This was one way to commemorate

or was it celebrate

the end of a working life?

Day after day, night after night,

while I ate my evening meal

I watched them dropping bombs,

shooting in the streets,

in cities, towns and villages

up in Yugoslavia's hills,

target after target

in that lighted chirping box.

I'd had my war, too,

without guns and jets

against the confused

background of a planet

and an unmistakable trend

towards the Lesser Peace.

Consciously involved

in a vast historic process,

describing as best I could

my twofold date with destiny,

with traces in my memory

which would last forever,

having begun to define

in quite specific detail

the mark I had made

over three epochs.¹

For without a soul-satisfying

answer, a soul-satisfying mark,

what was the point of it all?

In classrooms, for over twenty-five years, I generated intense emotion or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that the classrooms in which I taught were, for the most part, stimulating places. That was my job. It was called motivating students. Now that I have left the classroom, except on rare occasions when I am in one of those formal ‘teaching’ modes as a lecturer or facilitator, I have little interest in motivating people to do things by this old 'classroom technique.' After stimulating others, after trying to increase the awareness of my fellow human beings, twenty-five hours a week, forty weeks a year, for some 25,000 total hours, I do not have much interest in having an impact on the lives of others, except through my poetry and, when the occasion arises, through my religion.

How I will do this in the remaining part of my life will be through a combination of the two. This flowering synthesis has just begun in recent years, since the winter of 1992.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 18 June 1999.

For many a long year

there has been

that feverish intensity,

enough to make

volumes of poetry.¹

Here, in this poetic, I can:

adorn the heaven of understanding,

watch the waves of an ocean of utterance,

be led to the wellspring of bounty,

show forth what will cause me to be remembered,

bow down in lowliness,

humble myself before Thy commandments,

submit to Thy sovereignity and

entreat Thy grace.²

Ron Price

18 June 1999

 ¹ one source of poetry is the experience of the poet. This is autobiographical poetry. H.D. Lawrence wrote autobiographical novels strongly based on his experience.

This poem tries to present an overview of one of my strong feelings/thoughts of the past and where I go to from here. This is the eve of my final term of teaching, what may be the final thirty-nine days in the profession in front of a class of students.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 7 February 1999.

I learned to speak everyone’s language,

could talk the back-side-off-a-barn-door,

one of those clever dude’s, well-liked,

the friendly Canadian.

I had to to get all those jobs

and teach all those kids in all those towns.

And now, after all those years, I want out;

I want to stop talking all that stuff

to all those people.

It does not turn me on much

being the centre stage,

being well-regarded,

being thought the ants’ pants;

I’m tired of all that endless gas-bagging.

I want to go out to pasture

and just chew my own cud.

After forty years of trying to slip in a word,

let them know the truths,

the sparkling gems of a new Revelation,

I’m going to take some other kind of seat

where people don’t come in big batches.

I want to turn off, tune in and drop out.

It’s my turn after four decades of fighting

the battle. I’ve run out of steam;

I’m going to change all the parameters of the fight,

find a new venue

for its intransigence, its implacability.

I seem to seek the Friend

and love the enemy, still.

Will, this, my new assault on heaven

guarantee attention?

I am a sorry soldier. My camp is in ruins.

I am weary from a battle far prolonged.

Tomorrow, dawn will take me

to new engagements,

as I plan my slow exit from the scene

and a recouping of forces.

 Ron Price

7 February 1999

I prefer to view Conrad’s marriage as really a means toward his major and dominant preoccupation: to establish the best terms on which he could continue as an author. -Frederick J. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1979, p.367.

The real movers of society may be, not the thinkers and actors on the real stage of the world, but the comparatively insignificant members, those who contribute to what she calls "light literature" including her autobiography.-Helen Thomson, editor, Catherine Helen Spence, University of Queensland Press, 1987, pp.490-491.

When I was in that phone box

back in ‘75 and I had to decide

I saw you as the best terms

on which I could continue

my religious enthusiasm

without obstruction.

That had always been

my dominant preoccupation.

