7 Baha’u’llah, Long Obligatory Prayer.

8 Starobinski, op.cit., p.222.

Ron Price

11 October 1996

 ____________________________

Myth works when you know what it is about, when it says something to you because it says something about you. We must become mythic as a species if we are to survive. The great individuation of cultures each based on their myths must lead, through an emphasis on their similarities, to a planetization of mankind. For all things are one; the hero has a thousand faces, a unity in diversity. Myth is like a force field; it unfolds and calls forth our own special genius and is the basis of our understanding of our world, ourselves and our own transformation through life’s inevitable trials and tribulations.-Robert Siegel discussing Joseph Campbell on "The Spirit of Things", ABC Radio National, 17 January 1999, 6:05-7:00 pm.

You popularized an attitude, an understanding,

of myth with a remarkable consistency

with that universal myth

that has captured my heart and mind

in this post-war world¹.

I have been redesigning, retooling this protean self

and losing myself, giving myself, expanding myself

around this mythic base, this essence, this core,

where a yearning, pathos, has produced a sweetness,

dulce, settling in, an abundance scooped up, an updraft,

scooped up, with a bliss quotient that is inestimable,

indefinable. But there is always the work, the giving,

always more, a doubling of effort, a fatigue, a mystery,

a sadness, a tension, a working out of the myth in my

own life, in its individuality and its collective identity.

Ron Price

17 January 1999

 ¹ Joseph Campbell is the great popularizer of myth in the post-war period, beginning with his first book The Hero With a Thousand Faces(1949). There are many similarities between Campbell and the Baha’i concept of myth, certainly a great deal that has been useful to me.

 A CHAOS OF NAMES AND FACES

A mode of life devoid of collective myths is scarcely bearable. -Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 1935, p.31.

We have a thousand, a thousand million,

myths now, Karl; everyone and his dog

is into making their own from a hundred

billion sources: it’s part of the intellectual

restiveness of our age. The meaning of God,

man, life, despair and loneliness are not agreed

upon and, it would seem, people mind not; while

the truely real seems to take place almost unnoticed

and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed

and the truely cultivated know how to choose

their company among people, things and thoughts

with a passionate will to understand,

a deep tempering process,

that either kills you or makes you stronger

and gives you a home among your dreams

in a chaos of names and faces.

Ron Price

3 January 1997

I am constantly remaking my private, sometimes obscure and difficult, world by relating it to an organic whole,a whole that is amorphous, heterogeneous and contradictory. I see my poetry as Platonic, a basis for action and to a degree didactic. I also see it as imaginative, a basis for contemplation. But either way it serves as a process for the organization of experience, the simplification of the complexity of life, the conveyance of life's subtleties. If I lose or limit my audience it is due to the nature of my poetry not some personal snobbery. -Ron Price with thanks to Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Galaxy Books, 1965(1939), pp.1-59.

W.H. Auden's poetry weakened as he tried to rely upon an external framework-a doctrine or idelogy but, still, his best work revolved around one rather narrow theme and structure. R.F. Price's poetry is built on a spiritual framework, a set of spiritual themes. That is both its strength and its weakness, depending on your perspective. -Ron Price and Cleanth Brooks, ibid., p. 126 and 135.

