APPENDIX 1:Introduction

toSECTION IX

OFPIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS:

NOTEBOOKS

The material below, not originally part of the 6th edition of my autobiography, has been added as an appendix. This appendix may be useful for future autobiographical, biographical and historical work. Since such a substantial part of my life has been spent compiling and utilizing notebooks in my teaching, my personal study and my writing, it seemed relevant to include this commentary on my notebooks in this 6 th

edition of my memoirs or autobiography.

Notebook is the general name I give to each file that I now have in my study and to the files and notebooks I once had as a teacher and student as far back as 1949. One can spend much time defining precisely what constitutes a file or a notebook. I do that in several places in my literary resource base and especially here in this Notebooks: Volume 5.1 This Volume 5 of my Notebooks focuses on the Notebooks of other writers and provides an overview of some 300 of my own Notebooks.

Insensibly, after I completed the first edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Four Epochs in 1993, and as the last 17 years since 1993 have run their course, I became aware of the importance of the Notebooks of other writers as models for my own and of the genre Notebooks to my literary products, to my oeuvre in all its forms. It was my hope that I might learn a few things from these other writers and define as precisely as I needed to do the concept of Notebook. This Notebook, Volume 5, attempts, as I say above, to place the Notebooks of other writers into some overview, some overall statement and perspective to help give me an more accurate view of what constitutes my own Notebooks. After some sixty years of keeping Notebooks of various kinds I am beginning to get a feel for their role in my life. In 1949 when I entered kindergarten I produced a Notebook, but it was another dozen years before anything substantial, anything was created, that could, that might, in time, become part of an archival Notebook.2 Now, like shards of memory distilled from the past, my Notebooks provide scenes to be

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contemplated, tasted, savoured when they serve my purpose. Now, after collecting nearly fifty years of archival material in my Notebooks, I have a type of memoir which contains a dialogue with the mixed legacies of my life: religious, cultural, historical. For the most part, though, these Notebooks are not poignant or provocative; they are, rather, workmanlike collections, general repositories, of other people’s ideas and words.

Those who wrote autobiographies and memoirs in the Bahá'í community were and are few and far between. Those who did were content, for the most part, to write a short exposition what might become a chapter of a book. The closest I’ve come to Notebooks is pilgrims’ notes. What I have tried to do in my autobiography with its poetry, notes, journal and essays is to do what Samuel Beckett did with his plays. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots, and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of notebooks published by Faber and Faber.2 Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. In some ways my autobiography is an entire theatrical event. As this theatrical event approaches some 2500 pages, this comparison of my approach to Beckett’s is, I think, apt.

I now have some 300 files or Notebooks and it has become tiresome to try and keep count. In the 48 years, my pioneering years 1962 to 2010, of keeping material3 that has become part of a Notebook somewhere in this vast collection of material, I have also discarded literally hundreds of Notebooks. This Notebook:Volume 5 should be of value to anyone interested in general perspectives, overall pictures, of my Notebooks. I realize that future readers may find some ambiguity in my use of the term Notebook. I apologize here for placing any individuals who take a serious interest in all of this printed matter in these difficult positions with respect to my terminology and the resources in question. But I am confident that, should anyone really be interested in these Notebooks, I have done an ample job of organizing my printed matter for any future historical value it might have, if any.

2 The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume IV: The Shorter Plays, Grove Pub., 1999.3 I do have some photographs going back to 1909 and my grandfather’s autobiography takes his life back to 1872 when he was born. I have also hypothesized my family history back to the 1840s and, possibly, back to 1826 and my great-great-grandparents. Grandparents: 1872(born) Great-grandparents: 1850(born) guesstimation: Great-great-grandparents: 1826(born); Siyyid Kazim assumes leadership of Shayki-School in 1826.

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FOOTNOTES1 Generally, though, I define a Notebook as an arch-lever file, a 2-ring binder, an A-3 manilla folder or an easy-glide desk file. Of course, within most of these different collecting points there are sub-files or separate notebooks. If I considered these sub-sections, these separate/discrete sections as Notebooks there would be several thousand Notebooks in my collection. The Notebooks that I once kept as far back as 1949, nearly 60 years ago, were found in myriad forms in ther primary, secondary and post-secondary schools I attended.2 The oldest document I created is an essay I wrote in the early months of 1962 in English class.--February 12th-March 4th 2006

NOTEBOOKS: GENERAL OVERVIEWOF A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING

In the more than fifty years(1949-2010) that I have gathered my writing into Notebooks the writing has fallen into three general categories: school, job and personal/Baha’i. The first category was created in the years 1949 to 1988 in primary, secondary and tertiary education and then external studies programs(1973-1988). From the hundreds of Notebooks created in these years only two remain. From the hundreds created in the dozens of jobs I have had the only ones remaining are the approximately 30 files/Notebooks from my last job at Thornlie College, Notebooks from several of the social sciences and humanities.

The final category of Notebooks now in my possession are what I would term personal/Baha'i. They were created not for use in a place of employment, not as a teacher or in a school system. They were created for my own use in my work as a Baha’i or in my personal use as a writer and poet. I have been gathering resources now for over forty years, 1966-2010, but only seriously for the last twenty, 1988-2010 since moving to Perth in the late 1980s. I have been fine-tuning this 20 year collection of Notebooks in the last ten years, 1999-2010, after I retired from FT work and enaged in refining my scholarly activity. I now have some 300 Notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics. These Notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the base for my many writing projects in these middle years (65-75) of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should I be granted a long life.

Little did I know when I created my first Notebook at the mid-point in the twentieth century that sixty(1949/50-2010) years later Notebooks would come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Updated 21 March 2010.

