PIONEERING
OVER 4 EPOCHS
INTRODUCTION
A leopard adorns the opening of this website. An opportunistic, single and versatile hunter, the leopard is often used in heraldry and on coats of arms. My use of it here is largely accidental. When my son and I were creating this second edition of my website in 2001 this photo was available and we stuck it in to provide a visual stimulus. I have kept it here as part of my introduction. What follows is a collection of writings from a quite solitary person or, should I say, a person who has become more solitary with age, who has developed what he likes to think is at least partly a versatile and opportunistic content and style. Like the leopard, too, I eat meat but, unlike the leopard, I do not climb trees, at least not any more. The leopard and I also part company in that I write poetry and prose. The leopard, then, at the top lefthand corner of this access page to my website has proved, in a somewhat serendipitous fashion, to be an appropriate opening image.
I feel I must apologize at the outset for the lack of a friendly website layout. User-friendliness is crucial on the internet as it is in many other of life’s mise en scenes, to use a French expression that is often seen in English. My site lacks this friendliness or so I have been informed by some. There is no navigation-chart on the top of this home page, this access page, to tell readers what can be found at this site. In addition this home/access page is very wordy for many a modern reader who prefers pictures, photos, visual inserts of various kinds some of which move and some of which are accompanied by sound-sequences, short spurts of print or even no print at all. The colours of the many fonts at this site also need to be toned-down a bit to prevent readers from the occasional semi-blinding colour. So I have been told.
It would also be useful, I have also been informed on more than one occasion, if this home page contained an outline of what is on my site--and it does--but only after many pages of reading, of scrolling down—near the very bottom of this access page. I have been advised to condense the content of this home page and add that navigation chart right at the top, as I have mentioned. Others who have come to my site and left have later advised me, in an email or in a response at some internet site, to place my introduction on a separate page linked to this home page. The links at the very bottom of this home page need fixing, adjusting and having their colours altered among other changes. And so it is that....
I have received much advice in relation to making improvements to this site. Of course this is nothing new. I had been receiving advice for nearly sixty years before this third edition of my website went online in 2003. Receiving advice is part of living like air, water, food and a wide range of essentials that come one’s way out of necessity, sometimes asked and sometimes unasked. I have also given much advice; life consists of much giving and receiving of advice much of which acts as a weight for the recipients, especially if they are unable or don’t want to implement it. Sadly, I have no web design skills and, after trying to get help from other sources and being a bit slow on the technical-mechanical side of life or, perhaps, just lacking in persistence--or both--I have left this site as it is—with this opening apology to cover all these idiosyncrasies, site weaknesses and personal deficiencies.
Readers will find here a large body of poetry and prose spread over some 1800 pages and 450,000 words. At 300 pages and 75,000 words as one of the definitions of a book, this gives readers here the equivalent of six books. This material was written either from my home in George Town in northeast Tasmania from 1999 to 2008 or while living in Belmont, a suburb of metropolitan Perth in Western Australia from 1995 to 1999 in my final years as a full-time teacher, lecturer and member of a large Baha’i community. After being exposed to poetry from my conception in October 1943 by a mother imbued with poetry’s influences; after writing only occasional poems for thirty years, 1961 to 1991; after teaching in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools during the twenty-five year period, 1967 to 1992; after thirty years of periodic episodes of bipolar disorder, 1963 to 1993; after receiving various treatments for that disorder and achieving total compliance with my 1980 treatment by 1991; after going as far as I could go and wanted to go in my professional work as a teacher and my academic study as a student by 1993; after 40 years of association(1953-1993) with a Movement which claimed to be the emerging world religion on the planet; indeed, after a range of other experiences that readers can find described in my 2600 page memoirs(1)---I began to write poetry more seriously and extensively in that Holy Year of May 1992 to May 1993, the year that commemorated the centenary of the ascension of Baha’u’llah. That year was "an auspicious juncture" in the history of this Faith as the Universal House of Justice described that twelve month period in its annual Ridvan message in April 1992. And auspicious it was in a very personal sense; for in that year a poetic, a literary, efflorescence began, an efflorescence which has not ceased sixteen years later.