Privacy and obscurity are inevitable

adjuncts to one's life, one's thought,

one's social being: elusiveness,

intricacy, incongruity of connection

as we walk around in the essential

isolation of our chambers, reaching

out with words to bind and hold, as

best we can, the moment in all its

delight and tension. But now, for us,

this new myth, not merely private fiction,

not just conviction immediate, direct,

overwhelming, but energetic metaphor,

artist working in the service of a cause,

a sensibility fortified with principles,

at the mercy of certain spiritual axioms,

sustains my days with a focus and affirmation

that brightens my expectations of a rich

confirmation of my actions in these fate-laden

days of history and their recurrent turbulence.¹

1 This 19 line poetic form I have in the last year termed a vahid.

From 1959 to 1968, in the first nine years I was a Baha'i, Joseph Campbell published his four volume study of mythology The Masks of God. He said he found the process a richly rewarding enterprise and it confirmed his long entertained view that there was a unity to the human race. He said this unity has unfolded in the manner of a single symphony and that it is now advancing to some kind of mighty climax out of which the next great movement will emerge. He wrote that the study of myth inspired poetry, that is helped people see their lives as a poem and themselves as participants in that poem. Twenty years later, in the late 1980s, a book and a six hour series of interviews with Joseph Campbell was produced for television on "the power of myth." I have tried to convey some of Campbell's ideas in the following poem, a vahid. My own poetic opus draws on Campbell's study of myth and a multitude of other sources.-Ron Price with thanks to Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Frontpage.

To find the point of wisdom

is, for each of us,

the prime question of our time.

From then on its an adventure

following a road map

to and in the inner life

where His word, His myth,

His history as metaphor,

will help us to take

the greatest leap forward ever,

with an experience of meaning,

an inner meaning to outer events.

For it is all one great meditation,

one great connection with the planet

in these dark times

where the eye has begun to see,

eternity unfolds in front of us

in His sweet-scented streams

and our souls rise up like the evening star

and will one day join all the other stars

in a blaze of glory.

Ron Price

27 February 2001

Distinctive voice is inseparable from distinctive substance...we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome....the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind....the true has about it an air of mystery or inexplicability ........the subject of a serious poet must be a life with a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself... -Louise Gluck, "Against Sincerity", Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, Hopewell, N.J., 1994.

Every atom in existence is distinctive

especially these Hanging Gardens:

we’ve got distinctive substance here

and some of us have been waiting

a long time-try forty years-for this

apotheosis of the Ancient of Days

in a holy seat, at last a genuinely

holy seat in a world of seats, seemingly

endless seats: the light of the countenance

Here is a world where affliction is married

to ecstasy, suffering defined with virtuosity,

colour mounts on colour, temperatures mix

and pure gold comes from the alchemist,

pure fire, pure spiritual energy so that:

my pages stain with apple-green;

my letters are written in chrysolite;

words find marble, gates and shrines

embedded in diamonds and amethyst.

What is this molton gold, ink burnt

grey, revelation writing? ....cheering

visible and invisible.* Yes and no,

always, it seems, yes and no.

Conflagrant worlds interacting:

the myth is tragic here. A grandeur

that is magnetic, but even here,

the meaning must be found.

Can you see the scars, the evidence:

there’s been emotion here to the

essence of our hearts. I try to name,

localize, master, define that scar,

but it is beyond my pen, beyond the

poignant inadequacy of my strategems.

No response of mine goes deep enough.

This poetry of functional simplicity

will never reach Zion, the City of God,

but I will try: May my life be a sacrifice

14/10/95.

* Tablet of Carmel

The writer, unable to chose his language, can no more choose his style, this necessity of his mood, this rage within him, this tumult or this tension, slowness or speed, which comes to him from a deep intimacy with himself, about which he knows almost nothing, and which give his language as distinctive an accent as his own recognizable demeanour gives his face....a language inseparable from our secret depths, that which, therefore, should be closest to us, is also what is least accessible to us...to encounter and then to silence the empty depths of ceaseless speech...of uninterrupted poetry. -Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, editor: Michael Holland, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp.146-149.

The revolution has come: the break!

It twists and turns

in metaphorical equivalents

at special times, at any time

it seems appropriate;

for the whole history has,

what shall we call it,

mythological significance?

This is the new myth!

The end of history has arrived!

Yes, this is the eternal Return

and world shaking, world reverberating

institutions have come, born, growing

in a majestic process launched in 1953

within a rhythmic life pattern

of fundamental happiness

which itself contains anxiety and grief

and a time for healing in those secret depths

of ceaseless speech and what seems to be

uninterrupted poetry.