That was the most important

decision of my life, as it turned out.

Of course, there were other considerations

like "I’d be good for you"

and "you’d be good for me"

which one could put in so many ways.

And you have and I have

and here we are twenty years later

in ‘95 with our religious enthusiasms in place

and, all being well, we should go the distance,

but one never knows for sure.

Ron Price

5 October 1995

Bruce Dawe wrote a poem "Selkirk College" in which he talks about many of his students who were "widows and deserted women." For years I taught mostly women, many of who were widows, some who left their husbands and some who were deserted. I had similar experiences to Dawe. The following poem attempts to describe these experiences.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, ‘99

They’re coming back;

I’ve seen them for years,

met them in classrooms,

in corridors, in libraries,

in cafeterias, on campus:

had many a long yarn.

Embattled they were,

single mothers,

nursing alone

through sickness and

the frightening night,

seasoned victims

of domestic war,

I always found them

beautiful and tough.

Could have married one

from a dozen or more,

but I already had,

tough and beautiful she was.

Nerve-wracked,

they often were,

embittered,

disillusioned,

doggedly persistent,

with a fortitude

that quietly taught me

about a strength I, too,

would need,

to carry me through

to life’s long end.

---Ron Price, 15 October 1999

SOME DIVINE VITALITY

Eight years before Wordsworth passed away in 1850, he wrote a poem whose title was: "A poet!-He hath put his heart to school." The following poem draws significantly from this poem of Wordsworth's. The master, the schoolhouse, indeed, the curriculum and the system of instruction for me is also Wordsworth's Nature, the world of physical reality, but over and above nature, the "Source of all glory and majesty", Baha'u'llah, the prophetic figure of this age whose growing influence is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history(1), provides, for this poet, the basis for his personal sifting mechanism, the interpretation of physical reality and its meaning. -Ron Price with thanks to the Baha'i International Community, Baha'u'llah, 1992, p.1

Yes, I put my heart to school

under the Master of Love

in the schoolhouse of oneness

and did live current quaff,

although at times a stagnant pool

and, more than that, quite dead.

But in the end, each time, it did

renew itself somewhere under

the metallic stars with sweet

new life, some divine vitality,

some blended holiness of earth

and sky that generated nerves

and sinews even as I did sigh

and susceptibilities of ear and eye.

Ron Price

25 November 2000

Examines the western intellectual tradition beginning with the Hebrews and the Greeks, through the Romans, Christianity, Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation into the Modern Age. A discussion/listening course suited to student taste and interest.

An introduction to the basic history of sociology as a discipline with special emphasis on sociological thoery.

An introduction to psychology focusing on the following topics: individual differences, sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, learning, language, human nature, group behaviour and major theorists

The approach taken here is known as ‘the intensive journal method.’ The method is discussed in detail each week, the experiences students have with their writing and with life and samples are also read and discussed. Writing forms like: autobiography, poetry, novel and short story are also examined.

The study of autobiography has become a sophisticated discipline in the last forty years. This course examines the field of autobiography. It also examines various approaches to the writing of autobiography: narrative, poetry. short story/novel.

This course offers an opportunity to look at poetry beginning with its first forms in ancient societies through to the modern age. It also offers opportunities to write poetry and discuss it.

A brief examination of the history of philosophy from the Greeks to the twentieth century. Lecturette/discussion.

For students having completed 'philosophy 1' and any others who would like to join the group. This course focuses on modern philosophy from 1600 to the present.

A brief study of the major religious systems from animism through to secular humanism in the 20^th century. Lecturette/discussion

This is an interdisciplinary course bringing: history, psychology, sociology and philsoophy into an integrated whole for students interested in these subjects and how they play a part in understanding society better.

Ron Price

27 August 2001

This booklet of poetry celebrates the first fifteen years of educational services from the Department of Human Services at the Thornlie Campus of the SEMC. The period 1985 to 1999 was one of immeasureable changes both within Thornlie as a provider of Tafe educational programs and within what was first 'welfare studies', then 'community services' and finally, in 1993, ‘human services’. The many founding fathers and mothers of Human Services will soon be gone and a ‘second generation’ will be taking their place as the new millennia approaches and enjoys its opening years.