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THE CONCEPT OF NOTEBOOKS

Anselm Hollo wrote: "I love reading poets' notebooks. Poets are curious critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners."1 Many writers and poets, though not all, keep Notebooks. This part of Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, contains information relevant to my Notebooks. What readers find here provides a general framework for the many Notebooks I have kept over the years. If there is any threat of philosophical textbookism hovering in the margins of my Notebooks, and the threat does exist, there is also my determination to "see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which I find them." This tends to fend off that danger of textbookism with what I hope is, at least sometimes, a dazzling effect.

There are generally three types of Notebooks which I use. One is the type where I keep notes on a particular subject. The subjects on which I kept notes--and booklet, the notebook names--are not listed in this section.2

Another notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the subject of writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal keeping and letter writing, inter alia. In this latter category I have some 20 major files and in the former category I have some 280 files. There is material in these Notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks assumed the form they did in the last ten years and especially after I retired from full-time employment in 1999. A third type is found in my 61 collections of poetry, some 6500 prose-poems, and these 61 booklets could easily fall into a separete category of Notebook. FOOTNOTES1 Anselm Hollo, The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et al., 1995.2 Too many to list here on 25/8/’08. I have listed them elsewhere.

SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ON NOTEBOOKS

Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. The significance to Marx of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the simple fact of his copying passages of Spinoza.1 The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering over three hundred, could be viewed for the significance of the thought of these various authors in relation to many Baha’i themes. There is, of course, significance beyond Baha’i themes but, after 46 years of

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pioneering, the main focus is the connection of these resources to the Baha’i Cause. If a reader sifted my entire oeuvre and any specific writer through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings, I’m sure he would find many interesting connections. These Notebooks were themselves a significant sifting mechanism.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Eugene Holland, “ Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, 2002; and 2Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.

I take a hint from Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, that there may be a couple of good ways to think about ideas, and it would be a shame to blur them. Here he reports on a poet and a physicist talking about their work habits:

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one"(p.123).

Writers very often keep Notebooks and dip into them for ideas later on. They do this for at least two reasons. They want to preserve the energetic bits of language that come to them from time to time because they know that inspiration usually doesn't deliver whole poems and certainly never whole novels. Instead, they have to come back to the inspired bits and grow them into larger works, through regular practice of their craft. And they know that if they write regularly they will have more inspired bits to come back to. Good language comes to a writer who is working regularly with language, and not so much to one who writes only when on holiday, sporadically as if part of leisure time. Einstein’s point needs emphasizing here because my Notebooks are full of ideas but they are significantly the words of others. To have an idea that is all yours is a rare experience. Poets have inspirations in all sorts of situations: as they walk along, sit, eat, or whatever. I knew a fiction writer once who said he thought poets were always "working." “Working is” that magical insider's word that writers use with each other to describe their writing activity. But there are different styles of working. T. S. Eliot once said in an interview that he didn't keep notes of ideas for new poems because he thought they froze when they were written down, but they kept evolving when he had them in his head rather than on paper.

The French poet Valery is surprised at Einstein, I believe, because as a poet he thinks through the specificity of language, and needs to keep the rich, promising clusters of new writing at hand somewhere, somehow, in order to save and work with the specificity. One way or another, Valery

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needs to preserve the hints, the false starts, the fragments, that might lead him in the direction of that specificity. Language is not the form his work takes; language is his work. And for me, of course, the language bites are different. Each writer has a different game and his Notebooks reflect his game and the quality of his intellectual clearing house.

I can't speak as clearly about the specificity in Einstein's field. I don't know it very well. I recognize its power, its workable specificity, even if I don't speak his language and don't know, perhaps, what to make of his allegiance to mathematics and quantitative analysis. But Valery offers a clearer clue, at least to this reader, about writers having a generative relationship to language. It's visible in the ways they work, as mine are visible to me in the ways I work. –Ron Price with thanks to Ken Smith’s website, 03/07/03 at 8:33 pm.

And finally a reference to Goethe and his way of seeing life. The following words offer views of my Notebooks over six decades. “People always fancy,” said Goethe, laughing, “that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were. Man becomes, indeed, in the different stages of his life, a different being; but he cannot say that he is a better one, and in certain matters he is as likely to be right in his twentieth as in his sixtieth year.” And so it is that the mere accummulation of Notebooks do not necessarily make me a better person or a wiser person.

“We see the world one way from a plain, another way from the heights of a promontory, another from the glacier fields of the primary mountains. We see, from one of these points, a larger piece of the world than from the other; but that is all, and we cannot say that we see more truly from anyone than from the rest. When a writer leaves monuments on the different steps of his life, it is chiefly important that he should have an innate foundation and good will; that he should, at each step, have seen and felt clearly, and that, without any secondary aims, he should have said distinctly and truly what has passed in his mind. Then will his writings, if they were right at the step where they originated, remain always right, however the writer may develop or alter himself in after times.”4 Would that not be wonderful: to have one’s Notebook writings “remain always right.” Timewill tell.________________________________

THOMAS HARDY AND HIS NOTEBOOKS

4 Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 17 February, 1831.

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I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p.26.

Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;confusing burying with repressing is understandable.For me burying is an unconscious process associated with memory, so that rememberingis like creating something anew,not always mind you, experiencing itfor the first time, again and again.If I have any gift as a poet it is this and it extends from strong experiences to minute observations. This is the fresh centre of richness which feeds imagination, feeds the present with charged particles, with blood and bone, with glance and gesture and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix from ashes where emotion lies buried, exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world by some other me, as if for the first time.