Ron Price

7 December 1995

Price knew he did not need to construct a new mythic base to replace the symbolic base of Western culture that had existed in Christianity. His religion provided that new mythic base, that new metaphysical frame for his vision, that new metaphorical basis of spiritual reality. His poetry helped provide him with a channel to express his awakened intellectual faculties, his enlarged aesthetic appreciation and his unseen intimations of immortality. His poetry tried to embrace a language appropriate to these intimations; it tried to be an extended meditation on reality, the reality of history and the reality of his own story.

- Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, June 5, 1996.

Have my days of dramatic adventure finished?

All those towns and people and that excitement

sub specie pioneeringi? Age, these late years of

middle adulthood, has left me flat but still playing

the game sub specie aeternitatis. I felt tears come

to my eyes last night when she read about the poet

‘Aqa Muhammad-Ibrahim, but no similar tears came

when I reflected on the burden of my sins. I once

thought I could pray and, by God, I did; as long, as

intense as any man, but it seems like a new road now,

one carved in bone with a delirium of fever in a place

that I call home, although my words often chill or burn

me, usually when alone. As I try to tell of this story, its con-

figuration, the way meaning plays, my vulnerability: I wonder.

Ron Price

5 June 1996

Here is marble to the touch, but not to the heart. In its faultless excellence it possesses a certain self-sufficiency. In its beauty it is raised above the frailties of human passion and suffering. As a symbol of power, authority and justice it is an expression of the religion of humanity and the concept that beauty is truth and truth beauty. -Ron Price with appreciation to David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of A Critic, Chapter XI, Keats, Oxford UP, NY, 1983

Here is Grecian grandeur and my spirit rises

after weighing heavily as in some unwilling sleep,

after some ungodly hardships now gone,

substance of a century-and-a-half of incubation

and afflorescence, thou bridegroom ready for

the marriage of beauty and majesty, truth and justice,

silence and eloquence, whose fluted columns play

melodies sweeter to my spirit, lifting up my soul.

Fair youth, beneath the cypress trees, whose

fragrances of feeling open worlds of meaning.

Your ancient beauty emerges, adds up, unfolds

all of Greco-Roman civilization in a Hebraic place

to pipe songs forever new, forever young, warm,

to bring us safety, order and a pleasure on our

panting selves, breathing human passion. You

cool our burning foreheads and parching tongues.

You will bring your long and influential shadow

to our little towns near the sea, our cities in the mountains.

The villages which flood this world now endlessly

will come to breath your splendid symmetry and

your overwhelming moral and aesthetic superiority.

You will stifle damaging criticism as you come

to live in an all-embracing cordon sanitaire, with

architecture’s first heart-transplant fully in place.

As we make the intellectual breakthrough from

archaism to a full rationality in several generations,

you will come to symbolize no parochial patriotism

but a planetary fraternity, a reborn charismatic aura,

a reborn vision of oneness, of dynamic unity, housing

a new myth, inspiring a single aim-the oneness of humanity-

the product of a people and an epoch as transient as

the everyday life which is slowly harmonizing to your

timeless perfection.

Ron Price

22 January 1996

Reportage provides modern man, too, with a release from his trivial routines, and a habitual illusion of communication with a reality greater than himself. In all these ways religion suggests itself as the likeliest substitute pre-modern man could have found for reportage, at any rate in the West. -John Carey, Introduction, The Faber Book of Reportage, Faber and Faber, London, 1987.

The crossover from religion to the expressive arts...in the problem of dealing with restraints on impulse;...the coming to consciousness...of nihilism...the growth of the idea of a radical individualism in the economy and the polity, and of an unrestrained self in culture are part of a Great Profanation which has been in evidence since about 1575 to 1625 AD. -Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion", Hobhouse Memorial Lecture, 1977.

