The Arc Project: A Poetic Experience:
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Section VIII Poetry

by Ron Price

published in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography, Section VIII: Poetry

When an artist speaks 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 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 paradisal

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 the 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


A NEW POETIC INFLUENCE



The Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which the West comes closest to in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, places the accent in artistic expression, in its aesthetic philosophy, on the rustic, the raw, the rough, on the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete, on nothingness, emptiness, detachment. Since much of my poetry contains accents similar to the tone and texture, meaning and feeling, conveyed by these words; since I have long felt a certain identity with the writings of Henry David Thoreau, that pioneer of yesteryear who also wrote extensively about his everyday experience in the bush, in the rustic places where he lived by himself; since the Writings of the Bahá'í Faith, and of Bahá'u'lláh in particular, also dwell on that same mystical quality of nothingness and emptiness, of detachment and the wilderness of remoteness: this particular Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi has a peculiar relevance to my own writings.-Ron Price with thanks to "The Comfort Zone," ABC Radio National, 3 March 2001, 9:00-10:00 am.



Only recently has it been confirmed

that this galaxy has a billion planets,1

only just the other day while

the Arc Project was being completed,

filling out our world with light,

with fragrances of mercy wafted

as they are over all created things,

over that myriad of planets.

And here, in these words,

I shed a unique light on the lives

of men and women of four epochs,

these protean beings who strike

a thousand postures in their lives

and change their spots swifter

than the twinkling of an eye.2



1 Interview with an astronomer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS) on "The Science Show," ABC Radio National, 12:10-1:00 pm, 3 March 2001.

2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook: Samuel Pepys," 1886. He discusses the chameleon nature of human beings in his introduction.



Ron Price

3 March 2001



A POINT OF COHERENCE



For Baha’is who wrote poetry in the last quarter of the twentieth century and those Baha’is living and writing in the fourth epoch of the Formative Age, the Baha’i World Centre with all its recent and massive embellishments functioned as a point of coherence, a stable base for a superstructure of cultural and spiritual, historical and political imaginings. The master theme of the epoch, a period which began in 1986, the dominant, indeed obsessive concern, was increasingly global peace and the establishment of some kind of unity and coherence in the world. For the Baha’i poet, of course, the identification of the developments on Mt. Carmel, the Arc Project as it was called, with these global concerns was part of such a poet’s very raison d’etre.



Things had just begun to come full circle by the early days of the twenty-first century from the years of the Enlightenment, over two centuries before, at least from a Baha’i perspective. Faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by one based on revolution and then one based on imagination. Finally revelation was back in the saddle as the foundation of apocalypse. At least this was true for the Baha’i, if not yet for the great mass of mankind. Slowly, there developed over the years of this fourth epoch, the years when the Arc Project was completed, writers and poets whose imaginations could give force to the voice and current of the times. -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Cambridge UP, 1996, p. 16.



The complex energies

and impulses of the hour

were slowly becoming

embodied in an intellectual

and imaginative movement,

slowly inaugurating a new age.

Indeed, the second birth of poets

and writers, artists of all kinds,

around their poetic, artistic,

experience, self-authorization,

was coming to be linked

with emerging global forces

associated with an emerging

world religion that would,

in time, be a crucial force

for peace, unity and a whole

planetary civilization in

the twenty-first century.



Ron Price

10 January 2001


GROWTH 1



Yesterday I wrote a poem, Growth, on my life and the development of that fragrance until 1962. This morning I felt like continuing that theme with a focus on the development of my beliefs and that fragrance. The task seems too difficult to get the required depth. In the poem below I have set an overall outline but the depth, the detail, the kind of achievement that Wordsworth attains in his The Prelude I do not seem able to produce, as yet. I have a model in Wordsworth but my personal achievement in that direction must, for now, remain elusive. Perhaps one day I will come back to this theme, this poetic package.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 28 March 2001.



The only one on campus: '63-'66,

nearly lost the plot

in a mix of depression, sex,

career questions, confusion,

lectures, note taking and exams.



Was saved, in the end,

by Martin and Bond,

put on track,

got a direction,

centred my passion,

still fought fear

and depression,

broke the umbilical cord.



Survived those four years

in one piece,

launched to the north,

a real pioneer this time

with a marriage under my belt

to help me make it through.



Lasted, what, nine months?

A mild schizo-affective state!

Patched up and sent out after six

for a final two-and-a-half year

stint by Lake Ontario.



Restored my batteries,

kept my marriage,

continued my career,

pioneered again,

a few hours from Toronto,

taught the Cause, thanks

to the Eastern Proc Team,

put Picton on the map.



Fifty years after His passing1

I was in Australia

and praying again

To light up Whyalla

and my life,

both exploded

into more success

than I could imagine.



