20Community

20. COMMUNITY

A crucial tension line for the creative person in a Baha’i community is that line which always exists in one form or another between the individual and the community; indeed this tension line is a fundamental tension for all human beings on the Earth. The following essay explores this dichotomy, this fundamental feature of the life of a Baha’i artist. But, before this essay appears, I would like to share with you several poems: one about 'stories we tell' that enrich community life, one about the transforming power of small groups, two about 'the beginnings of community' and others about community in general. Baha’is believe that they and society in general are only at the beginning of the community building process. Certainly the study of community and community development, centered as it is in the discipline of sociology in particular and the social sciences in general, only began in the modern age, in the lifetime of Baha’u’llah and, arguably, His two precursors going back to their birth in 1793(Siyyid Kazim) and 1753(Shaykh Ahmad) in the 18^th century.

PROJECT OF THE SELF

According to Ulrich Beck, the most dominant and widespread desire in Western societies today is the desire to live a 'life of one's own'. More and more people aspire to actively create an individual identity, to be the author of their own life. The ethic of individual self-fulfilment and achievement can be seen as the "most powerful current in modern societies." The concept of individualisation does not mean isolation, unconnectedness, loneliness or the end of engagement in society. Individuals are now trying to 'produce' their own biographies. This is partly done by consulting 'role models' in the media. Through these role models individuals explore personal possibilities for themselves and imagine alternatives of how they can go about creating their own lives. They are, in effect, experimenting with the project of the self, with strategies for self. -Ron Price with thanks to Judith Schroeter, "The Importance of Role Models in Identity Formation: The Ally McBeal In Us," Internet, 11 October 2002.

I define myself in community

which is not the same as being

surrounded by people ad nauseam,

nor does it mean doing what I want

as much of the time as I can

or being free of difficulties,

stresses and strains--

which seem unavoidable.

I've been creating my own biography--

my autobiography--for years

and getting very little sense of

who I am from the media

and their endless kinds of role models.

I've been in a community

with two hundred years of

historical models and literally

hundreds, over the years,

of people I have known

who have shown me qualities

worth emulating, helping

to make me some enigmatic

and composite creature.

Ron Price

11 October 2002

MORE THAN A TRACE

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the leading sociologists at the turn of the millennium, wrote in his book In Search of Politics(Polity Press 1999(1988), p.54) that "sufferings which we tend to experience most of the time do not unite their victims. Our sufferings divide and isolate: our miseries set us apart, tearing up the delicate tissue of human solidarities." In the Baha'i community, as a pioneer in isolated localities, small Groups and larger Assembly areas I have found this to be only partly true during these forty years 'on the road,' so to speak. "Belief in the collective destiny and purpose of the social whole," Bauman continues, gives meaning to our "life-pursuits." Being part of a global collectivity with highly specific goals, purposes and a sense of destiny has not only given meaning to my life-pursuits but it has tended to unite me with my fellows even when isolated from them. It also gives me a special sense of consecrated joy; the consecration comes from the difficulties endured. Although these difficulties seem to tear that "delicate tissue" that Bauman refers to, they also provide some of that cord which binds. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 July 2002.

Often it was largely in my head,

that tissue of solidarity,

especially in Frobisher Bay,

Whyalla or Zeehan,

on the edge of a universe.

But always, they visited me

when I was sick, somehow

they were always there,

but they left me alone, too.

For this is a polity which

gives you lots of space

when you need it and,

if not, you can go and get it

because there's so much

out there in these vast

and spacious lands.

Life is no mere sequence

of instantaneous experiences

without a trace left behind.

Here is a trace with my inscription

of lived time on astronomical time.

This is no singular, self-same identify,

no shared and common ancestral,

historical, self. A fractured

and fragmented being

spread across two continents and four epochs,

cutting events out of flow

turning grief into lamentation

and lamentation into praise……Ron Price 29 July 2002 See ibid., p.165.

AS NATURAL AS BREATHING

It may not be too much to say that social and cultural evolution itself is, at least in part, if not significantly, dependent on the very existence and extension of Baha'i communities and Baha'i institutions across the planet. Although it is difficult to measure, to quantify, the importance of the Baha'i "teaching" drive epoch after epoch, especially since the process often seems to be so very slow and apparently irrelevant in the great scheme of things, yet there can be no doubt that this effort to expand the base should be the dominating passion of the Baha'i life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 24 March 2002.

In the day to day

round of affairs

the whole thing seems

to be as natural as breathing,

as the growth of a tree

or the slow maturation

of civilization itself.

And, like life, one waits

and waits and waits and acts,

for always there is action

in the spaces of our days:

meaningful, rich, deeply

important, significant

and yet, so often, ordinarily

ordinary, humanly human.