And some, millions, hundreds of millions,

would like some order, some mythic-totality,

coherence, in all this information chaos,

this disenchanted, de-magicified world,

that deals with existential questions, modernity

with that same coherence, so that they can

wear a cold mask in the morning and

explore subterranean rivers at night

always feeding springs of a spiritual appetite,

of eschatological hopes for a leap into the Kingdom

and some silence of oneness,

a silence of solemn consciousness

born of some shared experience

and wellspring of a redemptive,

consecrated, unifying joy,

far, far, above the grey morning’s

splashy, phosphorescence.

11/1/96.

Sensibility is the disciplining, the discipline of the emotional life, the defining as precisely as one can of the chaos, the mess, the mass, of feelings. Put another way, sensibility is the reservoire, the collection, the stock of a poet’s feelings and perceptions, memories and imaginations in their various stages of organization. It is the skill of responding with sense, with sanity, with an articulate wealth as a result of reflection. Again, sensibility is the process of being carried forward by curiosity and the pleasureable activity of the mind excited by the attraction of our infinite journey. -Ron Price with appreciation to S.T.Coleridge, R. P. Blackmur and Emerson in several sources.

You get some better feeling for reality,

for the personality of the past, the now,

the when, the then, for living, through

a unifying myth, through making the

unknown shine, through pollination and

cross-pollination, through organizing

what touches us deeply, recovering

underlying meaning, the moment’s scent,

the pulsations of the world, the poetry of

the universe. Perhaps, this poetic novitiate

will move insensibly to consummate artistry*

as the evening of life becomes more solemn

and serene and laughter touches the chaos with

an enchanting lightness, a token of virtue.

Ron Price

13 April 1996

*With the completion of Endymion on 28 November 1817 Keats, with a little more than three years to live, completes his poetic novitiate and begins to compose works of such authoritative power and consummate artistry that critics have had to go back to Shakespeare to find comparisons worthy of their company. -Stephen Gurney, British Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 1993, p.111.

* It would be presumptuous to compare myself with the greatest poets of the English speaking world but, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani puts it, "greatness rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great"(1) or, as Baha’u’llah puts it, "the greatness of those who while living or after death have circled round them."(2) Baha’u’llah is here referring to a blessed company of souls around which we can circle. One’s ability to circle around such souls is difficult to define but the desire to do so can be cultivated.

(1) Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, "Artist, Seeker and Seer", Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.

(2) Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, p.84.

The centre has not been lost because it never really existed; it was only a fallacious structuring principle. It would appear that, for various reasons, it was not important in previous religious dispensations that there be an agreed on centre that was free from serious schizmatic cleavages. -Ron Price with thanks to Frederick Glaysher, "Re-Centring: The Turning of the Tide and Robert Hayden", World Order, Vol.17, No.4, p.9.

There is this independent investigation of truth,

some free zone, inside, not society, others, them,

could call it poetry, the mind of man, pristine

singleness, as He said "Before all else, God

created the mind."* You are lifted up by its

invention, like some other nature, than nature,

freely ranging over all existence, embellishing

with ever-varying splendours, some new and

wonderful configurations, some godlike impulses,

some divinely-kindled fire, emanations, just a leap

in the dark, some distillation of meaning, some

delightful possibility, some meddling with language,

some radical rearranging of the familiar, affirming and

sustaining it bring us a quiet joy. This is not just a

Cinderella story; this is an attempt to define the new epic,

to tell of the new story, the new myth, metaphor, for the

whole, the oneness, the restoration of archaic mysteries

before our very intellectual eyes, true theodicy, some

imminence of rebirth during our disastrous quest for

meaning, our long wait for the wasteland to bloom.

This is a poetry that descends from the past, ascends

to the future and takes the present perception like

some training ground with every atom in existence,

as if the whole world existed to be put in a book,

to be tasted, or set on fire like some burning mirage

in the desert, seen differently through the diamond’s

many sides, telling me of meaning and meaninglessness.

Ron Price

27 May 1996

*Islamic tradition quoted on page 1 of The Secret of Divine Civilization, ‘Abdu’l-Baha.

The death of God in the eighteenth century sent many people in search of focuses for collective identity....a substitute for church was the nation.-J.L. Salmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980.