Largely through the assistance of my son Daniel who was then in the middle of his four year mechanical engineering degree at Curtin University, I acquired my first website in 1997. I began to put my poetry on the site--poetry written, as I say above, in and after 1995. I had been writing poetry for thirty-five years by 1997. I also placed essays on my website. I had been writing essays for academic institutions by then for thirty-five years: 1957 to 1992; I had been writing essays of varying lengths for publication in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and journals as early as 1964 in Ontario, 1972 in South Australia, 1976 in Victoria, 1979 in Tasmania, 1983 in the Northern Territory; and in 1988 while living in Western Australia.
After trying to write novels, science-fiction and books unsuccessfully for another twenty years for a popular as well as an academic market from 1983 to 2002, I published a book on the poetry of a Canadian, Roger White(2). A little of that book is found here as well. Anyone wanting to read that book can download its entire 300 pages at:
http://bahai-library.org/books/white. After working on my memoirs or autobiography from 1984 to 2003, yet another twenty year block of time, I finally came up with an autobiographical context and style that I was happy with and readers can access some of this 2600 page, five volume work, at the bottom of this page or go to eBookMall or Lulu.com and download various parts of that work. Also included in this 3rd edition of my web site are several essays, interviews, book reviews and an assortment of autobiographical and analytical material which I have included as introductions or embellishments to the forty-three categories of poetry and commentary listed below. The list of these categories, as I say, can be seen below at the end of this access page or introduction. There is an extended analysis of my poetry, my autobiography and my religion in many places on this website and at many others places on the internet which I will not list here for fear of prolixity.(3)The overall intent in all of this writing is to provide a framework of understanding for a life, our lives, a religion and a society under the title: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This framework is not one that attempts to be sequential, comprehensive, set in some theoretical and intellectual setting for an academic world; nor is the framework I provide one that attempts to appeal to a popular, mass audience with light and humorous asides, with many a reference to the content of a populist print and electronic media which tends to occupy the agenda of millions throughout the planet. In the world of publishing I am a small player in a burgeoning world of print, a small player in an immense ballpark. Fame, rank and name has not been my goal, although after writing something one likes to see it being read. Writing for me is the exercise of a talent that I enjoy within the context of a complex range of motivations that is part of my raison d’etre for writing.
My poetry and prose is read by many thousands of readers on the internet but, as yet, none of my prose-poetry is published in a hard cover. Also, in spite of having more readers than I ever could have imagined even as late as 2001 when the second edition of this website went online, any degree of wealth that I have accumulated is meagre in the extreme. In the five years of publishing on the internet at eBookMall, 2001 to 2008 I have received only $1.49. At 21 cents coming in per annum and fame diffused over literally thousands of websites in time frames measured in nanoseconds, my concerns for and interest in fame and wealth as well as their associated encomiums and opprobriums remain moderate. I am not troubled as so many are by fame’s mixed blessings. Before I continue with this introduction on this access page let me cut-and-paste a summary of my internet work, a summary which conveys some of the context for how my extensive readership on the internet has come about since 2001.
MY TAPESTRY OF PROSE AND POETRY ON THE INTERNET
There are now several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved. Just as talkers like to have listeners, writers like to have readers and artists like to have geezers or, should I say, gazers.
I have been asked how this has come about, how I have come to have so many readers at my website and among the threads in the tapestry of writing I created across the world wide web. Let me describe this tapestry of writing briefly, a tapestry which for millions of internet users is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms. This tapestry is one I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft to put my product in as honorific a way as possible. I could also describe this garment of words as a tapestry that I have thrown together into a chaotic jig-saw puzzle of writing that would take a publisher some months to locate all the pieces should that publisher want to collate my literary efforts into one epic work, one large jig-saw puzzle for sale in book shops. This latter description of my literary opus, of course, is to put my wordsmith job, my wordy product, in a slightly pejorative way. But, however I express the process and the product, the resulting content across the internet is now found at thousands of websites. I have registered at: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views.