Ron Price

24 March 2002

TOKENS

Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats felt 'the burden of the mystery' that was part of 'this unintelligible world.'¹This orientation of these romantic poets fits into what Horace Holley calls "the principle of struggle" which is our reality, which is deeply rooted in the very being of man. "The first sign," writes Holley "of the purification of the human spirit is anguish."²There is, too, a great mystery in all of life: no man can sing that which he understandeth not, nor recount that unto which he cannot attain.³-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1995, p. 151; ²Horace Holley, Religion for Mankind, GR, London, 1956, p.217; and ³Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985, p.121.

I can, I can, recount His tokens,

tokens that tell of His handiwork.

I see them in the community,

in the proximity and otherness

which stirs me: a beautiful face,

an exquisite mouth, such kindness,

a gentle voice, a garden of beauty

and, yet, it wore me out to the bone.

Pleasures they know nothing of,

worlds I can not enter: community

we are just beginning to learn to build.

Emblems of a mind that feeds on infinity,

sustained by transcendence,

attempting converse with a spiritual world

and the generations of humankind

spread over past, present and to come.¹

1 Wordsworth, "The Prelude," Book Fourteenth.

Ron Price

23 January 2002

STILL AT THE BEGINNING

It is not the function of this poetry to document the styles, the changes, the alternating myths and rituals, the increasing knowledge and theorizing about human development, role behaviour and patterns of living in family life in the last half of the twentieth century within or without the Baha'i community or indeed in the longer history of suburban life as it has existed since suburban life as we know it began in the 1840s.¹ This task is done elsewhere, particularly insofar as the general society is concerned, by an increasingly large number of social historians and students of culture and society. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life, Oxford UP, 1997, p.115.

There is no way I'd want to tell

of the changes and chances,

the patterns and styles

of people in these ninth

and tenth stages of history.¹

Why would I want to tell

of their homes, their food,

their gardens, their families,

their media programs

on and on in endless minutiae?

Rather, my aim here is to tell

of the home I have constructed,

not the one I can't go back to

and which I left back in 1962--

not the dozens with four walls

occupied since this journey began.

Rather, my aim is to tell

of the home of the mind,

a community I've been building,

forging over the face of this earth,

my small piece in a beginning

that seems to have been always

beginning,² a small piece that no one

else can create, for it is my part.³

1 1953-2003.

^{2 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1996, ""Baha'is are at the very beginning of the process of community building."
^{3 Susan Groag Bell, Between Worlds: Czechoslovakia, England, America, NY, Dutton, 1991, p.226.
Ron Price
6 January 2002}}

ME OH MY AND MY OH ME

Telling stories about people's experience in Australia has just begun in film and television, said Graham Thorburn who teaches drama and directing at the Australian Film and Television School. His remarks were about the history of Australian drama. He could very well have been talking about the stories of western Baha'is in recent decades. Of course, the Baha'is have lots of stories from their fascinating history and they talk to each other about their private, their individual, stories. In the last ten and, perhaps, twenty years Baha'is have also begun to tell their own stories in a more public, a more publicized, way, their stories over the last four epochs going back to the 1950s. What I try to do in my poetry is to write about 'the group story.' I also tell my own, my personal, story. There is, I think, a powerful narrative at the base of what has now become an extensive poetic of nearly 6000 poems and some two million words. There is, too, a nice balance in my poetry and essays between the group, the Baha'i community in history and the individual, my own, life and the lives of various individuals I have known over four epochs. -Ron Price with thanks to Graham Thorburn on "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 22 October 2001.

The first stories I heard

were about birds flying over Akka,

candles stuck in a martyr's flesh

and always there was a prison somewhere.

Then, I got older, and heard

different stories. There was:

Bill Carr up in Greenland,

a new crop of stories about

'Abdu'l-Baha and Shofhi Effendi.

There always seemed to be

new stories about the Central

Figures of this Faith of mine.

And I got even older

and heard stories about:

some ordinary people

and not-so-ordinary ones,

like Mirza Haydar Ali,

who travelled here and there,

for there always seemed to be

travelling in there somewhere.

They all kept you going, though,

through thick and thin,

the ups-and-downs of life.

And then a new crop began,

I don't know, perhaps about 1980.

Pretty good stuff, really inspirational.

Do you remember the one about

Muriel Sweetbun Udder?

And I got older still,

passed the magic fifty

and well-nigh unto sixty

and decided it was time

to tell my own story

and the story of how I saw it.

I wonder if anyone will read

this story from, let's see,

1953 to 2003?

Me oh my and my oh me!

Ron Price

22 October 2001

TRANSFORMING PEOPLE'S LIVES

Novelist Pat Barker, in an interview at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2001, said that "one of the few ways of transforming people's lives" was "to bring them up as part of a small group" whose aim is to go off into the world and slowly try to change it, save it or improve it. I was reminded of the words of Douglas Martin in a talk given as far back as 1976 when he referred to the Baha'i community as having "embarked on an infinite series of experiments at the local, national and global levels in an effort to realize a vision of mankind's oneness." Yes, I was brought up and have lived my adult life in the context of a series of small groups in which there was concerted action toward a single goal, with a map of the journey that had to be made, more than vague sentiments of good will and an explicit agreement on principles for co-ordinated progress. -Ron Price with thanks to Pat Barker on "Books and Writing," ABC Radio National, 11 November 2001.