A profound hankering after the One is common to both the Left and the Right. -J.L. Salmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase-The History of Totalitarian Democracy, Vol.1, Secker and Warburg, London, 1960, p.510.

Singly and alone he will attack the armies of the world, defeat the right and left wings of the hosts of all the countries, break through the lines of the legions of all the nations and carry his attack to the very centre of the powers of the earth. -‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, p.48.

The one thousand years began its

progression somewhat unobtrusively

by touches of intricate tracery and

elaborate ornamentation, perhaps

those first drawn on the sand of the

seashore by Louis Bourgeois, or the

first movement of earth by ‘Abdu’l-

Baha, or the flash of inspiration that

gave Louis the dome of that Temple,

that great bell of the most beautiful

building in the world, opened in Chicago

in 1953. By then, the thousand year Reich

had begun and ended and its unspeakable

language of holocaust: a saviour-in-a-hurry,

unanimous consent imposed by force, a vision

of eventual triumph, fitting an imaginary man

into an artificially contrived social harmony,

source and motive of contradictions, paradoxes,

casuistry, hypocrisy, ruse and tyranny.

Ron Price

18 August 1996

We must be like the mythic god Proteus who eludes tragedy, chronic frustration, remorse and despair by changing form. This form is an inner form or quality that deals with existential questions of how to live, what to do, who am I, etc. Proteus needs to be constantly replenished to achieve a constitutional optimism, a direction and redirection, a new creative impetus to a person’s life and work, love and meaning. One possible paradigm for this renewal, this contemporary guideline for dear old Proteus, can be found in Baha’u’llah’s Seven Valleys and Four Valleys. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau, Cambridge UP, NY, 1995, p.xii.

So, dear Proteus, let me try to summarize

a book of some special guidance for us here.

This is difficult to do, mind you, in the space

of ten lines or so, but you can go along way

on a pithy phrase or two: so I shall try. Take

leave of yourself; don’t be downhearted; work

hard; seek fellowship; expect difficulties; turn

inward, but know that this inner land is not real;

seek the assistance of the departed, do not stray

far from this jewelled wisdom of the lucid Faith;

pray; destroy your animal self, as far as you can;

seek the God within, this book of your own self.

Ron Price

15 June 1996

With public poetry which sets out to record, confront, and influence the external world, one must ask what is the structure of society the poet is dealing with; where does the poet stand in relation to the world of politics, religion and the broad base of values and beliefs; what channels of communication and social definition are available to the poet; in what ways is social change affecting his position and his poetic response to society and how does the personal and professional life of the poet affect his place in the poetic order and in the wider flux of life in society. -Ron Price with thanks to Isabel Rivers, The Poetry of Conservatism: 1600-1745, A Study of Poets and Public Affairs from Jonson to Pope, Rivers Press, Cambridge, 1973, p.ix.

An understanding of disorder,

images of the ideal,

essential for the public poet

who must state truths

which are perennial

but not archaic,

whose poetry flows

from some core of goodness

and its relationship to a vast complex

of processes within which

he constantly tries to define

and so create himself.

Dedication and training

can not be avoided,

nor the workings of time

and providence which are only partly

comprehensible as these "last days" spin

their unpredictable way through the cosmos

of our days and this new myth and metaphor

is given the living tissue of vision in a synthesis

that is poetry-my poetry- and a unity within the

most ambitious ethical system on earth:

Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised

But as the world, harmoniously confused.

Where order in variety we see,

And where, though all things differ, all agree.¹

2 ibid., p.186.

Giving oneself, expressing oneself, can be made into an end in itself depending on the goal, the object of expression. The Greek goddess Clytie persisted daily, year in and year out, in her love of Apollo. Apollo, the sun god, never returned her love but the gods, in their pity for her, changed her into a sunflower. Now, a fit symbol of constancy, she follows with upturned face his journey across the sky. -Ron Price with thanks to H.A. Guerber, Greece and Rome: Myths and Legends, Chancellor Press, London, 1995(1907), p. 72.

