More To Retirement Than Money

RonPrice

A MODEST LIBRARY

Forty years ago this month I became confronted, overwhelmed, by the world of print, of ideas, of academic life. Not that it was new, for I had just completed 13 years of primary and secondary schooling and achieved second class honours. But this new world, the world of university, required a new, a different, approach to the ones I had previously used to survive, to do well, in my educational life. I eventually adjusted to what seemed to me at the time, in the autumn of 1963, an impossible onslaught of books that I simply could not cope with. I went on to complete five years of post-secondary education and teach in schools and colleges for over thirty years. Now, in 2003, exactly forty years later, as another autumn approaches, I am entering my fifth year of retirement and my sixtieth year of life. In the last four years I have organized and reorganized my modest retirement library in Australia’s oldest town here in Tasmania. This poem is about my small library in my small study in this small town on a small island beside an enormous continent and a vast world where I have now lived for six decades. Would I live to see another fifty years? -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 August 2003.

There is nothing here that was
in my place of print in 1963
when the great game of books,
of study, of writing, of reading,
really began in earnest after
a warm-up of thirteen years:
1950 to 1963.

Fifty years down that track
from mid-twentieth century,
I began to prepare this place
for whatever was in store
in the remaining years of
this life: 2000 to whatever.

History and philosphy,
literature and poetry,
the social sciences,
religion and autobiography
just about covered it all
with a hint of psychology,
sociology, biography
and my efforts to publish.

They weaved their way
all these files and books
around this little room
three doors down on the left
from the corner of Reece and South
behind a garden above the stairs,
beside two bedrooms
and two bathrooms.

Ron Price
27 August 2003

RonPrice

After more than a year since that first comment let me add:

SOME UNHEARD VOICE


"Called in my late fifties to this high office/for a record term..."1 I, too, felt called by my late fifties after the feeling had grown for perhaps a decade. By that time I did not have to spend time with the responsibilities of job and endless meetings.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Bruce Dawe, "The Vision Splendid", Sometimes Gladness, 3rd edition, Longmans, 1988, p.183.


Called in my fifties to this high office
for what is coming to look like a record term,
I receive no honours for my grey hairs
or my endless combination of words;
perhaps this is because I seek no honours,
only this late afternoon sunlight glittering
like sparks of stubble over all of creation,
a vitalizing fragrance, too,
like some dawning-place, some day-spring,
some transmutation of grief into blissful joy.

Replenished from deep springs,
perhaps the Ancient of Days,
or some unheard voice
from a burning bush, some bounty
beyond the ken of mortal mind or heart*,
I sing in the company of the most exalted angels,
but still I hesitate and halt, still I shake
to my very foundation, still my sorrow
and tears accompany by blissful joy.


Ron Price
19 December 1995


* Baha’u’llah, The Tablet of Carmel

_________________
11. MARRIAGE AND SOCIABILITY

A FORTRESS FOR WELL-BEING

Many people visit others out of a desire to have company, be sociable, pass the time, etcetera. Many others, at the other end of the social spectrum, are lonely and in need of company. Another group of people don’t want any company and are happy with their own. Working out your own ‘sociability index’ is important to your peace of mind, sense of social tranquillity and personal integrity. -Ron Price with thanks to George Simmel in The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet, Heinemann, 1966, p.308.

I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart and lungs as strong as an ox’s so as to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years.
-John Keats, In a Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819.


Give me a call sometime; didn’t I tell you
the greatest journey in life is to relieve
the sorrow-laden heart.1
If you’re ever feeling a little low,
drop in, no need to give me a call,
unless you want.

I find when I say this not many drop in,
so don’t get the idea that you are imposing
on my time. I’m not the most popular fellow
with everyone and their dog dropping in.
My wife keeps my spirits pretty good,
quite an understanding lady really
and I find I can talk to my son,
like a friend, when sadness visits me.