You take it as natural,

part of the given,

the way things are,

can't quite articulate

the transforming reality

that you are part of

with the cups of tea,

the hospitality and

endless conversations.

You realize that real life

exists in this waiting

to become something

other than what you are

and in having become

something which you feel

is partly right and partly wrong,

as everything is bound

to a definite moment

and proceeds contemporaneously.

And you always seem to be

a spectator looking at everything,

always a stranger to things,

bees to the invisible

set down in this difficult plan

with a driving energy and now

the substance of this poetry.

And always the breath of time

which you enter every moment

closes behind you, touches your cheeks,

quivers behind you and is gone

into memory and imagination.

---------Ron Price 13 November 2001

INTRODUCTION TO one of my 52 BOOKLETS OF POETRY

"IN LOVING MEMORY"

This collection of poetry, part of a larger autobiographical work, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, a period which began for me in 1962, has as its backdrop a time frame now of nearly thirty-four years. The changes in this period have been momentous, impossible to grasp, too close for me, or us, to really understand them. The phrase ‘dark heart of an age of transition’, first used by the Universal House of Justice in October 1967, has been an appropriate one for we who have lived through these years. They have been years which have witnessed a paradigm shift, an endless series of disasters and drastic happenings, yet another part of a tumultuous transition, what the Guardian referred to as a critical stage in the long and checkered history of mankind. It has also been a period, bright with promise.

This poetry has as its backdrop, then, this tumultuous, auspicious, period. These years have been exciting, adventurous ones filled with opportunities, challenges and a sense of meaning and fulfillment that is immeasureable, only partly accountable, comprehensible. They have also been years in which my soul has seen a dark heart several times on its long, sometimes thrilling and sometimes tortuous journey to its Maker.

I have now been in Perth for eight years and served on the LSAs of Belmont and Stirling nearly all of this time, after serving the Cause in every state and territory in Australia, except Queensland. During the last four years, since the beginning of that propitious Holy Year, I have written over twenty-six hundred poems as well as carried out my normal duties as a lecturer at a post-secondary college. The role of father and husband also continues and contributes its normal responsibilities. I often feel a little, and sometimes a lot, like the burnt-out case that Elizabeth Rochester describes in her letter of January 1981 to overseas pioneers from Canada. For years, until 1980, I suffered from episodes of manic-depression, or a bi-polar tendency as it is now called. Since that year I have been taking lithium carbonate and this condition has been fully treated, although I think there is still a residual element still present.

About the same time that this healing occurred I began praying for assistance from holy souls who had gone on to the world beyond. I also started writing poetry at about this time. Now, some fifteen years after initiating and fertilizing this process, I send this poetry¹ in loving memory of the many Baha’is who have served during the several epochs of this Formative, this Iron, Age. I dedicate my poetry to these souls who have gone on to that Kingdom of Light and I pray for their assistance as well as the assistance of those departed Hands of the Cause listed on these pages.

I am currently serving on the Belmont LSA. I carry on my role of chairman dutifully, but often wearily. I frequently wonder how many servants of the Cause have continued serving year after year at endless meetings when they feel ‘dried out’. One of the kinds of contribution I have made over the years has involved periods of extensive attendance at meetings. These periods have usually been less than five years running. Eventually, I have been freed from endless attendance at meetings by a process known as pioneering which took me to remote areas where no Assemblies existed. Now that I am in a large urban centre I am often asked to attend meetings and it has taken me many years to work out an activity level in harmony with my predispositions. I do not seem to have the capacity of the long distance runner whom Townshend refers to.²

While my enthusiasm for meetings and organized activity declined in the mid-1990s, my desire to write poetry has waxed full on. Perhaps it was an excess of speech that lowered the temperature of my enthusiasms for the endless listening and talking in which I had been engaged for years. It gives me great joy, though, to write poetry, given this remarkably dynamic period in the history of our Faith, these auspicious years on Mount Carmel. The poetry is like a gift of God. Since Baha’i publishing houses are disinclined to try poetry, they rarely attempt to publish the work of a Baha’i. Kalimat Press tells me poetry does not move from shelves. I think some of my poetry is excellent, or at least of use to the Cause, and so I send it to the Baha’i World Centre Library. There it is kept and there is serves as the record of an overseas pioneer, a role I have come to identify with increasingly as the years have gone on.