This cornucopia of places on the world-wide-web contains sites to place: essays and articles, books and ebooks, poems and prose-poems, pieces of memoir and autobiography, items of a diary and journal, genres of work with new names for a new age. The topics I write on and about range from: sport to entertainment, gardening to domestic and family life, poetry and literature, sociology and psychology, history and philosophy, society and culture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products there and engaged in discussions with thousands of people, little by little and day by day, one by one, a few at a time and often hundreds or even thousands at once. Given the flexibility of the internet so much has become possible in the last dozen years or so, just as I began my own internet site and just as I was finding the time to write. Not having to fill some 80 hours on average a week with the responsibilities of a job and various community responsibilities by 1999 I was free at last. Thank God, Almighty, I was free at last. I have come to enjoy these literary results bit by bit, little by little, over the last several years without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success and, more importantly, without uttering a word, without opening my mouth. After half a century(1951-2001) of an extensive verbal patter, from the deep and the meaningful to the practical and the essential, from the humorous and the serious to the trivial and the profound, from my middle childhood years to late middle age, I have been able to enjoy in these early years(60-65) of late adulthood(60 to 80) a more solitary style of life with much solitude, a style suited to my needs, wants and literary proclivities.
The last seven years of internet posting have been immensely rewarding. As I indicated above, when one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers. Talking has moved to the periphery of my life and writing has come centre-stage. It is almost impossible, though, to carry literary torches, literary flames, fires, sparks or burnt-out candles, tapers, embers or unlit lamps, lamps that went out long ago--as I do through internet crowds or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings at some sites on the web singe the beards of readers and my own are burned, metaphorically, occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting, indeed, I might add, of living. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of: (a) an intimate or not-so-intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental harmony or dissonance between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks.
In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulfs over the valleys of life are unbridgeable and not satisfying at all. One often wishes after having engaged one’s mouth or one’s pen, that it would have been wiser not to be so engaged. When this is the case at internet sites and when the site members or some of them are troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism but, rather, to stimulate thought and, as I say, share views. For me, dissension, dissidence, is a moral and intellectual contradiction of the main object animating my writing, namely, the establishment of and the contribution to the unity of humankind. The internet is an excellent place to have one’s writing soundly criticized or praised whether that writing is just a sentence or two, a casual remark or a paragraph, a page, a chapter or a book. One is somewhat insulated from the feedback, however positive or negative it may be; one is able to be more detached from the views of others, as one goes about the ongoing process of writing, if one never meets the person who espouses whatever views he or she may have of one’s work. Unlike verbal interchange which is a very different medium of communication, written material on the internet can be chewed over, reflected upon, often altered and, when others respond, one can think for a few minutes, hours or days—or, indeed, never respond at all.
Each writer, each poet, has their field of exploration in the world of the personal, the social, the intellectual or, indeed, any one or more of the myriad aspects of life. My gaze and exploration has a breadth, an ambit, a very wide range of topics and subjects that have become part of my study, my purview. The poet and the poem, the essay and the individual, the book and the society in which it exists are, from my point of view, inseparable, interdependent, interconnected in a host of logical as well as somewhat chaotic ways, many quite unknown to the writer. Each of these several dichotomies throws light on the other in a combination, a complex interaction pattern, that readers I hope will find a pleasurable juxtaposition if not frequently, at least occasionally. Such is my hope as I go about my writing and putting ideas onto my computer monitor and sometimes on paper.
Much of my poetry and prose can be found in the Baha'i World Centre Library in Haifa Israel several flights below the ground, below the International Teaching Centre in arguably the largest library in Israel. Some of this oeuvre, my literary opus of writing as it is sometimes called, can also be found in several Baha’i libraries in towns in Canada, Australia and England. To date I have written over six thousand five hundred poems and several million words. I have taken less and less interest in recent years in counting words or the number of poems, a necessary habit I got into as a student, then later as a teacher in the more than half a century I was in classrooms from 1949 to 2005 as well as a person in a society that measures so much of what one does in life by quantities, by statistics, my numerical entities. There are, perhaps, a hundred or so poems on this website but, again, who’s counting? Most of my poems have prose introductions. My poetry, it seems to me, is a sort of thinking out loud; it may be better to call my pieces prose-poems, what one writer-critic said was the most common form of poetry in the last 200 years.