17 September 19957 REECE MEWS/6 REECE STREET

I think what caught my fancy about the story of Francis Bacon1, in addition to his works of art and some of the quite stimulating and provocative things he said about art and the creative process, was the transfer in tact to Ireland of Bacon’s entire art studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. Bacon worked in this studio from 1961 to 1992. It is unlikely that this will ever happen to my study. The reasons for this are complex but obvious after a brief reflection.

My study holds less interest for the eye than Bacon’s studio. There is less colour, little clutter, far less heterogeneity and diversity of materials here. What I have here in my study is an orderly arrangement of books, files, furniture and stationary resources. In a general culture that takes more interest in the visual than in print a place like this study has virtually nothing to offer the art gallery, the library, the museum. The archivist or the librarian might find some print materials here that they could integrate

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into their wider collections. But I can not think of any reason to keep this study at “6 Reece Street” in tact for some future generation, as the studio of Francis Bacon has been kept.-Ron Price with thanks to 1“7 Reece Mews,” ABC TV, 11:20-12:20 p.m., 14/15 August, 2005.

I watched “7 Reece Mews,” on ABC TV last night14th /15th August 2005and wondered to myselfif there was any point intransferring my study to somehome for tourists to come,a place to serve as modellocation for serious reflection.

But after brief considerationI concluded that this couldnever happen to my world,this extension of who I am,this identity frameworkthat tells much about thisself, this person, this manfrom Canada transplantedto the Antipodes near theend of the Nine Year Planto spend the rest of his lifeand lay his bones in the soilat the southern end of the axis.

Ron PriceAugust 15th 2005AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS

In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks.

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These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519. His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made from the age of 37 to 67.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October 31st, 2004.___________________________________________________________Some may regard me as a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”1 ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t enumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949-1950 in kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1.

I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s. Most of these notes are: (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my notes comes from the quarter century, 1981 to 2006. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997; many were given to my colleagues when I left the teaching profession in 1999; many were thrown out when I reorganized my Notebooks on retiring from teaching in 1999 and retired from casual and volunteer teaching by mid-2004.

What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five year period, 1981 to 2006, from the age of 37 to 62.2 The collection of alia, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and, to a far lesser extent, my observations and experiences. There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i) journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks

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on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines /topics in 300(ca) Notebooks in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files, inter alia.

I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have also added additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping. I should add, too, that there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories of Notebooks that I have in my study twenty-five years after I began to keep notes that became the collection that now exists.3

New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry. They are scattered like seeds on page after page and sometimes they fall on the right soil and grow into poems, essays or chapters of a book.

There are now 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.4 _______________________FOOTNOTES_______________________1 Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.2 My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1984, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first notes from the period 1984 to 2004 come from January 19th 1984, a journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.

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3 Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 by which time I was in grade 4 and nine years old.4 Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs. –2004 to 2006.___________________________________________________________UNPRECEDENTED DIGNITY AND EASE

It is by a continual effort that I can create....My deepest, most certain leaning is toward silence and everyday activity. It has taken me years of perseverance to escape from distractions....It is how I despair and how I cure myself of despair.-Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, Penguin, 1970, p.276.

I tend toward ‘the work’ every minuteand can sit vacant staring at the gardenor some inane bit of TV or some vacuousact for only so long without a feeling ofgreat emptiness invading which I must fillwith my ‘planned program’.* If this cannot be done, I fill my own mind with my ownthoughts or some Passage. But, generally,in a chaos of reading, silence and creationI keep out a distracted, frenetic passivityand a mountainous world of trivia as faraway as I can until necessity intervenes.

And then, then.... some holy simplicity, some rest, plain mysterium, a feeling ofthe numinous, a nothingness, an idiosyncraticsomething that is incommunicable, gliding ona sea of faith with reason resting in the wings,the burning desire to seek enjoying a lowflame, quietly flickering, in a free zoneof some unprecedented dignity and ease.

12 January 1996MY TRIBUTARY

Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert

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Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.

There’s been a stream, scented, I’ve been drinking from since before I came of age. The waters have been sweet and deep, with periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry and the blackest soil filled my soulwith fear, disorder and dessication.

My own tributary of this stream only began to run in my middle years.Inspiration has run with a force that I barely understand, nor can withstandits roving eye and hand like an interwovencarpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.

Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressedmy life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,more clear-sighted level than anything I can achievein the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributaryof a great and thundering river whose waters willflow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:

as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;I know many who have not the will that will not will belief.The mood will not strike them here below:I know not why?

12 January 1996MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS

...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee....-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.

To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you

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like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.

It was not all risk, though; some of it was simply pure surprise and wonder: like the two exploding stars colliding 17 million light years from Earth and taking, according to one astrophysicist, 1200 years to do their colliding; shooting out gas in all directions at 36 million kilometres per hour, creating a supernova, a brilliant light show, in a place, a galaxy, where six supernovashave been produced since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His Tablets of the Divine Plan.

And me, defining myself, my sense of nothingness, in the face of that immensity.

Ron Price14 June 1997NOT QUITE ME It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams

Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last thing the poet would ever say-like a will. -Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.

Every once in a while I go

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to some plush joint on the sixteenth floor and get a view of the big smoke, or eat a lunch in the finest restaurant in townand discuss the state of the world, or travel in the fast lane for an afternoonwith dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car for the day; it’s a dip into another world foran instant in time, a world that belongs to someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new desires, significations, to savour, like a dream, vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS

We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, 1968(1965), p. 26.

I feel as if I have becomemore introverted with the years.I bring the world’s wondersinto myself.I put words aroundevery atom in existenceand the essence of all created things,as much as I can,within my limitations,except what the garment of wordscan not clotheand what those mystic tonguesand their mysterious melodiesfind no ear with which to hear.