So we’ve got a, what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called,
a fortress for well-being2 here,
a safe haven, a quiet place,
a silent garden where only birds
and blowing branches can he heard.
Can I say a wave of tenderness is here?
Mostly. There are barriers here
which we do not pass:
each in separate solitudes,
in separate rooms much of the time,
You will find greater and lesser pearls
in the corners of our rooms,
in our garden and hidden away
in shallow seas and rivulettes
that run through our lives.
Set free in a diamond studded array,
kept secret mostly, modestly arranged,
for God hath set all things free
from one another
that they may be sustained
by Him alone,
and nothing in the heavens
or in the earth, but God,sustains them.3

1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, source not known
2 other quotations from marriage prayers
3 The Bab, from His Tablet El Kadir(The Mighty)

Ron Price
29 December 1995

12. WAR

In recent years, at least since the late 1980s and 1990s, the subject of warfare has become more popular, partly because war and terror are back in the social picture, partly because the whole of the last century has seen one war after another, partly an end of history climate of apocalypticism, partly because we increasingly see a relationship between our own daily activity and war, partly rhetorical inflation, partly endless media hype and partly because of an increasingly loaded language with warfare terminology: military-industrial complex, consciousness industry, territories, borders, logistics, defences, inter alia.


DAYTON’S TEMPORARY BOND AND TV'S SCATTER GUN

The first peace talks in my life, the first end-of-war talks were in 1945 at Yalta. There were then a series of peace talks in Korea, in Viet Nam, in relation to the Cold War, in the Balkans, in the Arab-Israeli War, the list seems endless. As I write this poem there are peace talks going on nearly sixty years after the first ones in my life. "Why were there peace talks in Dayton Ohio?"-Ron Price with thanks to Alister Cook, "Message from America," ABC Radio, Sunday, 26 November 1995, 7:15 pm and 21 February 2003.


The Wright Bros would not have believed it;
we did not believe it:
peace in the Balkans-at last!
Is it a sign of things to come?
If we can sort out this knot
anything is possible.
Who would have thought you could fly?
Who would have thought we’d get peace
in our time?

They’re turning in their graves now;
they’re turning; things are turning.
There’s a turning of the wheel,
some kind of vital axle’s here,
some kind of vital oil
as a peaceful Order emerges.

It’s an oil ignited in the Siyah-Chal;
gone now around the world,
a light that’s far beyond those fairies,
far beyond Dayton’s temporary bond.
far from TV's endless scatter gun.

Ron Price
26 November 1995


13. CIVILIZATION

In Kenneth Clark's discussion of civilization he says there are three "essential ingredients:" leisure, movement and independence. 'Abdu'l-Baha puts the focus on "purity, independence and freedom." This poem explores some of the core problems of civilization at a quite personal level, more personal and deeper for me than is usually examined in the media.

This poetry is
an emotional response
to the truths of revealed religion
in an hour when
my contemporaries
are looking for different truths.

While I tried to understand
these great truths
I moved thirty-six times,
possessed a restless
insatiate curiosity and,
by the time I was sixty,
all I wanted was tranquillity,
the experience of fine discrimination
and the capacity to discover truth
through the delicate balance of words.

Purity seemed to elude me
as the years went on
and I became increasingly
encrusted with the
soil and soot of a body
of staggering incapacity.

Ron Price
29/5/03.




VOLUME FIVE

CHAPTER NINE

PRAISE AND GRATITUDE

I'd like to close this autobiographical work with some poetry, poetry that is an expression of praise and gratitude for the developments that have taken place on Mt. Carmel. In many ways these developments express, symbolically, the achievements in the half century that this autobiography describes: in my life, in my religion, in the Baha'i community and as a hope for humankind. Autobiographies written by Baha'is during these years, and there have not been many, extend what you might call a hypothetical hermeneutics1 to correlate the events of Baha'i history with episodes in their own lives. And this is what I do in both narrative and poetry. -Ron Price with thanks to Linda Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation, Yale UP, London, 1986, p.61.
______________________________________________________

APPLAUSE

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
and dances...
-William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud".

Walking through these gardens green,
red-pebbled paths and cypress sheen,
He saw those marble columns tall,
a Parthenon reborn; he raises a call
back to the Greeks!
whom for many a year he seeks.

Such a brilliance to the eye,
continuous with the stars who die,
but only after many years
and then their light goes out, my dears.
All of history here he saw,
the future too in one draw
of breath, one cast of eye.
The whole world around it danced so high
He nearly missed the wealth this view had brought
because he had not really thought.