Divorce and two years

in South Australia

led to Tasmania, Victoria,

the NT, WA and back to

Tasmania and a thousand

upon thousand events

taking me to 57,

the opening of the Arc Project

and the Terraces.



Always the fragrance

has been there,

but to follow its journey

as Wordsworth followed his

must wait until another day.



1 'Abdu'l-Bahá: 1921-1971



Ron Price

28 March 2001



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 Bahá'í Faith and other Faiths make it the unique and profoundly different phenomenon 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 disease, one a physical disease and the other spiritual.

-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


A SENSE OF THE EPIC



In Price's poetry there is action along a central narrative axis; around it, like a spiral, there are passages of recollection, forward-leaping prophecies, digressions, an intricacy of detail that is highly dynamic and interactive. He suddenly feels moved in a direction, along or within a theme, as part of a topic and, in the process, he discribes an age, a society, a time, several epochs, a Bahá'í community in the dark heart of an age of transition, during the early early of the Formative Age or in the seventy-seven years of the Heroic Age. Perhaps Price's work is timeless, even though it is anchored in the early decades of the tenth stage of history with a retrospective and prospective glance at nine other stages of the history of humanity and its glorious future filled, as it obvious is at present, with social paralysis and anarchy.



Price's effort to introduce into his poetry the notion of an epic base was at first subtle, obscure and perhaps a little presumptuous. But the idea grew as his poetry grew so that, by the time of the conclusion of the Arc Project and the opening of the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, Price had a very definite sense of his poetry as epic, as containing the elements of epic, of his life and his poetry being part of an immense epic story, narrative and journey that was at the centre of the Faith he had been associated with for well-nigh half a century. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 31 March 2002.



The action in those other epics

takes place over a week, a few weeks

with, perhaps, retarding conventions:

the formal saga or recitation,

a parenthesis to bring in longer history,

a descent into an underworld.1



Here, we've got a story

as real as blood and sky,

with immortal chroniclers,

saints and heros,

a galaxy of intoxicated souls

who traversed a Persian landscape

even in my time,

gave all that they had

and often found the path

too long and the cross too heavy.2



And the action takes place

over history's tortuous course,

indeed so vast is it

that it is difficult to contain

within unity's heterogeneous

and many-coloured light.



1 Other major epics: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Divine Comedy

2 A.Q. Faizi, Meditations on the Eve of November 4th, London, 1970, p.25.

--------Ron Price 31 March 2002


DYNAMIC SYNCHRONIZATION



By the early 1990s the Arc Project was making large holes in the side of Mt. Carmel. During this same period of time, in 1993, the Hubble Spacecraft was fixed in the heavens. As the Arc Project headed to completion in 2000 and 2001, Hubble sent back data that allowed astrophysicists to determine with some accuracy the age of the universe at 12 billion years. Some 40,000 galaxies could be observed in the sky behind a curvature the size of a grain of sand and there was a vast increase in the knowledge of the origins of stars. The Sun and the Moon were also studied during the construction of the Arc Project telling us much more about these heavenly bodies. The Sun's polar regions were investigated during this period. Asteroids and comets were also examined in more detail than ever before. Mars and Saturn also came under the astronomers' microscopes. -Ron Price with thanks to The Internet: Planetary Science Spacecraft, 24 June 2002.



They1 said we stood on the threshold

of the last decade

of the radiant twentieth century.

The prospects were dazzling:

little did we know

we'd be able to go back

and see our origins

12 billion years ago.



Yes, there was an acceleration

of spiritual forces then

as May 1992 approached.

The suddenness, the speeding-up,

the transformational impact

on my poetic output,

the new feelings of delight

on the dry soil of my heart

and a certain bewilderment

which I have been trying

to understand since those

winter months when

it really began,2

made me slowly realize

that, at last, I could

not do everything

on this long, slippery

and tortuous path

as that dynamic synchronization

at last approached.



1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message 1990.

2 In the winter months of June to August 1992 I wrote 35 poems, the precursors to an immense poetic unfolding of about 600 poems each year for the next ten years: 1992-2002.

-Ron Price 27 June 2002


SEIZING THE MOMENT



While famous American writer Saul Bellow was writing his final exams in sociology and anthropology at Northwestern University in 1937 the American Bahá'í community launched its first Seven Year Plan. The first epoch of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Divine Plan was finally put into action after a hiatus of nearly twenty years. Bellow went on to write 15 books and receive the National Book Award and unprecedented three times. The international Bahá'í community, in 1937 some 100 to 150 thousand strong, went on to more than five million by century's end and the completion of their Arc Project on Mt. Carmel.-Ron Price with thanks to Marian Christy, Boston Globe Online, November 15th, 1989, p.81.