I write the above in presenting this gift of my most recent poems. I wish everyone serving at the Baha’i World Centre well in their own labors of love. I’ve always liked George Townshend’s line: "The movement is like long-distance running: you may lose your first wind, but if you get your second it is permanent though you run all day long."³For those of us who are not long-distance runners, the movement involves running out of breath frequently, getting it back after a rest and running again; or as that now proverbial blacksmith said to his assistant: ‘die and blow; die and blow.

Canadian Overseas Pioneer in Australia

^{1 This booklet of poetry was sent to the Baha'i World Centre Library. It was one of 43 sent until 31 December 2000.
^{2 David Hofman, George Townshend, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, p.323.
^{3 idem

Ron Price
2 July 1996
_______________________________________________________________________
A PERIPHERAL FLUCTUATION
If a group of people in possession of the ideas and the faith of the Baha'i act in concert and with conscious knowledge of the dynamics of the historical juncture in which humanity now finds itself, they can decisively influence and change the present course of history....They can be the small, initially periferal fluctuation which can be suddenly amplified in a complex, dynamical system when that system becomes critically unstable....Acting with sound knowledge, solid faith and firm determination, men and women of good will can load the dice of social change....-Ervin Laszlo in To the Peoples of the World: A Baha'i Statement on Peace, The Universal House of Justice, 1985, p.xviii.

Ampified and spreading as we are,
we will help determine
the course of the coming bifurcation,
bias the evolutionary transformation
and achieve a humanistic end
consistent with the great patterns
and modalities of a future age
here on earth and in the vast reaches
of the cosmos. A new dynamic stability
on a plane of organization
will not be acheived
without critical instability:
a common insight will one day crystallize.

Ron Price
1 October 2001

CELEBRATION
This poem was inspired by Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass and its introduction written in 1855. Whitman writes that the United States was, for him, the greatest poem. I would express a like sentiment only I would transfer it to the Baha'i Faith--for me the greatest poem. My spirit responds to the spirit of this new Faith and has for more than forty years. This poetry of mine stretches in its outreach across the globe as these new teachings have also come to spread across the earth. This poem, even in its great length, hardly knows triviality or pettiness. There is an underlying consciousness in this poem that "not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, not everything that can be disclosed is timely and not every timely utterance is suited to the ears of the hearer." There is so much that can not come under its embrace from the burgeoning fields of knowledge. One can only take in so much, do so much in life. Limitation faces us everywhere. "It is necessary to focus one's thinking," writes 'Abdu'l-Baha.¹}I have found much of inspiration in the more than two centuries of history associated with this Faith, much inspiration in the world's history and in the whole metaphorical nature of physical reality. The proof of this poet is not that his religion has absorbed him but, rather, that he has absorbed his religion with the greatest of affection.² -Ron Price with thanks to ²Walt Whitman, "Introduction," Leaves of Grass, 1855; and ¹'Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha, Haifa, 1978, p.111.

I celebrate this Cause¹}and what I assume the world
will one day assume
for every atom in existence
belongs to all.

I walk and invite my soul
in the spirit of this easeful breath
observing the wet green outside my window,
the tall trees and the river down to the sea.

And my shelves are crowded, too, with perfumes.
There is a fragrance there, for years
they've occupied my room.
They are also for my mouth forever,
for I am in love with them.

They are part of my inspiration,
perspiration and respiration,
the beating of my heart,
words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
even yesterday along the paths in the bush
where I will also walk today,
where the words will play in shine and shade
on the trees as the supple boughs bend and sway
and I will remain unaware of their affect,
yet they will, I know, sooner or later,
come to influence my own soul.

There is a new delight in the streets,
a new intensity, not in my childhood,
as it was for Wordsworth,
overwhelmingly in his five senses,
but in a new fragrance wafted
over all created things
which past ages cannot rival.²

1 This poem draws extensively from the first two dozen lines of Whitman's poem.
^{2 Baha'u'llah, Tablet of Carmel.
Ron Price
9 August 2001}}

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND FECES

The Guardian uses metaphors from science, from biology especially, in his expatiation of the history and development of the Cause. I have used some terms from ‘the reproductive processes in plants’ to apply to the ‘community building work’ I was involved with for forty years before the Universal House of Justice announced that we were "at the very beginning of the process of community building."¹Perhaps the first several decades of the tenth stage of history constitutes this 'beginning'; perhaps the first several Plans beginning in 1937 is where the 'beginnings' of community building are to be found. . -Ron Price; ¹ Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, BE 153.

I would have thought that

that was community building.

Perhaps it was just the beginning

of the beginning, all those years,

just a beginning. So now,

we’re at the end of the beginning,

or as Churchill put it a lifetime ago:

the beginning of the end

or, as we might put it,

the beginning of a process

that will suddenly revolutionize

the fortunes of the Faith¹.

But those years in so many lounge rooms,

drinking so much tea, going to places

as inhospitable as an iceberg

or as hot as hell

which one learned to make as home

-they were community building ,

embryonic stages, seedbed,

fertilization, embryogenesis,

sperm nuclei, double fertilization

and self-fertilization essential for continuity².