There are so many individuals who were involved in the process over these many years, 1985 to 1999, people who could be seen as having laid the foundations at this College of a field of study which will continue to expand and play an important role in training what is a diverse sector of the labour market: Human Services. But there were three individuals who were central to the initiation and delivery of modules to the students enrolled in certificate and diploma courses.

This book is dedicated to those three who made the running of Human Services possible: John Bailey, Pat Katheappa and Ron Price. This booklet is also dedicated to the many casual and contract staff over these years who made the running of Human Services possible. Of these, Harold Pauner deserves mention because of his many years of service.

There were literally thousands of students who graduated from Human Services, Community Services and Welfare Studies programs in these years. To these students, as well, is this booklet dedicated.

It is not the intention of the author of this booklet to write a detailed or annecdotal statement of life within the intersticies of this department at the Thornlie Campus. Nor is it this author’s intention to provide a formal history of these foundation years, the last years of Tafe’s first century in Western Australia and the first decade of its second century.¹ Rather, it is his intention to provide a poetic statement, some thoughts which will hopefully be enjoyed by those who continue the labor in this growing interdisciplinary field of Human Services and, perhaps, some other sections of Thornlie College as well.

I hope you, as a future reader of this booklet, gain a helpful perspective on these early foundation years in this department, this section of Thornlie college. O hope, too, that you enjoy the poetry contained herein. The history that this poetry celebrates was an intense one, involving as it did five or, perhaps, six major shifts in curriculum and content. The labour of the personnel in this section has been immeasureable. I trust that readers will find here some sense of continuity and the beginnings of some sense of tradition for the important and, it would appear, difficult years ahead.

Ron Price

1 April 1999

The truth I convey may be, as he calls it, a "cunning snare, a crystal residue that is indissoluble in memory's stream", but the facts, say the recent eight months since my last update, are of little meaning if I am unable to write in an entertaining and engrossing way. For this reason, Leibowitz, moves style from the circumference to the centre of interpretation. I can see why Shoghi Effendi went to Oxford to work on his English for without his style, at the centre of his exegesis, the revelation would never have become the matchless gem that it did in English.

What can I say about another year as chairman of the LSA of Belmont, what may be the beginnings of the last year of my teaching career before retirement, another year of marriage and the family, however peaceful and conducive to the production of poetry, now some 3700 poems? Reading tonight how "the autobiographies of public men are especially prone to fictional embellishment", in particular Benjamin Franklin, I trust I will not ere by creating a model worthy of emulation. Far from it, I would think my autobiography is in many ways a model of how not to live. I do not want to recite what seems an endless list of sins of omissions and commissions. I do not want to publish a catalogue of virtues for some future generation to follow in a chirpy cheerfulness for others to copy. I want to tell it how it is. This is a difficult task, not so much due to problems associated with truth, as problems associated with style.

I am not here to produce a publicity handout nor am I here to please, to inform and to persuade like writing a piece of rhetoric. What I would like to do in this short update is to tell the story of these last few months. I think I can best do this by referring readers to the poetry I have written during this period. It tells more than I could possibly say here.

I think I could highlight the chief events in the last eight months in one paragraph; but what would it achieve beyond a list of facts, events, experiences and feelings that gave me pleasure, anxiety, guilt or a number of other sensations and thoughts. My desire to write of these events is barely existent. The day-to-day routine and any enduring commentary wall not be found in these pages. Partly this is due to disheartenings, to an immense repetitiveness in the daily activity and to a certain sadness. Even pleasure, always delectable, had become stale in some respects.

