpeted in, this new phase,
by a new sound. It had been swung-in
heart and soul, a secret musical energy
or fire which, by 1942, saw the glorious
emergence of a firmly-welded incorruptible
Baha'i community, assuming its rightful place
at the forefront of the world-wide spiritual
army of Baha'u'llah.
Ron Price
22 September 2003
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A LOST GENERATION
The first talking picture premiered on Broadway in 1926, at the end of the first stage(1922-1926)¹ of the evolution of American National Spiritual Assembly and in the middle of the first phase of Baha'i Administration.(1922-1929).²Broadway reached an all-time peak in these years. In 1927 there were 268 plays in New York. In the 1970s there were only 50 to 60 plays in any year. During this phase the American Baha'is adopted the basic principles of Baha'i Administration which are still utilized today. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who dramatized the exuberance and many of the excesses of these years in his novels and his short stories, observed of this period that "it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire."²-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Loni Bramson-Lerche, "Development of Baha'i Administration," Studies in Babi & Baha'i History, Vol.1, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, p.260 and ²p.256; and ³F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Literature of the Jazz Age," Larry Carlson, Internet, September 21st, 2003.
These were the first years of a conscious
following of Baha'i laws and teachings,
a national consciousness, organized
connections between National and Local
Assemblies sharpening, as it does now,
our perception of his¹ unequaled
significance and accomplishments.
And during these years they fixed their
gaze upon the Order of Baha'u'llah,²}part of a grand design that prevented a
pandemonium of factions and allowed
Baha'i experience to fuse in that new
and unknown institution of the Guardian,³}offspring of His interpretive mind and
co-sharer in a unique genius of that divine
interpretation and explanation of meaning.

And all this in an age of miracles with its
new liberation, its exceptional literary
creativity, great works of the mind by
a 'Lost Generation.'⁴
1 Shoghi Effendi described by Glenford Mitchell in "The Literature of Interpretation," World Order, Winter 1972-3, p.13.
^{2 The Bab quoted in The World Order of Baha'u'llah, Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, 1955, pp.146-7. ³ G. Mitchell, op.cit., p.15. ⁴Term coined by Gertrude Stein.
-Ron Price,21 Sept. 2003.
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BOOKENDS
I would call these decades 1917 to 1937 bookends, if you like, because between these marking years, these demarcation points, the student will find so much that defines the Baha'i community as an international group, a people, a philosophy and a faith. A great sense of expectation, of millenarianism, types of mild and extreme apocalypicism, Baha'i beliefs for the most part ignored, unacceptable or just arousing indifference within western sensibilities, a strong encouragement to teach, people with stories of long searches and finding this new faith, tensions in the community from varied sources; a non-sectarian, non-denominational, inclusive movement centered around the teachings of the Bab, Baha'u'llah, 'Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi, a predominant image of liberalism with an absolute authority structure requiring obedience and, hence, generating some of that tension and, finally among a long list of features, an emphasis on good deeds, good works and a strong sense of morality. At the same time in the outside, the wider, community, a pessimistic hedonism and a growing despair, an inclination to extremes of democracy, liberal and conservative and, inevitably, total disillusionment and indifference.-Ron Price with thanks to Peter Smith, "American Baha'i Community," Studies in Babi & Baha'i History: Vol.1, Moojan Momen, editor, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, pp. 135-194.
The magnitude of the ruin had just begun
as that first bookend was put in place,
a catelogue of horrors darker than the
darkest of ages past: the most turbulent
tempest had begun to blow. But hope
sprang eternal as it always does, some
fortuitous conjunction of circumstances,
it was thought, would make it possible
to bend the conditions of human life into
conformity with prevailing human desires
at this great turning point, this climacteric.¹
1 Century of Light, Universal House of Justice, Forward.
Ron Price
21 September 2003
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NAVIGATION
Just as Homer's Odysseus is compelled to navigate his way through all kinds of contrary forces in that classical western epic, so, too, is Baha'u'llah compelled by the forces of fate and circumstance to navigate His way through tides of misery, abasement and of overflowing tribulations¹in His spiritual journey. So, too, must we battle on without being able to view the whole scheme or itinerary. For ours, like theirs, is a partial vision and this poetic narrative that I have constructed is articulated on this basis and the irreducibility of life's continuous movement.² Life's hell, for them and for us, "can be overcome only in the restoration and elucidation of the world in a system of law and fixed positionality."³ -Ron Price with thanks to ¹Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, 1957, p. 191 and ^2&3Alan Durant, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis, the Harvester Press Ltd., Brighton, 1981, p.47.
I'd say that who someone is can be known
because we all live together and depend on
each other to tell our story from birth to death,
to define the 'who I am.' There is no flattening
out of uniqueness here, but there is mystery
and intangibility; there is intelligibility through
language and being a subject, through narration
of my life-story, in a life-span, a structure,
an uncontrollable narrative impulse of memory.