Some seed plants have attractive fruits

that are eaten by certain animals.

They also have seeds that resist digestion

and are excreted in animal feces,

then subsequently germinate.²

Some of the work in this beginning

of the beginning of community building

involved a seed planting not unlike the above:

fertilization and, now, some germination

in this beginning of community building

with plenty of feces to be cleared

from the dark heart of this age of transition,

destruction & creation.

^{1 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, USA, 1965, p.117.
^{2 Claude Villee, Biology, 6^th edition, Toronto, 1972, p.242.
"Self-fertilization may be regarded as a safety device to provide for the fertilization of the egg by sperm from the same plant, if no other sperm are available", idem.
Ron Price
6 February 1999
____________________
COMMUNITY BUILDING BEGINS
Of course, not everyone experiences the Baha’i Faith or the life they live, the way I do. Although there are commonalities: beliefs, values, attitudes, rituals, dogmas and structures, the individual experience is quite unique. In fact, it is important that the experience of individuals is unique, idiosyncratic, different. This poetry expresses one specific life story, one interpretive schema, one specific blend of individual and community with enough links to the experience of others that it can be read with meaning and their relationship of individual and community can be contrasted and compared. I trust one day others will tell their story. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 5 February 1999.
Some sing fine songs,
or write them, or dance,
or write, or enjoy
committee work(fairly rare),
or LSA activity
(pretty testy for many),
or have some specialist interest
or function that allows for
a unique contribution,
or travel far and wide
with adventure in their blood,
or stay at home
to care for their parents or themselves,
alone or gregariously
in the endless warp and weft
that is this global community
whose twentieth century traces
shall last forever...as the process
of community building makes its start
after a decade in the forth epoch
of this Formative Age.¹} Ron Price
5 February 1999
¹ Universal House of Justice, BE 153 Ridvan Message. The decade:1986-1996.
___________________
COMMUNITY FEELING
Alfred Adler, the famous psychologist, died five weeks after the beginning of the first Seven Year Plan which began in April 1937. Many of his ideas would be particularly useful to Baha’is in the prosecution of the various teaching plans that have succeeded that first one from 1937 to 1944. Adler emphasized, among other things, the power of understanding in coping with and enjoying a rich life. What some psychologists called the unconscious he called 'an area we don’t understand.' His focus, again and again, was on understanding. ‘Abdu’l-Baha placed great emphasis on this same quality many times in His writings. The meaning of life, to Adler, was what we give it. The source of our striving lies in our sense of inferiority. If, in fact, we must, as Baha’is, prefer our fellow man to ourselves, perhaps Adler’s psychology of inferiority might serve as some of the basis for this Baha'i ethic and attitude to others. -Ron Price, "Notes on Alfred Adler," Internet, 28 January, 2001.

It’s a vast and puzzling matter,
our own inner chatter
keeping us busy
‘til the end of our days
teasing, teasing, over and out.
Slowly being awakened
to our sense of moral destiny,
to community feeling,
just now taking form
over these Plans--
this gift of evolution--
to the inevitability of social harmony,
to an elan vital
and therapeutic meaning
based on orientation towards
a community goal, feeling,
an inner thing which will triumph
over everything that opposes it.¹
1 See Paul E. Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow: Adler in Context, The Analytic Press, Hillside, N.J., 1983, pp.248-274 for these ideas about community building.
Ron Price
29 January 2001
____________________
MY ELSEWHERE COMMUNITY

The essential ideas in this poem come from Hugh Kenner’s 1997 Massey Lecture in Canada and William Wordsworth’s poem "A Poet’s Epitaph." The greatest shift in the last thousand years has been from a Eurocentric, Christocentric, tradition centered, civilization to a gradually evolving global civilization with no special political and moral centre in a universe of infinite space and time. It is this phenemenon that this poem tries to speak to, of, about. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1998.

I have my own Grand Tour¹ now,
my ‘elsewhere community’,²}

my journey through what I know

to what I have yet to learn;

and when the war is over

I will go home.

There are no more Colosseums

or Roman Forums

and my education takes me

down different paths past other Alps,

another Paris, some other Channel

en route to finding out who I am,

absorbing life to make me someone else,

to discover impulses of deeper birth

which come to me in solitude.

The harvest of a quiet eye,

random truths around me lie.

In these verses I impart what broods and sleeps

what in my own heart and in my mind keeps.

In the meadows of His nearness

I try to roam to get some clearness.

For the Grand Tour is my own creation

and can’t be found on any tourist guide,

only in my own world where I now abide.