I began writing for teachers and academics in the 1950s and 1960s to get my primary and secondary education and from 1963 to 1967 my university degree and teaching qualification. In 1967 I began, as a teacher, writing for my students and to pay my bills. In 1967 I began to teach Inuit children on Baffin Island. Writing and talking was how I had made my way in the world as a first as a child and adolescent and then in a long series of jobs and relationships. It was the way I made my way in life with time out for eating, sleeping, engaging in a variety of leisure activities, marriage and the family and a host of involvements in community and volunteer organizations. Writing and talking was the critical form of my modus operandi, my MO, as they say in the who-dun-its. It became the core of my survival package in this complex world. I came to realize this by degrees from my teens through my twenties, my years as a pre-youth and a youth, the years from, say, 15 to 30, 1959 to 1974.
As I indicated above, these skills have not made me either famous or rich, but they have helped me put a roof over my head and the heads of my wife and children. They have helped me pay the bills and get on to the next day. Such, in summary, appears to be at least part of the case, my case, my story, my life-narrative, after the passing of more than six decades writing for various publics.
This third edition(2003) of my website, the second(2001) and the first(1997)--all benefited from the help of my son, Daniel Price. This site, too, is part of a wider exercise of writing for a richly diverse public, a public I rarely if ever meet. After fifty years of a high sociability profile I do not mind leaving my writing for a public I do not meet. I meet the written word every day and that is my chief engagement. I have come to experience writing as a river, an ocean, a sea, of words and ideas from which I can dip into with relish as often as my body and brain keep me awake and with sufficient energy. Editing is an endless job and after a decade of making many additions, deletions and alterations to this website, I feel that in this third edition I have finally achieved a solid and consistent base of content which I can refine as the years go on. This is all I intend to do with this site in the years ahead: make the occasional alteration, deletion or addition. Any significant change will involve making a new website which, I trust, one day I will acquire. Some of the internet sites at which I have posted my writing and some of the blogs, diaries and journals, I have created at some of these sites amount, in various ways, to a series of my own websites, but this is a technical and tangential matter, indeed, partly a matter of definition as to what actually constitutes a personal website—and it is of little concern to me or readers here. The acquisition of a new website, a fourth edition, is not as pressing an issue as it once was on my personal writing and publishing-promotion agenda. With more people than I want to count with whom I correspond on occasion as a result--with literally millions of words now on the internet, quantities I have placed there since 2001--a concern for a personal, a revised, a more user-friendly website for a popular, populist, market has become a largely peripheral concern.
People who come to this site and find themselves attracted to the style and content of the writing may learn a great deal about society from my particular perspective. They may also learn little; they may not agree with what they read; they may not even be interested in the least degree; they may not find my particular perspectives, my cosmology, my worldview, to their taste. Every writer, indeed all human beings, must live with this possibility, with this potential reality. Readers may also learn about the nature and process of autobiography, about poetry, about the Baha'i Faith and about the individual in society. I would like to think that readers will gain some understanding of the chaotic panorama that is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—and the anarchy, complexity and immensely fascinating story that is history. This story, history that is, is, though, quite obscure, impossible to really take in due to its now massively documented narrative and, for many, just one great big mud-puddle. Some readers and writers now just ignore history in their effort to understand our times. For many it is as if anything before, say, WW2 just did not exist. To describe, then, the long stretch that is the history of humankind as I often do in my poetry, leaves many readers wishing they were watching a movie or working in the garden.