I did not inherit a fixed historical role as men and women did in previous centuries. On becoming a Baha'i, nearly forty years ago now, the several roles that I was being socialized into took on new directions, although not initially apparent. I moved into a new theatre, a new dramaturgical scene filled with martyrs, heroes, saints and messengers as well as a language defining how to live expressed in great beauty. For me and for the Baha'i community, then and now, was a world beckoning to be explored, offering its treasures, its challenges and its opportunities for the slow growth of a new order, a new way of life, a new civilization. This autobiography is the story of one of its members and how he spent his life in this new theatre which he became more and more familiar with as the stage and setting changed with the years, evolving into new forms as his own needs and those of his community altered.

New currents were flowing, as I have already indicated in previous statements perhaps as far back as 1992. They flowed in the dried-up springs of the old. After nearly ten years of serving on local spiritual assemblies in metropolitan Perth and after nearly twenty-seven years of overseas pioneering I was experiencing the endless waves of the same alternation: joy and sorrow, gain and loss, success and failure, sickness and health. So much of the downside of this experience was associated with my Baha'i community life here in a city of over a thousand Baha'is, many wonderful souls from Iran. Many beautiful and talented women, young and older and many talented men providing a rich mosaic of people that I was, for the most part, not able to enjoy.

This endless trap of repitition, part of life's necessary spin, was the outside world which engaged my senses day after day in alternating feelings of richness, fatigue and frustration. Inside, a new world had opened up, 'wholly and spiritually glorious' as one Baha'i Writer put it, through the venue of poetry. New and wonderful configurations deriving from the power of thought took precedence over all created things, as 'Abdu'l-Baha put it on the opening page of The Secret of Divine Civilization. To a large extent these configurations are found in my poetry and the reader who would want to measure the last eight months of my life would have to turn to the poetry and the related booklets with the dates on each poem.

The other genres are also useful, of course, especially the letters. My correspondence with John Bailey, one of my fellow lecturers, probably has the continuity and content to make it a useful comment on the type of teaching involved with a large part of Australia which thinks but which is not attracted to religion. My diary and my essays have such little content as to hardly deserve a mention.

The reader of this autobiography will not be subjected to the fringes of a parade with a sea of abstract and concrete faces passing by in stupefying numbers with the occasional person rising from the mass with their clear features, their eventful, pithy and pertinent contribution to my own story. Such a reader who has come this far has had enough of such people rising from the ashes of the everyday. Shaping the shapeless, giving form to an endless stream of events finds its chief expression through the chalice of a new revelation without which I have little doubt none of this would ever have been written.

Some of my most successful experiences in teaching came in the last eight months; I have included some sample feedbacks in my 'letters file: Vol.5' to give an idea of a representative sample from a lifetime of seed-planting in classrooms. I certainly felt the surge of power, purpose and initiative conscious as I was that this new Faith was getting an airing, getting some exposure, however limited and indirect for the most part. I had become, by the 1990s, a manager of interaction with a lower-key role as stimulating provocateur. By 1998 I was tired of managing.

2June 1998

As Price’s pioneering life moved on from place to place he taught children, adolescents and then adults, from age 3 to 63, and an incredible array of subjects, mostly self-taught: sociology, history, psychology, human relations, behavioural studies, the history of ideas, social sciences, English literature, politics, ancient history, welfare studies, communication studies, media studies, management studies, philosophy, anthropology, and on and on. Yes, it was solitary work, but the teaching of it was inevitably social, interactive, always spurred on by his desire to sew divine seeds for future harvests and, by the fourth epoch, a certain other-worldly ambition. Although many of his students came to be close to him few, except in 1972, acquired this new loyalty. Although his faith was shaken severely on two, perhaps three, occasions, it weathered the storms, the tempest, that was harrowing up the souls of mankind. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript.

As need and curiosity prompted, Shaw taught himself shorthand and bookkeeping, penmanship and public speaking, economics and etiquette, score-reading and dialogue writing-most of it solitary work spurred on by a kind of other-worldly ambition...Shaw never had disciples...He added to his information or shifted his batteries, but his faith has been the same since its first stilted expression in the early fiction. -Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern, Harper and Brothers, NY, 1956, p.251.