Ron Price

27 December 1998

^{1 In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was the trip from some place in western civilization through Europe to Rome. This is no longer the Grand Tour. We all make our own now.
^{2 We all have what Hugh Kenner calls ‘elsewhere communities’, places we travel to and things we do and think to find out who we are. The traveller absorbs this ‘elsewhere community’ into himself to become what defines him throughout life.
TRIUMPH
...it is the nature of sociability to free concrete interactions...and to erect its airy realm...the deep spring which feeds this realm and its play does not lie in...forms, but exclusively in the vitality of concrete individuals, with all their feelings and attractions, convictions and impulses. -Geoege Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, Kurt Wolff(ed.), Collier-Macmillan, NY, 1964.

This is unquestionably the community,
an instrument of mega-proportions
with a community feeling that will
triumph over everything and become
as natural as breathing, necessity itself..
So: what is crucial is our subjective
orientation toward the community
in all its manifold aspects. This is our
elan vital; this is our therapy, our centre,
our norm, our basis of judgement,
our overcoming of antisocial dispositions,
our indestructible destiny.

Here is creative tension: the individual
and community, that much talked about
dichotomy that stifles our capacity for joy;
where we are learning new bases, new
instrumentalities for happiness after
centuries of darkness; where guilt and
innocence play in a drama whose roots
are largely unseen; where the alone and
the lonely are found in a complex web
of social intersticies; where the greatest
theatre of all plays life on the stage
and we play with a required courtesy,
hopefully genuine, a certain reservedness,
but not as stiff and ceremonial as the past.

It seems purely fortuitous: the harmony,
contact and dissonance, the easy replaceability
of everyone we meet, the democracy we play at.
And we must play on the stage as players with
our parts-not indifferent-interesting, fascinating,
important, even serious, with results: after the
action, the play of several acts with many scenes
and exchangeability. Ourselves, our self, our
personality may just vanish or become coated
with the many colours of ‘otherness’.

Enter thou among My servants,
And enter thou My paradise.*
For here you must lose your self
to find community and we have
much to learn about loss of self.
It is here we shall find the
community feeling that will triumph
over everything, as naturally as breathing.

Ron Price
1 December 1995
* Seven Vallies, (US, 1952), p.47.
THE WOOING OF BEING
In the older years, this shift from outer-world to inner-world orientation takes the form of progressive disengagement, a withdrawal involving self and society. -Herant Katchadourian, Fifty: Midlife in Perspective, W.H. Freeman and Co., NY, 1987, p.93.
Sometimes he talks about himself-never about what he does or what happens to him, but about what is deep down inside him, the impulses of his mind or...his soul. -Maurice Blanchot, "Jean Jubert’s Private Diaries," in The Siren’s Song: Essays, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982, p.55.

I’ve started this process in my middle years
with a wooing of being, an exploration of its depths
by continuity of attention and meditation,
by saturation, by battle with reflection,
with the process of self-historiography:
workshop, chronicle and reservoire of images.
Here we have ‘a man talking to himself’,
such a jumble, for that is the inner world,
of jottings, ideas, observations, on-and-on.
A juxtaposition of the trivial and serious,
the exuberant and despairing, the energetic
and the weary, the fertile, the uneven: provide
an unusual acquaintance with an inner life
that transform my experience into
an autobiographical account of unusual detail
for these epochs of an Age that itself
transformed my community and stimulated
me to draw out the energy and power of my
own life into the substance of this art.

It is difficult, though, to go deep down;
the tendency is to report the superficial
which is usually of little value to a process
that, ultimately, belongs to the world,
will remain alive forever and awakens me
to my own self and what and who I am.
Ron Price
25 September 1995
THE FABULOUS TRANSACTION
To really do something great you have to pull yourself away from the mainstream of the population. I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to bars, I don’t know a lot of people and I don’t pay any attention to the major media. I don’t watch TV and I don’t read magazines...I don’t want to know. I don’t need it. I don’t want the information that millions of people have....I....search out nutrition in strange places. -Henry Rollins, writer and singer, 15 April 1995 in The West Magazine, 23 December 1995, p.10.
You want to get the right word;
there’s a right vocabulary, a language,
a set of appropriate expressions,
an in-language-for-an-in-crowd,
the right book, the right clothes,
the latest thing, real groovy-mate.
I’d love to be seen with her or him,
or them. Have you seen that movie?
Did you watch it on TV, that program
at 7:30 on Tuesday, channel 8?

I know too many people to suit me,
but then I’m a teacher of 150 students
every six months and live in a big
metropolitan community with hundreds
of names where I try to limit my involvement
because after twenty-five years of talking
and listening--endlessly it seems--I feel
burnt out, dried out
and now I need some replenishing fruit
to resuscitate my withered tongue,
some healing water
to cleanse my charred self.

I’ve long ago dispensed
with fashionable concerns
culled from the best magazines;
I tire of the issues; there are so many
and necessarily subject to up-dating.
I don’t even remember yesterday’s news;
do you?
One day, death will short
irreversibly my circuitry
and until then I, too, shall carry on
this fabulous transaction
with my branches upturned
rapturously to the light.