But I am not just a story; I'm not reducible to
contents; this is not my identity, interwoven as
it is with story which belongs to me alone,
uniquely me in intercourse and isolation,
narratable, unstable, insubstantial, fragmented,
disjointed, striving, desiring, a unity of form
that manifests itself in this complex relation
between my life and my story.¹
1 Thanks to Paul Kottman, "Introduction," Relating narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Routledge, London, 2000, pp.vii-xxiii.
Ron Price
July 31, 2003
________________
ENERGIZE
This evening I watched as Hollywood's academy award winners paraded onto my TV screen. I am not sufficiently interested in the content or the process of this four hour program to watch for the entire sequence of time, but in the half hour I did watch I saw award winners going back to 1936. The film industry, beginning in the ministry of 'Abdu'l-Baha, has brought an immense amount of pleasure, entertainment, stimulation, understanding and insight to millions, nay, billions of people around the planet. Of course, films got in forty, perhaps, fifty years, before TV and, together, these two mediums have enriched the lives of people all around the world. I think it more than coincidental that all of this has coincided with the release of Baha'u'llah from the restrictions of His earthly life. The radiance of His soul was no longer beclouded by His human temple. His "soul could henceforth energize the whole world to a degree unapproached at any stage in the course of its existence on this planet."¹-Ron Price with thanks to WIN TV, "75th Academy Awards," 7:30-11:30 pm, 24 March 2003 and ¹Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p.244.

He had done His job
and the light spread
all across the planet:
in windows, streets,
screens and rooms,
a new radiance,
a dazzling brightness,
a glow, an illumination
of the very fringes of earth.

It was a light baptized in fire,
made an ash of civilization's
foundations and sent us through
a grievous ordeal which has left
traces on the hearts of an age
and given it a new darkness.

And so: light and darkness
fill our lives now with pleasure
and pain and while we are
entertained the wars, the terror,
the cares and the afflictions
bewilder and confuse humanity.

And we slowly learn while we watch
that lighted and chirping box that all
humanity is now our concern.¹
1 This is a revolutionizing principle. The Universal House of Justice, May 24,2001.
-Ron Price 24 March 2003
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THIS WILDERNESS
After nearly four years of 'retired' life away from the classroom, I have developed a system of classifying information for use in any 'serious' writing that I want to do. It is a system that can be changed, altered and expanded. Increasingly, in the last decade and especially since I ceased employment in 1999, a vast amount of material to read has appeared on the Internet. So much is this true that it provides a more relevant library for me than the public or academic libraries I used to use. In the last two days I have organized and filed many new articles on religion and the Baha'i Faith. One of the articles was a piece on Horace Holley and the following poem is based on that piece.
As I near the age of sixty I am increasingly in a well-organized position to write for the print and electronic media to obtain exposure for the Baha'i Cause as it comes out, more and more, of obscurity. I can draw on: history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies, philosophy, writing, literature, religion, the Baha'i Faith, biography, autobiography, among other disciplines. Let it now be seen what writing unfolds in the years ahead. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 December 2002.
I saw today that Horace Holley
resigned from the NSA in '59
and he died a year later just
when my own story was beginning
its long haul. He certainly went the
distance: 1919 to 1959 which is as
long as anyone is expected to go:
forty years in this wilderness¹}as the foundation was laid for
an Administration that is the nucleus
of a new World Order.

I've had my forty years: 1962 to 2002
on the pioneering front and, if those
mysterious Dispensations of Providence
allow, I may get another forty: 2002 to 2042.
We shall see.
^{1 Baha'u'llah, "Long Obligatory Prayer," Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985, p. 13.
Ron Price
6 December 2002
MAKING OUR LIVES SUBLIME
About 400 million years ago various amphibians moved onto the land for the first time. If someone had chanced by and stepped on them the evolutionary process would have been quite a different story. So is this true of our own species. If we were to be snuffed out in these days of what often seems like our apocalyptic late adolescence, the story 400 million years from now would inevitably be a different one. I was reminded of this idea while reading the introduction to Thomas Carlyle Selected Writings (Penguin, Ringwood, 1971, p.15). The editor Alan Shelston wrote that Carlyle had a passionate belief in "the uniqueness of the individual experience set against the eternal and limitless perspectives of Time and Space." Carlyle saw human beings as "the miracle of miracles-the great inscrutable mystery of God."¹-Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings, p.15.
In these last days of spring
before a Tasmanian summer
I am reminded that we are
God's mystery and He is ours¹}with the conflux of two eternities
beckoning from the remotest
past and some awesome future.
Yes, time and space, wide and fair,
is our estate. You² were right, though,
there was something special about your
time, your century, and which you conveyed
in your special writing and which He conveyed
in His from prison and exile.

The ultimate inspirational hero had appeared,
little did you know, to be the apotheosis of
the revelation in the world, the agent of Divine
Purpose: time, definitely shaped, inevitable,
predetermined, waiting and unseen--to remind
us that we can make our lives sublime.
^{1 Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, p.177.
^{2 Thomas Carlyle
Ron Price
24 November 2002
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