So much of what we do and think

has unknown origins and goes

toward unknown destinations,

has nothing to do with the moral,

but is simply part of the vague,

multiform spectacle of human life,

where tendencies are so various,

circumstances too complex,

for a single definition.

Then, there are those moments

when we are alone, deeply,

on a summer day with the sky

lonely and blue, pure,

and I am not running,

thrust into the maelstrom,

the busyness of it all.

This presence of God

vanishes with others

unless I keep remembering:

I ripen all that I write in the dark,

waiting for the death of self,

that I may be nothing

and walk,untrapped by mind,

my heart made ready

for the descent of heavenly grace.*

Ron Price

15 September 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p. 51.

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, some neutral facticity.

Ron Price

22 October 1995

There’s alot of people doing it: teaching poetry, reading poetry, editing poetry journals, mailing poems to poetry journals, keeping track of poetry grants and contests like inveterate race buffs for track tips, networking poetry, organizing poetry lobbying and poetry-for-social change, promoting poetry therapies, reviewing poetry. There is a new breed of organization poets, with their workshops for poetry, identity poetry, language poetry: and there is a great mass with no interest in poetry whatsoever. -Ron Price with thanks to Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990, Urbana Illinois, 1996.

Some organize aviaries, some bake,

some cook, some don’t, some are into elephants,

rhinos, flowers, growth, hats, shoes or image.

There seems to be someone

into just about everything imaginable.

Now poetry is one of these things

and I’m into it in a big way.

It all happened only recently

and quite without my planning it:

seductively, unobtrusively.

And here I am writing about writing poetry!

I’m not doing this for a degree, for publication,

but for the love of poetry, of devotion to a Faith,

to express my beliefs, my acts, my past, these days,

as accurately as I can, a means to an end--

to advance civilization in a miniscule way,

a part played in a whole,

because we can all count,

can all affect the totality,

both now and in the future.

Ron Price

11 May 1996

My pioneering days began the year Marshall McLuhan pegged the phrase ‘global village’ in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. This was 1962, the year before the Kennedy assassination and Viet-Nam, the living-room war. This pioneering venture began about ten months before the first election of the Universal House of Justice. The Lesser Peace seemed to loom on the horizon, on the horizon of our days, then and now. -Ron Price, "A Reflection on the Years Before the Lesser Peace", Unpubished Essay.

From 1988 to 1993 I taught a course in ancient history: Greece in the fifth century BC and Rome from 133 BC to 14 AD. I was enthralled by the many parallels between our own age and these two ancient societies. This poem is a reflection on one of the many points of comparison.-Ron Price, 4 October, 12:10 pm, Rivervale, WA.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the days

before a latter-day Pentecontaetia¹,

a modern half-century: on the gentle side,

crazy days, decades of slow building,

burning, some staggering burgeoning,

hot tears of light amidst a sea of darkness

in this Formative Age,

an age amusing itself to death

on rehearsed spontaneity

and immense triviality,

some long night before the dawn,

on the brink, years of the tempest

with bleeding humanity

brought to its knees

in a common remedial effort,

a new spiritual and moral attitude,

some collective identification

with catastrophe, shock and trauma

contained in obsessions: Liz, Marilyn

and Elvis and anchor men

with Oprah Winfrey, ET

Shwarznegger, monopoly, scrabble

and Sylvia Plath blowing it all away

just before the House was elected,

an apex crowning a new Order

growing slowly, unobtrusively amidst

the detritus and exploding knowledge

of this latter age:

years before the Lesser Peace.

Ron Price

4 October 1996

glisten in the sun, rain-soaked,

outside my window while honey-eaters

drop by to suck sweetness

into their yellow faces.

White clouds, gleaming bright

roof of eternity, trail their splendour

into my eyes like some Israfil²

bringing life to my spirit,

dried up with the years,

teaching me to turn away

from myself to become wholly Thine,

attain the lights of the Beloved

in this last plane of limitation³

among the Kunzia, the clouds,

the rain and the honey-eaters.

Ron Price

27 September 1996