Ron Price
27 December 1995
TO ALAN: SOME REFLECTIONS
The characteristics of Ron Price’s poetry are varied. He seeks to define and possess the experience that took him across two continents as a pioneer in the Baha’i communities of Australia and Canada. It was a formative experience as a homefront and as an international pioneer which he attempts to describe, analyse and understand. In clarifying and defining what shaped his imagination and his thinking he comes across certain nurturing elements in his past, certain joys in the present and certain directions into the future. A darkness, a sadness, a seriousness echoes through his words as well as light, humour and a golden seam of joy. In the process he defines himself in the context of a larger autobiographical form in which he has set his poetry: Pioneering Over Three Epochs. Although these are the poems of one international pioneer, they are a reflection on behalf of a generation of pioneers who arose during the second and third epochs(1944-1986) of the Formative Age to lay the foundations for a global community within an emerging world religion, the Baha’i Faith. -Ron Price, 2:20 pm, 20 May 1995, Rivervale, Western Australia.
You’ve sat in so many lounge rooms
they all seem the same, even the
toilets have a sad familiarity.
You say a similar line, like
some kind of vaccuum cleaner salesman
who’s got all his lines off pat,
even the heavy philosophical ones.
Heading off to the fireside you felt
like some veteran, mandarin
of Jesuitical pose, but only at the edge
as you put your hands in your pockets
with an ‘I’ve been here before’ feeling
of deep and quiet sadness: noone hears.
Going through the motions is easy
and you think, well, this is one type of maturity.
Ron Price
May 20 1995
THIS IS NO PICNIC
There is a new song.
Up from the Siyah-Chal it rose, breaking the Shah’s dream.
-Roger White, "New Song", Another Song Another Season, p.118.
When children are born in a Baha’i community
they are wrapped in Allah’u’Abhas, LSA meetings,
deepenings, Feasts and the Writings.

They are slowly introduced to a variety of people
whose heterogeneity is more educative than
they or the rest of the community can imagine.

There’s a life-line for these unsuspecting neophytes:
children’s classes, pre-youth, youth programs,
young adult, adult activities-taking the votarie
from cradle to grave in a crucible of care,
stimulation and challenge that he learns to
call his Baha’i life.

The supplies of food, music and entertainment
can be staggering in their quantity as the
adolescent leans toward the rigours of pioneering
where he must supply it all and the foundation
stone of prayer which he has been acquiring.

This is no picnic, although it often looks that way
amidst rice, kebabs and dishes of desert beyond
your imagining. Don’t be fooled by this smorgasbord
and the endless lines of awefully nice people.

This is serious and potentially tragic;
deep lines of sorrow lurk behind those
treacherous smiles. You can’t have all of this
for nothing. The greatest adventure in the world
has its price: nothing less than your soul,
but you may, just may, find it.

There’s plenty of opportunity here to escape
that insolent litany of insularity that often
afflicts the young and the sheer boredom
that deepens as it grows into the corners
of their lives with its deadening stamp.

They need you in Mongolia and Manchuria,
Morrocco and Medina and just about anywhere
you care to mention and you may just find
that flooding rain which will water the soil
of a Life you have grown to know which has
become part of your life and which began,
perhaps, in Tabriz or Shiraz,or maybe in
the mountains of Sulaymaniyyah or the Siyah-Chal.

For that new song you’ve been learning
with your mother’s milk has been growing
in sweetness; its music can be heard
triumphantly gaining in range and momentum.
The accents of its Words are capivating
millions, rejoicing the trees of places
you’ve never heard of and flooding with felicity
everywhere on earth. Yet, I falter too, Lord.
I quaver as I try to sing. And I cry.
Ron Price
16 December 1995
THE INWARD PIONEER
The serenity of the comic spirit informs the closing scenes of Byron’s later life. -Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art: Studies of Author’s Classic and Modern, Harper and Bros., NY, 1956, p.68.
For the inward pioneer...must accompany the outward pioneer if this endurance and faithfulness are to convey life and joy to the community in which he serves.....For it was with his wit and his subtle mockery and the endearing manner in which he was able to see himself and others as caricatures, that he maintained a sense of balance....He maintained a sense of perspective as his tone of self-mockery implies, and was able to remain detached from his surroundings. -Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Four on an Island, George Ronald, Oxford, 1983, pp.87-88.
Here, it’s a style of life,
part of the interaction ritual,
part of growing up,
with mother’s milk.
A laugh here is the great bond,
the healer: transforms strain
and momentary expectation
into nothingness, well, a light
residue of air spreads across your
forehead for an instant,
for that instant the world is trivialized,
and a bloody good thing too:
the vanitas vanitatum, vanity of vanities,
the show, the emptiness, the semblance
of reality is shown for what it is.
Keep it lively, baby; keep it all at ease--
the mind that is, the mind, ‘tis a gift
of fortune, perhaps the sign of an
imperturbable serenity: at least for awhile,
but then they tell me
funny guys get depressed.
No hunting about for immortality,
just temporary pleasure, mate, just
take it easy, nothing tragic here man.
Always being right, never doubting
and you’re half way to dullardland.
Play with it, dance with it, stuff and
nonsense, let it pierce you with its
strange relations, let it dice your
personality, toy your inner fantasy
and teach you of your limitations.