9 October 1999

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THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW

I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems.-Octavio Paz in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W., Norton & Co, NY, 1995.

A poem is to keep a now for then. -Felix Pollak, ibid.

What we see here towersfar too high for us to grasp.These terraces and marbleselude our mental clasp.

The anguish and the lossthat make our furrowsof sweet toil, now spur-onstriding spirits every morning, on the boil.

The world sees a lovely hanginggarden on the way to work,a place for flowers and for laws,a crystal concentrate of beauty,a blissful vision and a cause.

No one knows what lurks beneath the ground of this vast expanse.The vision’s coming faster now:the dancer and the dance.1

6 January 1999

1 This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines, NOTEBOOKS: Fitzgerald’s and Mine

F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"1 some time after May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations. Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald, they are important.2 Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.

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R. Frederick Price "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and 1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he lectured and taught. His poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes that came from observations and ideas. By 2006, as this statement was being recorded, over three hundred two-ring binders, arch-lever files and booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.viii & p.ix.

It had become a massive embrace,filled the spaces all around himlike a sprawling glovethat noone could wear,like a collection of old shirtsnicely hung and arrangedto wear on cold or warm days.

He'd been warming to them for,what, forty years now?1

It had been a lifetimesince that early startwith lots of practiceeven in those earlier years,perhaps as far back as '53--surely not that soon,not in grade four2

when the Kingdomwas just arrivingand that Crusadeto conquer the world?1 1962-20022 I have vague recollections of notebooks from school from about 1949 through 1962, from kindergarten to grade 12 in Ontario Canada. Nothing, of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The oldest item from a notebook that I possess comes from 1962.

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CRYSTALLIZATION AND THE OCTOPUS

The octopus is the most ambidextrous creature alive. Man, in his ability to live and work within a multitude of polarities, has the most flexible mind of all living creatures. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Incredible Sickers”, 6:00 pm, Sunday, 25 August 1996.

I feel no division between art and action, no social fragmentation of poetry from life, no ivory tower, no barricades. I work in solitude surrounded by community, many communities, in dialogue and silence, alternating between myself and some collectivity. This poetry and this action moves through my solitude and its membrances. I experience the pull of the inner and the outer, voices often wrenching me between poles, between the dichotomy of active and contemplative. This dichotomy, part of the very mystery of polarity, is at the heart of oneness. The experience of oneness is the experiencing of an alternation between the active and the contemplative, an alternation as necessary as day following night. For this is oneness. -Ron Price, thanks to Adrienne Rich, What I Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, WW Norton and Co, NY, 1993, p.53.

If you want an experience of an alien life form,you could just dive into the sea in the rightplaces and meet the Houdini of the ocean deeps.This hunter and gatherer of the last frontier onearth-the great abyss-this cephalopod, the octopus,a skeemy predator, swimming and foraging as hehas for one hundred and fifty million years. He wasa professional long before homo sapiens sapiensemerged looking like the mammals of yesteryear.He is still a professional, as we learn to map hislife in this most recent epoch of the Formative Agewhen knowledge continues its explosive journey from these abyssal depths to the edges of the universe, pioneering processes crystallized by other pioneers.1

26 August 1996

PS. I often wonder what the relationship is between the extension of the Baha’i Faith, an extension based on The Tablets of the Divine Plan and promulgated since 1919, and the extension of knowledge on this earth. I like to think that the Baha’i pioneer has been a critical variable in this complex equation. Pioneers have been so critical to the extension of the

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new light that their true value is largely unappreciated, even by themselves. ______________________________MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS

We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, 1968(1965), p. 26.

I feel as if I have becomemore introverted with the years.I bring the world’s wondersinto myself.I put words aroundevery atom in existenceand the essence of all created things,as much as I can,within my limitations,except what the garment of wordscan not clotheand what those mystic tonguesand their mysterious melodiesfind no ear with which to hear.

9 October 1999____________________ THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW

I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems. -Octavio Paz in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W. Norton and Co, NY, 1995.

A poem is to keep a now for then. -Felix Pollak, ibid.

What we see here towers

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far too high for us to grasp.These terraces and marbleselude our mental clasp.

The anguish and the lossthat make our furrowsof sweet toil, now spur-onstriding spirits every morning, on the boil.

The world sees a lovely hanginggarden on the way to work,a place for flowers and for laws,a crystal concentrate of beauty,a blissful vision and a cause.

No one knows what lurks beneath the ground of this vast expanse.The vision’s coming faster now:the dancer and the dance.1

6 January 1999to December 29th 2005

1 This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines._______________________FILE TO BIN

A part of the written record of this autobiography, a part that with the passing of time is likely to get lost when my days are gone and someone has the responsibility of keeping all my writings safe and sound, is what I have numbered Section VII: Notebooks and Section II: Parts B & C: Journal. The Journal is currently in three volumes and the Notebooks in some eighty volumes. When I retired from teaching in 1999 I left another fifty(approx.) volumes of notes with my coworkers in the Human Services sector at the Thornlie Campus of the South-East Metropolitan College of Tafe.

My Journal contains the more spontaneous, personal, intimate connections with my real world. The Notebooks, spread as they are over such a wide range of subject matter, and organized in more systematic and orderly arrangements of material, could easily be dispensed with, in

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most cases, and there would be little loss, unless, of course, all of this wealth of academic resources and this life becomes more important than can be envisaged at this early stage of its existence. Then, in that future age, these notes might prove useful in some minute investigation, in some embellishment of this autobiography. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.