I think the angle, the perspective, I take is often a refreshing one. It is refreshing for me and if, some readers find my way of seeing things and writing about them refreshing, that is a bonus. For it is the approach, the mix, the take, I bring to the issues that makes this site relevant and attractive to readers, if it is attractive at all. At least that is one way of putting the stress, expressing the meaning and significance of what is found here at this site—among the many ways I might put my case before the unseen court of public opinion. After being a students from 1949 to 1967 and after teaching in classrooms across two continents from 1967 to 2005 I have no illusions about my readership. People learn in a variety of ways and not everyone is as enthusiastic about print as I was and am. "Those who can’t do, teach." This saying has some application to me for I was never a person with mechanical aptitudes or interests. Many of life’s activities, popular among the millions and billions, never turned me on. Sport after the age of 18; gardening from the word go; cars, cooking, clothes, shopping, even most of the books ever written have not been and will never be on my reading list—I could make a long list of other turn offs. "Those who can’t teach," it is also said, "they do research and write books." That seems to be where I am now at the age of 64.
I have no pretensions about my skills; living in Australia and teaching people with abilities far in excess of mine: people who could talk faster, knew more, were funnier, more handsome and personally attractive in a host of ways helped me keep a handle on my ego—at least some of the time—for that is a handle that keeps most of us busy most of the time if we are honest. Others have a problem with self-esteem, never think they are worthwhile and never seem to develop their capacities. In some ways this applies to all of us for our capacities, I think, are like rich mines, deep endowments and, this side of the grave, we all only develop so much, have many sins of omission and commission and destroy so much of what we could become in all sorts of ways. But I don’t want to be too didactic, too serious or solemn here for I am very aware of the perils of didacticism, solemnity and the serious in our modern world which is strongly imbued with the importance of having fun.
Readers can gain a knowledge of the various topics I deal with in many other places, by many other authors, in books and articles by literally thousands of writers. I recognize that what I write here is but a drop in the bucket of the burgeoning knowledge and literary explosion we are all living through in our age. This reality is true for all writers and all readers. Only a drop of our lives is ever conveyed in one go: in conversation, in personal contact, in a book, indeed, in any form of communication. As I say, there is, for me if not for others, a certain kind of inventiveness, a certain juxtaposition of themes, my own recipes, that makes what is here unique. Readers will simply have to try my writing on for size and see if it works for them, as it is said these days. If I do not meet, do not connect with the personal meaning threshold of a reader after he or she reads a few lines or paragraphs, they can easily click me off their radar. Clicking requires no effort. I take much pleasure from the act of writing and I hope, dear readers, you take something away from your time on this site that is of personal value.
The Irish writer, Frank McCourt, says that the best storyteller is one who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he's done. I'm not sure how much beguiling I've done or, indeed, if beguiling is one of my talents. The pleasure a reader gets at this site certainly depends on my talents, but much also depends on the reader at least now that I have placed my work in cyberspace. I am aware, though, as one writer put it rather humorously, that publishing poetry is like dropping a feather in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sound of the feather hitting the rocks or the river below. I don't expect to shake the world with what I've written here. Perhaps, though, with that feather I may gently stroke the world. With hundreds of thousands of words one can do a lot of stroking.
Since the Baha'i Faith has a range of websites and an increasingly large literature, too much for the average person to ever read it all, no attempt is made here to provide material that can be obtained elsewhere in many places on the internet, in books and journals, inter alia. I have given this website the title Pioneering Over Four Epochs because this title captures for me the general framework within which I have come to view my life. It is my pioneering life and the Baha'i Faith that is at the centre of this website. Readers are advised to go directly to section 16 below for my 'pioneering' link, if that is their primary interest. But I would think this will rarely be the case and each reader who seriously examines this site will browse about in their own individual way. My poetry and prose, my commentary and analysis, in its various forms here is what makes this website different than any of the poetry sites--and there are hundreds of them--I have surveyed on the net and unique among the published books and articles currently available in Baha'i bookshops or on the internet. I like to think, then, that there is something fresh, something original, something that is different from other learning places, something that will stimulate readers who come to this site. There is certainly a lot of writing or words here at this site, far too many I imagine for a good deal of the reading audience in cyberspace. But readers can switch me off, as I say, at any time even before they have begun. Such are the perils of too many words!