Ron Price
22 September 1995
MAJOR POET?
What is a major poet? The two criteria most often invoked are range and development: a major poet is one whose work encompasses a variety of different kinds, covers broad bands of the emotional and formal spectra, and has also a shape in time, forming a pattern into which the individual poems can be seen to fit. -Monroe K. Spears, American Ambitions: Selected Essays on Literary and Cultural Themes, Johns Hopkins UP, London, 1987, p.57.
Now who would claim to be a major poet
after only three years of significant writing
and only a small handful of poems published,
especially after White and Toynbee
only claimed to be minor poets?

About all I can say, at this stage,
is that I write a lot of poetry,
that I like writing it,
that much of it does not seem like poetry,
that it occupies a shape, a pattern,
covers broad bands of emotional life
and that it covers a range and development.

I enjoy a certain serenity of view and
a settled temper of mind in the realm
of contemplation as one world breaks up
and another is born, keeping alive my
sense of self, community and soul:
antidote to passivity, reconciler of
self-divisive internecine malices,
being happy most of the time.
Ron Price
22 June 1995
THE LONER
I used to visit people in the evenings and at the weekend to cultivate their friendship, sew seeds or just seek out simple companionship. By the time I was in my forties this habit became less conspicuous. By my fifties it was nearly absent from my lifestyle. Occasionally, though, someone called me on the phone wanting to get together. I was usually quite responsive, for I sensed that they both wanted and needed my company. This happened about once a month. In addition to this personal social life there is the social life of my family with other families, my job and Baha’i community life. These aspects of the social are separate. In my private time, freed from my family, professional and social responsibilities, I have become a loner. -Ron Price, 11:55 pm, 30 December, 1995, Rivervale WA.
Poetry and religion each have their own purpose and value. But if we could search for the experiences which produced them...we might find ourselves exploring, if not the same ground, at least territories very close together. -Clive Sansom, Poetry and Religious Experience, 1948.
They have a nice garden here,
could be one of the better hotels,
but seeing everyone spaced out,
just a little over-ripe, over-done,
or so underdone they could be
sleep-walkers still in their dreams,
reminds me this is a place for the
burnt-out cases. I’d been one myself
several times and one gets to know
the signs: the reasons are usually
complicated. Here I just say hello
and give people a lot of space.

The traffic humms not far off
just to remind me that normality
is not far away even if one is
burnt-out. The tidy BBQ, benches
and tables tell me this is one of the
smaller, human spots for the mentally
ill, none of that institutional alienation
and paranoia of the big places. We talk
about: religion, the USA, TV, sex, my poem,
his piano playing, the routines here.
We: have tea and donuts, sit on the swings,
go to his room, walk on the porch.

They give me stellazine. It’s pretty good,
but I go way down after lunch. It’s like
going to hell and back everyday. He looks
a little tired; try twenty years of manic-depression
and schizophrenia off-and-on, to strain the
facial muscles. Been up now for 13 hours.

Have they tryed lithium? I suppose your case
is so much more complicated. I suppose they
know what they’re doing.

The willow trees blow gently in the light breeze.
It’s a balmy evening in summer, late December.
The leaves caress the air. An air-conditioner
comes on reminding me this is summer in Australia.

The nurse prepares Matthew’s small cocktail. She has
a warm vitality, a pepsodent tooth-paste smile and she
plays the flute. You have only 700,000 hours to make the

most of it, Ron. And mine is 70% over, if you’re figuring
on an eighty year lifetime, Matthew. I give him a big hug
at my car door and think about the greatest journey in life
being one to relieve the sorrow-laden heart. I don’t make
many of this sort of journey these days, except when invited
and only when it’s convenient. I’ve become a loner.

Ron Price
30 December 1995
ELOQUENCE
Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say. They say what they have to say...Communicability has nothing to do with popularity...no man is eloquent save when someone is moved as he listens....Those who are moved feel, as Tolstoi says, that what the work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been longing to express...the artist works to create an audience to which he does communicate.-John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p.105.

Complete and unhindered communication,
in a world of gulfs and walls
that limit our experience of community,
can be found in some works of art.
Was that why I cried in looking
at your paintings on the wall
when normally art galleries
make me sleepy?
Was that why I wrote so many essays
about Roger White’s poetry,
though noone would publish them?
Is that why I write all this poetry,
to serve the unifying forces of life
breaking out all over this planet?

Ron Price
23 December 1995
That’s all folks!}}