So much writing and note takingover thirty years of teaching andBaha’i community consolidationand most of it gone now into thatpart of history which is oblivion.Only some fifteen volumes left of any personal, intimate, relevance; the rest just resources for the work,and these resources listed elsewhere1

should anyone really be interested.Can I really contain all those 1000sof hours of my life in one sonnet?What does all of that paper mean?Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, file to bin.

1 See Section VIII, kept in “Latest Poetry for Latest Booklet” Filelisting all the subject files I have kept and all the ones I left in the last school where I taught.

6 March 2000__________________WRITING FOR THE PLANET

Two years before the outset of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, Thomas Wolfe delivered a lecture at the Colorado Writers’ Conference. What Wolfe said then, about American writers, could well apply to the Baha’is who are writing now at the turn of the century and the millennium from a planetary perspective. I have summarized Wolfe’s words below and turned the message toward myself and my fellow Baha’is who are trying to be writers.

The Baha’i who is also an aspiring writer has a task that very well may be the hardest that any writer has known. The physical proportions are vaster and more difficult than those that the writer in any individual nation on the earth must contend with. There is no antecedent, no structural plan, no body of tradition that the writer can draw on. Such

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writers must make a new tradition for themselves derived from their own life, from the immense space and energy of the planet. They must labour in the direction of a complete and whole articulation; they must attempt to discover the entire universe; they must try and form a new and complete language. This is the struggle toward which their lives must be devoted. From the billions of living and non-living forms, from the swarming complexity of life everywhere, from the world’s violence and savagery, from the uniqueness that surrounds us everywhere, we aspirants to the vocation of writer must draw on that power and energy in our own life, a power and energy furnished by those who have been “faithful to the Cause of God.”1 We must find that special voice that is in our own speech and that becomes over time the substance of our art. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, editor, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, Introduction; and 1 Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161. I have tired to capture and subduethe enormous multiplicity and what is so often the grey washof existence, of what comes into my sensory emporium and mind from outside, external.

There is a staggering muchness,pictures, events, happeningspouring in from all compass points,sifted through my active brain, leaning to the side of solitude now, the deep-sea diving of memory and the world’s invisible, infinite sources that swim and float.

24 August 2000_____________________VISIONS: 1937-2000

“The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe show us the difficulties that the autobiographical method created for him due to an ever-expanding, ever-detailed proliferation of material,” writes R.S. Kennedy in The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe(U. of N. Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970). Rather than small pocket notebooks, the informal records of a literary career, a mixture of day-to-day jottings of a most miscellaneous kind, a jumble of literary ideas, readers of my autobiographical pot-pourri

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get a mixture of poetry, essays, letters, narrative, journal, history, biography, criticism, notes from reading, newspaper and magazine articles and incompleted novels, mostly from the fourth epoch but some from the third, of the Formative Age. This mixture of genres provides readers with an unusual, a rare, acquaintance with the inner life of a Baha’i who is an aspiring writer, a fascinating glimpse of a poet at work and a close look at the creative process which transformed his experience into writing. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, p. xvii. I, too, Thomas, have a hope,a conviction, of a high,a glorious fulfillment. No abortion here, Thomas, no corruption,no infection of disease will dull the vision, the golden dome,the silver thread, the amethyst, the diamond:they will shine however bleak the scene,however much the revulsionthat is felt from time to time.1

Yes, there will be shame, anguish,loathing, follies, stupidities,crises that threaten to arrest its unfoldment and blast all the hopes which its progress has engendered.2

And there will be a tasteof bitterness with the years,made sweet by death’s final calland that Wondrous Visionthat is the brightest emanationof His Mind.3

1 When the Seven Year Plan began in 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the last year of his life and the vision, the dream, he had had of America seemed mortally wounded.2 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.111.

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3 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p.48. //Ron Price 25 Aug 2000_____________________A DIFFERENT PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

It is difficult not to regard, indeed it is quite fitting to regard, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in autobiographical light. It would seem that Joyce intuited this autobiographical reality early on and most certainly was consciously aware of this personal nature of his writing by the time he undertook the novel. This book is, I think, a sort of 'Pilgrim's Progress' from the world of objectivity to the world of Einstein's relativity which had entered the world more than ten years before Portrait. I could illustrate this by dealing with several facets of the novel, beginning with the overarching guide through the novel: the narrator. The first chapter of Portrait, too, begins with a montage of memories of very young childhood. If Joyce first approached his autobiography through this novel, I first approached it through a narrative of my life and this led, by 1992, to a poetic narrative of literally thousands of poems. -Ron Price with thanks to "The Dedalus Factor: Einstein's Science and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist," Timothy D. Clark, in Joyce's Papers on the Internet, 20 December 2002.

Here you will find my life and times,but my account is flawed and fails,as life itself fails and is flawedand, for the most part, apparentlymakes nothing happen of consequence.

But the potential is therefor much good, much effect,if only, if only the readercan be part of it, and thenthe most self-centred poetbecomes the most universal1

and a life, of little apparentultimate significance, keepsa now for then, a musicthat all can use and wordsthat are, strangely, the poet's last will and testament.

1From The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, WW Norton & Co., 1995, p. 219.

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20 December 2002___________________A PLUNGE

Since I kept some of Richard Needham's Saturday columns from the Toronto Globe and Mail in about 1965 it is possible to examine representative materials that reveal my thoughts and tendencies as far back as my twenty-first year. It seems to me that, given the existence now of some one hundred and fifty Notebooks readers and analysts are given an unusual acquaintance with the inner life of a writer who was a Baha'i, a fascinating glimpse of his literary workshop and the creative process that transformed his experience into poetry. Readers will find here a plunge into Price's psyche. He does not reveal every possible confessional nook and cranny, but he does provide an encyclopedic assembly of literary phenomena. We are shown how a Baha'i and a writer, a poet, equipped himself to execute his craft and cope with the problems of his time and his religion as it emerged from obscurity in the years toward and in the fin de siecle and early twenty-first century. Price belonged to his religion as an arm belongs to its socket. Any separation, permanent or otherwise, he saw as an amputation. His was a search for definition, intellectual and experiential clarification and a universe of language and thought. His goal was to capture in words the multiplicity and diversity of it all and give it a place, a relevant perspective, in his writing, his poetry and his life. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, editor, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, pp.xv-xx.