I should say, be up-front, as they say colloquially these days: if you have little to no interest in the Baha’i Faith, if your curiosity was not whetted before you got to this site and if it is not whetted by now, I strongly advise you click off and go elsewhere. There is no need for you to wade through 400,000(circa) words however well stitched together and ingenious they may be. This new Faith which claims to be the emerging world religion on the planet is a pervasive theme at this website. It has been a pervasive theme of my life since the early 1960s. It is the key sifting mechanism, the paradigmatic framework, the chiaroscuro, the major mise en scene, the core cosmology that underpins and inspires this website of 43 parts.
When I want to engage a group of people at an internet site that is concerned with debate, dialogue, apologetics, discussion on some serious matter where an initial Baha’i statement seems appropriate, I often post the following opening note. I like to see this note, this set of linguistic tones, more like an exercise in fishing. However, like fishing, one often does not catch anything on the line or in the net. My opening note often goes like this:
Since you have raised questions about religious beliefs and philosophical concerns; since you have invited people at this site to engage in debate and dialogue, discussion and discourse, I felt it useful for me and hopefully for you to say a few things about: "My Beliefs and My Religion." I hope this opening post provides a general, a useful, a helpful context for any continuing discussion, comment and developing threads we may have at this site.--Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia.
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Apologetics is a branch of systematic theology, although some experience it’s thrust in religious studies or philosophy of religion courses. Some encounter it on the internet for the first time in a more populist and usually much less academic form. As I see it, apologetics is primarily concerned with the protection of a position, the refutation of that position's assailants and, in the larger sense, the exploration of that position in the context of prevailing philosophies and standards in a secular society or, indeed, a religious society. Apologetics, to put it slightly differently, is concerned with answering critical inquiries, criticism of a position, in a rational manner. Apologetics is not possible, it seems to me anyway, without a commitment to and a desire to defend a position. Naturally in life, one takes a position on all sorts of topics, subjects, religions and philosophies.
With that said, though, the activity I engage in, namely, apologetics, is a never ending exercise. The apologetics that concerns me is not so much Christian apologetics or one of a variety of what might be called secular apologetics, but Baha'i apologetics. There are many points of comparison and contrast, though, which I won't go into here. Christians will have the opportunity to defend Christianity by the use of apologetics; secular humanists can argue their cases if they so desire here. And I will in turn defend the Baha'i Faith by the use of apologetics. In the process we will both, hopefully, learn something about our respective Faiths, our religions, our various and our multitudinous positions, some of which we hold to our hearts dearly and some of which are of little interest.
At the outset, then, in this my first posting, my intention is simply to make this start, to state what you might call "my apologetics position." This brief statement indicates, in broad outline, where I am coming from in the weeks and months ahead. -Ron Price with thanks to Udo Schaefer, "Baha'i Apologetics?" Baha'i Studies Review, Vol. 10,2001/2002.
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I want in this second part of my first posting to finish, as best I can, outlining a basic orientation to Baha’i apologetics. Critical scholarly contributions or criticism raised in public or private discussions, an obvious part of apologetics, should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Often questions are perfectly legitimate aspects of a person's search for an answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich once expressed the view that apologetics was an "answering theology."(Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p6.)
I have always been attracted to the founder of the Baha'i Faith's exhortations in discussion to "speak with words as mild as milk," with "the utmost lenience and forbearance." I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone may well be justified. It does not help an apologist to belong to those "watchmen" the prophet Isaiah calls "dumb dogs that cannot bark."(Isaiah, 56:10)
In its essence apologetics is a kind of confrontation, an act of revealing one's true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating essential characteristics of one's faith, of one's thought, of one's emotional and intellectual stance in life. Dialogue, as Hans Kung puts it, "does not mean self-denial;" but the standard of public discussion of controversial topics should be sensitive to what is said and how. Not everything that we know should always be disclosed; to put this another way, we don't want all our dirty laundry out on our front lawn for all to see or our secrets blasted over the radio and TV.