Often when he sits or lies
there comes upon his inward eyes
this flash of beauty like a dream
mountain fresh, torrent, stream.
Then his heart fills up at last;
his rivers run, his mind moves fast.
After years of working for a Cause
his eyes taste sweetness, hands applause.

Ron Price
19 June 1995

GESTATION

When artists speak about the gestation period for their work I like to think of a long, medium and short term period. In my own case the long term gestation involved my grandfather, my mother and my father. These were the primary influences on my life in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course, one must also add the socio-historical influences from this period: the two wars, the decline of tradition, the new media, et cetera. The medium term influences involved my career as a teacher, my pioneering and experience in the Baha’i community, say, from about 1953 to 1978; and short term gestation and influences, especially Roger White and the writing of poetry from 1978 to 1992, my years in the north and west of Australia: 1982 to 1999 and, finally, the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel from 1987 to 2000. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 18 July 2000.

Gradually, an emotional engagement,
an imaginative reconstruction,
a crystallizing of attention,
of life’s waiting,
a linguistic enactment,
a private and colloquial voice
an expression of the paradisical
substratum of experience
in a dark and complex age
of the isolation of the individual
of the individual in community
of an emptying out of an articulate self
to clarify and define the Other,
of a lifelong pursuit of a speech
fitting to one’s life,
of an insistent and intense personal presence
in touch with a spiritual world
and with human society,
of inner brightness and darkness,
the precious and the painful,
from place to placelessness,
from now to then,
from here to there
in the power and depth of my solitude.

Ron Price
18 July 2000

Anyone who has got to this final chapter in my story would probably agree that "a man's true life is not the sum of the events of his life." As authority moved from revelation to reason and experience in the last two to three centuries, a paradigmatic shift took place in the writing of autobiography. From a sense of some objective story, out there, writers became aware that their lives became more private even as they brought them into the public eye, the public domain, by the act of writing. The story oscillated between the presence and absense of the self. That has certainly been my experience in writing this work. I feel as if I have artistically arranged the phenomena of my life for aesthetic, intellectual and moral purposes, for education and reality testing. But I have been honest. I have not hidden behind the lives of uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers, a host of significant individuals who have come into my life or my interests.

The Baha'i Faith, some may feel, has occupied too much of a central place. But I put it there and did so intentionally. I have enjoyed writing this account; it has not been distasteful to put myself at the centre of the stage, although I have been incapable of the "striptease of autobiography" that it has become for so many and which has also become the taste of a vast readership. For me, there has been what William James called "a rage for privacy" and this has balanced whatever confessionalism has been part of my work. Autobiographers tend to leave out what makes them uncomfortable. The famous Helen Keller, in her autobiography of 1903, omits the sadness and rage she suffered due to her blindness and deafness.

SMALL DIFFERENCES MAKE THE DIFERENCE

The completion of the Human Genome Project, the great achievement that it is, is coinciding with the completion of the Arc Project. Both events change and will change the way we think about ourselves. Just as small differences between our genome and those of other animals and plants reveal what make us uniquely human and profoundly different from animals and plants, so do small differences between the Baha'i Faith and other Faiths make it the unique and profoundly different phenomen- on that it is. Both Projects have resulted in great gifts, powerful tools, for humanity's use. Both Projects will help human beings find their place in the complex systems that make up the great adventure of life in this universe. Both Projects were launched by inspired visions, visions that were based on the belief that the pursuit of large-scale fundamental problems in the life-sciences or in religion was and is in the interest of humanity. Both Projects are not endings but beginnings of a new approach to biology on the one hand and global cooperation, peace and a new future on the other. Both Projects are identified with extraordinary new power and with the treatment of dis- ease, one a physical disease and the other spiritual. Both are associated with a true internationalism which has developed significantly during these my pioneering days. -Ron Price with thanks to Barbara R. Jasny and Donald Kennedy, "The Human Genome," Science, Vol. 291, No. 5507, 16 February 2001, p.1153.

We get another perspective
on all the life on earth
and on this small and insignificant religion
we have played a part in all these years.

Small differences make
all the difference:
a written Revelation,
a clear statement of succession.
My God, these two factors alone
make it unique and pure.
The unity of life, of religion,
is so obvious, so clear, so true:
I see it on that Hill of God,
still the cynosure of a very few.


Ron Price
24 February 2001

Dithering_Dad

Keep taking the meds, Ron.