I've tried to probe to the bottom of it all, of our dark and twisted agewith the new Light blazing,with hopes of a high and glorious fulfillment with a seemingly infinitessimal progress here and thereone hundred years-and more-after the summons of the Lord of Hosts.

I've asked for confirmationfor my efforts to advance His purposefor the redemption and healing1

of humankind--and me!

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But am I deserving, am I worthy?I shall never know here--only there.

1 Universal House of Justice Message, 24 May 2001.

20 January 2003___________________FINDING MY LIMITS

It has been nearly four years since I retired from my professional career as a teacher. I had already become quite tired of the verbal world in all its forms, teaching and community activity, in my last several years as a teacher. Now after four years of relative quiet, with only my wife and son to talk to, a small Baha'i community of half a dozen and a few others: family, friends and people I had come to know in the wider community providing a small base of human interaction, I seem to find anything beyond about four hours of continuous human interaction and dialogue at one stretch a cause of some anxiety and fatigue. Only a slight anxiety exists in anticipation of a long verbal exchange, but my spirit clearly finds a type of emotional exhaustion setting in after I have engaged in conversation with others for more than about four hours. I am now only 18 months short of sixty. After forty years of extensive and intensive talking and listening, 1962-2002, a new set of limits, what you might call interaction limits, has slowly defined itself in these early years of retirement from employment. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 3 January 2003.

There's a frontier, too,of ineffability, like an invisible wallthat surrounds everymovement of the lipsin love, in anything.

I try to catch someof its mystery,embrace and penetratesome of its universe,identify it in my own effortto unleash the infiniteand express

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the emotion of an idea, the desire to create,and only this work, this labour, can satisfy it.1

1 Albert Camus in Notebooks: 1942-1951, trans. Justice O'Brien, AA Knopf, 1965, NY, p.210.

3 January 2003______________THE AGE WE LIVE IN

It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.

George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2

The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.

I, too, saw myself as comingat the end of a complexhistorical processthat had its beginningsin the district of Ahsa,those birds flying over Akka

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and those Men with beardsand I identified with it.

I was born near the startof yet another Formative Age:would it last as long as the Greeks?1

I understood profoundly wellthe claims of this new beliefas you did the claims of your craft.2

I was, like you, fortune's darling in this new age and I was, too,the shell-shocked casualtyof a war that was more complexthan any of us could understand.1 their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began 23 years before I was born.2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939._______________________ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH

Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough. -The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.

Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,many people, places and things,am not so good on gestures of flowersat any time of day or season.

Well, Rainer, I go back oftento unknown neighbourhoods,to unexpected encounters,partings seen and unseen,in the paintings of my mind.

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Well, Rainer, I also go backto my days of childhood,to mornings by the sea, the bay,the river, the town, the city,the island and the meadowwhere mention of God hath been made and His praise glorified.

And Rainer, you are right;it’s never enough,but it’s all I havewhen I travel at nightto those childhood sicknessesand to so many thingsunexplained in this world of the mystic, of mysterythat will never be explained.

December 3 2004__________________1817: A BIG YEARFOR NOTEBOOKS

I have come to see my own notebooks as a genre of my writing which began in 1953 when I was in grade four. The selection of this date is partly due to its significance in the Baha’i timeline of significances and partly due to grade four being the half-way point in my primary education. I had had four years of schooling by then and I’m sure I had notebooks in those first years 1949 to 1952. The first notes that I kept and which I still possess came from 1961/2, but the vast array of notebooks I have now collected comes from the period 1974/5 to 2004/5. The conscious collection of notes into notebooks was an even more recent phenomenon. Looking back I see the years 1980 to 1995 as a time for their early development, an insensible process that is difficult to define in any clear way. But by the late eighties the process of gathering notebooks was a quite conscious one with an increasing articulation of their role in my writing in the years 1995 to 2005.

Reading about the origins and development of Pushkin’s(1799-1837) notebooks which he collected in the last two decades of his life, in the years 1817 to 1837, made me reflect on my own. Pushkin carried his notebooks around with him while he was in exile in the 1820s. Mine

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have simply been relocated by moving companies from Katherine in the NT to South Hedland and then to Perth in Western Australia and finally to George Town Tasmania. Mine now occupy space in an orderly fashion in my study to draw on in my writings and be updated from time to time from (a) my writing, (b) photocopied material and (c) internet information on a host of topics.

Pushkin’s notebooks came to occupy 8 volumes and were first published in 1994, 157 years after his passing. I have no idea whether mine will ever see some published form; I leave that to those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence. At this stage, after only 10 years of conscious, formal, organized notebook collecting, I have trouble seeing their long range significance.5

Each page of Pushkin’s notebooks is reproduced in colour and are now seen as an important part of Russia’s heritage. Many pages of the originals are deteriorating. Who knows what significance will be seen in the pages of my manuscripts coming as they do from the 3rd to 5th

decades(1983-2013) of the tenth and final stage of history, the fourth and fifth epochs of the Formative Age(1986-2021), the second half(1987-2037) of the first century(1937-2037) of the formal implementation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan? It is possible than nothing will come of them but, circling around some of the great writers of modern history as I do, it gives me pleasure to make comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 11th, 2005.