I want to thank Udo Schaefer, "Baha'i Apologetics," Baha'i Studies Review, Vol.10, 2001/2) for some of what I write here. Schaefer goes on discussing one's views one's faith which he says "should not be opportunistically streamlined, adapting to current trends, thus concealing their real features, features that could provoke rejection in order to be acceptable for dialogue." To do this puts one in the danger of losing one's identity.
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without getting someone's beard singed. In the weeks and months that follow, my postings will probably wind up singing the beards of some readers and, perhaps, my own in the process. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics. Much of Baha'i apologetics derives from the experience Baha'is have of a fundamental discrepancy between secular thought and the Baha'i teachings on the other. In some ways, the gulf is unbridgeable but, so too, is this the case between the secular and much thought in the Christian or Islamic religion or, for that matter, between variants of Christianity or secular thought itself. That is why, or at least one of the reasons, I have chosen to make postings at this forum-this forum invites dialogue.
Anyway, that's all for now. It's back to the winter winds of Tasmania, about 3 kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of place is so much simpler than that of the spiritual geography readers at this site are concerned with, although even physical geography has its complexities. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and simpler and simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone. Here in far-off Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there through some other route than off the end of South America--your response will be gratefully received. -Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia.
The American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, published his famous 'frontier thesis of American history' in 1893. Turned placed the pioneer at the centre of the American historical experience. In 1890 the US Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. From a Baha’i perspective a new pioneer began to merge in 1894 and this spiritual adventurer has now been part of the Baha’i landscape of experience for twelve decades and will be for many generations to come. Of course, in a new somewhat obscure and complex sense all human beings are pioneers now; we are all working out a survival modality in what seems like a new world, a new age, a new historical zone. But my concern here is with the pioneer in the Baha’i community and not so much the pioneer who can be found among the many diverse publics who inhabit our global community of six point three billion people.
In 1894 a Baha'i from Egypt arrived in the USA and began to actively teach in the Chicago area. He could be said to be the first Baha'i pioneer in the West, although the term 'pioneer' was not used until 1924 and not used widely by the Baha'i community until 1936. So Will C. van den Hoonaard informs us in his The Origins of the Baha'i Community of Canada: 1898-1948 on page 181. The Baha'i pioneer is certainly central to the first two centuries of Baha'i history. The pioneer is also central, as I say above, to what is at the heart of the concept and pattern of this webpage.
The term 'pioneer' is used by the Baha'i community to describe those who travel to another town or another country to serve that community and the wider communities they work in and for. Indeed, the term can apply to any Baha'i who advances the teaching and consolidation process of this new Faith. I have laid out below forty-two divisions of poetry, one division for each of the forty-six years of my own pioneering. There are four additional literary efforts, products and categories of publication, not found on this site, for each of the other four years and for the three warm-up years, my preparation period for pioneering, my period of Baha’i youth in the years 1959 to 1962:
1. A book on the poetry of Roger White
2. An autobiography in five volumes;
3. A host of prose posts on some 23000 sites on the internet; and
4. A host of poetry posts on some 2000 sites on the internet.
All of my poetry here and elsewhere is not about the pioneering process. The more than 6500 poems and several million words range over much that is modern life, much that is the Baha'i Faith, its history and its teachings and much that is my own life. A list of the topics is, as I indicated above, found at the end of this essay, this access page—below. I see the total body of writing as an integrated whole. I have no trouble seeing that sense of integration, partial though it be, and I leave it to readers to experience that wholeness, that oneness, that integration, if they can, like my sense, a partial one.
I left the home in which I grew up with my parents on or about August 20th 1962. My mother and father helped form a local administrative body for the Baha'i community we moved to in Dundas Ontario about a dozen miles away. I studied matric that year in that new town and then went on to university and got a B.A. and a B. Ed in the next four years. I was twenty-two on graduation. I am now sixty-four. In retrospect, I have come to see the beginning of my pioneering venture as taking place on those hot nights and days in late August of 1962 when I left Burlington in southern Ontario to live in another town. Many of my poems have been written with this beginning date in mind.