The heart that has truely loved never forgets

but truely loves well past the close of debts.

And in some undiscovered country, land,

finds some symbol, mystery, hand, and

on new lips and hair of gold a love is

found so sweet to hold, as if it was like

yesteryear, only richer to the taste and tear.

For persistence in love is never lost, though

it may for atime be paid for at great cost.

One day the soul will find its Centre and

turn forever as it was meant or were.

Ron Price

1 December 1996

METAPHOR’S DANCE

The dream-web of myth has fallen away; modern man has emerged from ancient consciousness like a butterfly from its cocoon, or like the sun at dawn. The great coordinating mythologies of the past are now known as lies. The problem today is one of rendering the modern world spiritually significant. A transmutation of the whole social world is necessary so that through every detail of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is effective in all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness. -With apprecation to Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Princeton UP, 1949, NY, pp.387-389.

This vitalizing image of my universal god

that fills every atom of existence with a

richly allusive, poetic imagery, a metaphor,

a drama, for my path of spirituality, with

this man-god, this life, these words, at one

remove from what I see here, unlocking a

meaning, I must turn the key to open the

door of an autonomy of spirit in this world

of people and, like the butterfly, fly free

and light to suck yet again the nectar of

life on a flight-path carved out by destiny,

biology and fate: slowly, meticulously,

wittingly, methodically, until death removes

the colour, the form and the dance of life.

Ron Price

30 September 1996

Poems aren’t made of beautiful thoughts; poems are machines made out of words.

-William Carlos Wiliams, found on The Internet.

I have long wanted to try to summarize Iranian history in a poem. I have read about Iran and talked about it for years, as one inevitably does, being a member of a religion with its origin in Iran. Not being a specialist, a historian, or even someone particularly versed in that history, I have tried to take what I know and forge this knowledge into some expression, some machine, that puts the nearly three millennia of its history into focus, at least an initial focus for future revision and elaboration. The exercise is not unlike making a ‘machine’: to forge 3000 years into twenty-five lines is indeed a machine-like exercise. The exercise is impossible artistically-aesthetically; it needs the efficiency of a machine to make such a coldly efficient, but somewhat crude, attempt. -Ron Price, 4:15 pm, 9 January 1996, Rivervale, WA.

Your civilization, culture, nation,

has been nibbling at other civilizations

for millennia(or been nibbled), as far back

as the Assyrians some 2700 years ago and

before then beyond Turkestan or the Caucasus.

Your first dynasty of kings, the Achaemenid,

had its origin in a semi-mythical king nurtured

by an eagle. But then you conquered(no nibble)

all the four great powers of the middle east:

Egypt, Babylonia, Media and Lydia.

You provided, under Cyrus, a unifying empire

and you gave peace to Western Asia for 200

years(550-350 BC), before the Seleucids and

the Sassanians ruled you and then another

story begins under the Arabs and Byzantines.

And on-and-on past: Turks, Mongols, Safavids

Qajars and Pahlavi: long, tortured centuries,

until you produced a King of Kings Whom

you exiled to that once great city, Baghdad

and then to Constantinople, the end of the jetty.*

Installing Him in that prison city Akka

to finish out His days, you seemed to lose

all greatness. Cyrus’ old dream of unity

will be realized in your lands. Billions

will come to you, revering His sacred places.

Some mythological-metaphorical eagle

will again ensure your greatness, nurturing,

as he has, the origins of a spiritual dynasty

that will last half a million years over the

entire surface of the Earth: O Persia!

Behold and wonder!

9 January 1996

* Constantinople is sometimes referred to as the end of the ‘jetty’ of Western Asia.

Modern Turkey, as you can see on a map, sticks out like a jetty from the continental landmass of Asia.

1 Haemocytoblasts are what red cells are called at the beginning of their lives. They have huge nuclei and go through a rapid series of divisions during which they become progressively smaller and then are lost altogether.

No more for now!