Your first notebook beganin the year that the most precious Being to have ever lived drew His first breaths in Tihran near the Shimran Gate whereHe lived in the house of Mirza Buzurg where He never cried, was never restless-so they say.6

Descended from Abraham

5 This brief outline of the origin and development of my notebooks is an outline I write occasionally and each time I write the account, the outline differently. If there is ever anyone concerned about these variations, I would like to lay their minds to rest by saying simply that: one perceives the past differently each time one writes about it. What I write here is to an extent impressionistic and makes an attempt at an accurate account. But it is not a painstaking and meticulous historical analysis of the story of my notebooks.6 H.M. Balyuzi, Baha’u’llah: The Glory of God, George Ronald, Oxford, 1980, p.19.

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and a Sasanian monarch,the son of Khadijih Khanumand Mirza Buzurg this Man,this great God-Man of the 19th century began an undertaking that has captured the imaginationof several million peopleand is associated with thoseclimactic changes in directionin the collective history of man.

August 11th 2005______________________INCIDENTS OF A VOLATILE/EVANESCENT KIND

My attitude to books and notebooks is not unlike that of Samuel Johnson(1709-1784) an important literary figure who produced an English dictionary in 1755, the most significant and useful one until the Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1911. Books, to Johnson, were for use not for adornment, not for sacred and reverential treatment. His sanctum sanctorum, his library, his biographer Boswell wrote, “was strewn with manuscript leaves, with books in great confusion” when he chanced by for a visit. And so is this the case with my books and notebooks should a casual observer catch me in the middle of my research and writing. My notebooks and books are full of handwriting, underlining, notes in the margins, indeed, notes in many places in the books. My files and notebooks often lay all over the floor and the furniture. This is not true all of the time and of all my books, but it would take too long to provide a detailed description of this heterogeneous, this varied and complex process. Needless to say, I share some of the features of Johnson’s attitude and policy with respect to books and notebooks.

This disorderliness, this apparent clutter and chaos, which Boswell observed in Johnson’s library, is sometimes observable in mine when I am caught in the midst of my work, my writing and research. At most times, indeed all the time when I am not writing, I keep everything in its place in this small study here at Port Dalrymple on the south side of George Town the oldest town in Australia and located as it is in northeast Tasmania. My notebooks, my books, my manuscripts and papers, my files, my stationary and various items of writing and reading equipment all have their place: labelled, ordered, tidy, dusted and ready for use. –

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Ron Price with thanks to Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson, Princeton UP, 1987.

Such a grand composition,mingled as it was withall the shades, peculiaritiesand blemishes that fleshis ere to, all the fertilityand readiness, dexterity, wit, vigour and vivacity, the extraordinary endowmentsand particulars of his own mind-- such was the person who laid out all those notes on the lives of others1

sometimes on the floor and disarray.

1 Ron Price with thanks to Boswell's Life of Johnson, Front Matter, Editor, Jack Lynch, Oxford, 1904. "The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily life. Here exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.……These narratives are often written by those who are not likely to give much instruction or delight. Most biographical accounts of particular persons are barren and useless……The incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.”1

"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles." Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Langhornes's Translation. -8/24/ ’05._____________________________NOT TOO DISTRESSINGLY INSIGNIFICANT

Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist. She has become an Australian icon in the last quarter century. In 2004, fifty years after her death, her diaries were published. There are few diaries to rival Franklin’s for entertainment. She kept a pocket diary from 1909 to her death in 1954. The materials in her diary make up a million words. They are composed of: literary notebooks, journals, letters, pocket diaries, helpful annotation and linking narrative to enhance the reading experience. This

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linking work is done by the editor Paul Brunton. The publishing of these diaries, The Franklin Diaries, will not be in the form of, say, Virginia Woolf’s diaries which came out in five volumes in the years 1977 to 1984. It appears that Franklin’s will be episodic: this collection is but the first episode.

I find the interlinking, interlocking, of Baha’i history and Franklin’s history of personal interest. In the month, the year, for example, that the Seven Year Plan began for the American Baha’i community, April 1937, Franklin rejected the OBE. When the full Franklin Diary is published readers will be able to follow diary entries, should they so desire, from the year the Bab’s dust was entombed on Mt. Carmel in 1909 to the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade when the Kingdom of God on earth began in 1953/4. There is, for me anyway, an interesting juxtaposition here of Baha’i history, Australian secular history and the life of one of Australia’s paradoxical writers.-Ron Price with thanks to Jill Doe, “the Diaries of Miles Franklin,” The Age.com Book Reviews, March 13th

2004.

So far, my story is better toldin the form of other genres,although you’ll find somethingof value in my journals whichare part of my universe and whichI bequeath to posterity as a personalbackdrop to the 4th and 5th epochsof Baha’i history. There is love hereand addiction; flesh is made wordwhile time’s winged chariot hurriesnear in the midst of a lawless enterprise,a sort of chronicle of everything, well—something: effervescence, hopefullynot too distressingly insignificant.1

1 Andre Gide in Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, Ticknor and Fields, NY, 1984, p.286.

November 18th 2005______________________________UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS

Anyone who has studied history to a significant extent knows the extent to which poetry, art and history are intertwined. The examples, the historians, the poets and the artists who have pointed out this intimate

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association are many. In a comment the historian Arnold Toynbee made in 1955 in the Journal of the History of Ideas, after he had completed his epic 10 volume work A Study of History, he said he regarded himself as much a poet as a historian. Theodore Mommsen the great, perhaps, the greatest Roman historian, said in the fifth volume of his History of Rome that imagination was the mother of both poetry, history and he might have added art.