I would like to think that (a) at this early stage of the development of the Baha'i Administrative Order, an organic Order which in its current form took its first significant shaping by 1936, not so coincidentally when that term pioneer began to be used extensively in the international Baha’i community, over seventy years ago, and (b) with the completion of this Faith’s spiritual and administrative centre in Haifa in 2001, this prose-poetic statement will serve to be yet one of the multitude of expressions that will enrich the first century of what Baha’is call the Formative Age and the first century of the evolution of that Order which, arguably, began its first shaping, in the last years of the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Baha less than a century ago.(4)
The presence of the Baha'i Faith on a medium, the internet, is coming to have more and more importance for the global Baha'i community. This site, Pioneering Over Four Epochs and sections of it are now found at several dozen search engines and hundreds of websites and sub-sites. Individual pieces of my writing can also be found at a host of forums, discussion sites, message boards and topic sites like history, psychology, sociology, sport, popular culture, et cetera, et cetera--far too many to list here. I trust that what is found here will give some pleasure to readers both now and in the future as this Faith comes to inspire generations yet unborn, as it has inspired me in the last half century, 1958-2008.
I like to think that this website will be of primary interest to those wanting to gain some insight into the Baha'i Faith from the experience and understanding of someone who identifies himself with its belief system and who provides, what you might call, a poetic perspective. I like to think, too, that there will be some people who might find the content of this site intellectually stimulating enough to be attractive in its own right. To the many who do not find poetry their 'cup of tea,' the essays, interviews and prose sections may be preferable. They can just leave the poetry out. There is something here, some print, for anyone who has a general interest in the topics I have mentioned above and which are listed in order at the end of this introductory essay. But, as I say above, there is a strong Baha’i bias. I write, not from any official Baha’i perspective, simply as one of the members of the community of Baha’is in the world from an individual point of view. And, as should be obvious to readers already, I write a great deal here. This is not a light-on site, with little boxes of print, with lots of photos and illustrations creatively arranged to suit an audio-visual age. If by now you find this access page a little too 'wordy’ for your taste, I’d click off and go to a site more suited to your visual, intellectual, auditory, or whatever—bias. I won’t mind; I won’t know and you are free.
The content of this webpage are the traces I have left behind from my experience in the twentieth century with a few additions, new traces, in the twenty-first. I completed the second edition of this web site, three days before the official Opening of the Terraces, the beautification and extension of the administrative and spiritual centre of the Baha'i Faith, in Haifa on 23 May 2001. Two years later a third edition of this website went onto the Net. A book, an autobiographical study and an autobiography, was added as were several hundred thousand more words. This book, now an integral part of this website, is currently in its fifth edition. There is clearly too much for anyone to take in at one setting. This material needs to be approached in manageable chunks or portions, just like any good book and, for this reason, I have placed little chunks all over the internet with one big chunk at the bottom of this page.
I see the 2nd edition of this webpage, as I say, completed two days before the official opening of ‘The Terraces,’ as part of the celebration associated with the project that has been completed in recent years at the Baha'i World Centre. I see it as part of the 'befitting crescendo to the achievements of a century.......a period that will leave traces which shall last forever.' (5) This 3rd edition is, I trust, a refinement of previous editions. I hope readers will not have to wait too long for a bright, new, more user-friendly, edition. But don’t hold your breath. This edition, without doubt a little too wordy for many an internet user, may be as good as it gets. Time will tell.
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FOOTNOTES
copyright: Marco Abrar
CATEGORIES FOR MY POETRY
ON THIS WEB SITE
These categories are somewhat arbitrary. The poetry in each section, while being generally relevant to the topic in question, could easily be placed in one or more of the other sections. Poetry being the essentially interdisciplinary, intersubjective, field that it is, it is difficult to tie down individual poems to one specific category as I have done somewhat arbitrarily in the following sections. Just click on any one of the following and you will be taken to a section of prose and poetry that belongs in a very rough sort of way under that label/title/subject/topic:
1.
Autobiography
The first two chapters of my autobiography are
HERE.
My email address is:
ronprice9@gmail.com if you would like to contact me.
Here are some other sites:
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