England buried its historian Thomas Macauley in the poet’s corner of Westminster Abbey. Edward Gibbon wrote in sentences pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images which drew attention to his words as art form as much as, if not more than, content. This is often the function, the way, of the poet and the artist, in the process, readers often have to work a little harder to read what they say.-Ron Price with thanks to my “Section IX: Notebooks,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 1/6/06.

The state, you said, in the 19th century’sfinest work in history, was built on sand unless a common morality pervaded therulers and the ruled, you who poet-like,artist-like, had a genius for passionate,subjective judgements in that monumentalwork, that poetic work, your opus, oeuvrethat helped keep you young, helped giveyou the fire of youth1 as you headed formiddle age2 in those first years after theMost Great Spirit, personated by a Maiden, had descended on the agonized soul of ThatGod-man in the Siyih-Chal---Baha’u’llah....

You revolutionized the study of ancient Rome:2 was it that sudden eruption of forces released by an overpowering Revelation? Was it the firstwind, rain, the tempest of His slowly crystallizingwords and their unsuspected benefits acrossthe entire range of human culture in our time?

Was it a new intellectual anchorage in which theworld was deriving continuous, unobstructedinspiration penetrating to the very core of life?

June 1 2006.

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1On reading the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1902 to Theodore Mommsen in Nobel Lectures Literature: 1901-1967, editor, Horst Frenz, the Nobel Foundation, NY, 1969, pp. 7-11. 2Mommsen wrote a three volume History of Rome(1854-56) published when he was 39 or 40. V. 5 appeared in 1885. V4-lost in a fire. ________________________THEY WERE EARLY DAYS

In April 1937, when the Baha’i community of North America opened its first teaching Plan, Winston Churchill was putting the finishing touches to his book Great Contemporaries which was first published in September 1937. As one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding promoters of democracy he was also conscious of its precarious nature. This is obvious in these essays written between 1932 and 1937 at the same time as the American Baha’i community had evolved to the point where it could turn its energies toward worldwide expansion.

Churchill saw the two great wars as part of one process, one great war, not part of one great Lesser Peace, as the Baha’is were coming to view most of the 20th century. It was a war, he thought, we began in 1896. Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the year that the Kingdom of God on Earth was initiated, again from a Baha’i perspective. His History of the English Speaking Peoples in 4 volumes came out half was through the Ten Year Crusade in 1956-58. Churchill blends the personal and the historical; indeed in many ways he disguises autobiography as history. This was partly due to his view that the world had become one that dwarfed the individual personality. -Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Churchill: History Notebooks,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 7th 2006.

I’m sure you had absolutely no ideawhat they1 were on about in those entre des guerres years, althoughyou had a pretty good idea whatHitler was on about back in 1937.

All those statesmen you wrote aboutas you went about defining the precisenature of leadership in a modern liberal democratic context--as an activity of peace; and those monarchical leaders whose light was fading fast on the horizon, really should

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have included that princeling at the side of the old king, that pearl from the twin surging Seas and the Ocean Itself.2

But they were early days, Winston;They had just stuck their head abovethe ground; the grand design wouldgrow unobtrusively for many a year;even they were unable to estimate the grandeur of that offspring of Their interpretive Minds, that co-sharer, unequaled figure in the genius of divine interpretation.1 The Baha’i community2 Shoghi Effendi and ‘Abdu’l-Baha

January 7th 2006_____________________THE THRILLING MOTION

At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.

While the Kingdom of God on Earthwas getting its kick-start in Chicagowith a wonderful and thrilling motionfrom a point of light and a spirit slowlyor quickly permeating to the entire world,you1 were pointing your finger at meaning,interpretation, the power of understanding,the advent of entirely new prophets: onlythese would bring the promised hope of escapefrom icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2

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For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour, He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning, would be heard far and near in intimatelywhere we sat quietly with our steak and pie.Then, then, the knights would come, knightsassisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midstof confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3

1 Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17. -March 22nd, 2005________________________ SELF-FASHIONING

Plato in the Phaedrus has the character Ammon make the point that writing allows people to appear to know more than they do by means of repeating the discourses of others or quoting others. Real knowledge, Plato argued, results from an active engagement in discussion not reading. Plato’s precursor, Socrates, on the other hand, saw the practice of writing as an essential personal tool. The 20th century philosopher Michel Foucault agreed with Plato not Socrates, but Foucault still advocated the keeping of notebooks, not as a substitute for memory, but as a form of practice, a technology to aid the self. Writing is a way of rendering an absent party present. Such was the Roman philosopher Seneca’s view.

The fragmentary parts of life are part of our memory. This memory can be transmitted to us or to others by teaching, listening or reading. Memory is a means of establishing a relation with oneself. We should try to make this relation as adequate and as perfect as possible. No sensible man will venture to express his deepest thoughts, ones he would like to put on record, verbally. Oral accounts tend to be subject to change. Our deepest thoughts should be expressed in some unchangeable form, some written form. For many people the knowledge of real objects, processes and activities is not arrived at through direct sense perception, nor through the memorization of discrete formulas, but through the process of approximation, refutation, and reformulation, a process that is characteristic of writing. -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Allen Miller,

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“The Art of Self-Fashioning or Foucault on Plato and Derrida,” Foucault Studies, May 2005, No 2, pp. 54-74.

There’s a self-fashioning herein all this writing, a defining,some memorialization but notmuch memorization. Puttingstuff on record, appropximating,refuting, reformulating, refining,rendering myself present longafter I am gone into eternity.

There’s a bringing of meaningto all the random assaults of life,a conceptual entry point, reflectingon the deepest thoughts of who I am,interweaving of personal constructs,all through the act of writing, poetizing.

November 6th 2005___________________________

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