He tried to instruct and entertain

to seize the moment

with his powerful mind.



He said our task

was to understand,

to accept our fate,

not master it.



With age he was less

vulnerable to negative opinions

and had a strong sense of

the impersonal about self.



He prayed when depressed,

as I have for years;

and we seized the moment

as we tried, usually in vain,

to accept our fate

with radiant acquiescence.



Ron Price

16 May 2003


COSMIC COINCIDENCE



While I was writing my 1000+ hundred page autobiography entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs a great deal was discovered about our universe. Just ten days after the Arc Project and the Terraces on Mt. Carmel were officially completed on May 23rd, 2001 and the "awe-inspiring, worldwide effects" began to be reflected in messages being received at the Bahá'í world centre, NASA launched the Wilkenson Microwave Anistrophy Probe(WMAP). This satellite orbited about one million miles above earth and measured microwave radiation that had travelled 13 billion light years and was generated 380,000 years after the Big Bang, scientists currently theorize. This is the earliest picture we had at the time of the universe. This discovery was made possible by discoveries in the 1960s. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 December 2003 and CNN.com/Science & Space, February 13th 2003.



It travelled 13 billion years

to meet a new Light

enshrined at last

in this mountain of beauty,

unparalleled in character

since the dawn of time,

an unprecedented project

with wondrous results

and fulfilled visions,

a change of time,

a new state of mind,

coherence of understanding

and a moment of consciousness,

a dynamic link with the past

when light began to travel and travel

as it now will in these days

to the hearts and souls of men.



Ron Price

23 December 2003


MELANCHOLY'S ANTIDOTE



In 1601, four hundred years before the opening of the Arc Project, the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, William Shakespeare completed his composition, his most famous play, Hamlet. The phenomenon of the character of Hamlet is, as leading Shakespearian analyst Harold Bloom writes, "unsurpassed in the West's imaginative literature."1 Given the preeminent importance of the process of teaching to the growth and development of the Bahá'í community, in the following poem I have given my proto-typical teacher in the Bahá'í Faith during that teaching Plans beginning in 1937 the persona of Hamlet. I have drawn on Harold Bloom's study of Hamlet for much of the text of my poem. I have also made one crucial alteration or inclusion to this persona, the experience of "the most exquisite celebratory joy."2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Penguin, NY, 1998, p.384; and 2The Universal House of Justice, Letter 3 April 1991.



Hamlet is so endlessly suggestive,

his ever-growing inner self

and his infinite consciousness,

often sees himself as a failure,

a failed, tragic protagonist,

an earlier self had died

and a new one born,

in a sea of constant change,

a graciousness in mourning,

the centre of a solemn consciousness

everywhere and tentativeness

the peculiar mark

of an endlessly burgeoning world,

so continuously alive,

a breaking wave of sensibility

pulsating onward.



His bewildering range of freedoms

we can see in ourselves

providing as they do

a will-to-identity

and his sinuous enchantment,

his global self-consciousness,

of two hundred years now.



He needs humanity

to give honour and meaning

to his life for we are not alone.

He lets everything be

and trusts in God

to balance, siphon,

the anxiety,

as he makes us see

the world in other ways.



He makes successful gestures

and so do we with our inwardness

in the theatre of the mind

in the inmost self,

our necessary disinterestedness

where the only enemy is self.

But for us there is joy,

melancholy's antidote.



Ron Price

14 May 2002


GESTATION



When an artist speaks 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 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 paradisal

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 the 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


GROWTH 1



Yesterday I wrote a poem, Growth, on my life and the development of that fragrance until 1962. This morning I felt like continuing that theme with a focus on the development of my beliefs, that fragrance. The task seems too difficult to get the required depth. In the poem below I have set an overall outline but the depth, the detail, the kind of achievement that Wordsworth attains in his The Prelude I do not seem able to produce, as yet. I have a model in Wordsworth but my personal achievement in that direction must, for now, remain elusive. Perhaps one day I will come back to this theme, this poetic package. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 28 March 2001.



The only one on campus: '63-'66,

nearly lost the plot

in a mix of depression, sex,

career questions, confusion,

lectures, note taking and exams.



Was saved, in the end,

by Martin and Bond,

put on track,

got a direction,

centred my passion,

still fought fear

and depression,

broke the umbilical cord.



Survived those four years

in one piece,

launched to the north,

a real pioneer this time

with a marriage under my belt

to help me make it through.



Lasted, what, nine months?

A mild schizo-affective state!

Patched up and sent out after six

for a final two-and-a-half year

stint by Lake Ontario.



Restored my batteries,

kept my marriage,

continued my career,

pioneered again,

a few hours from Toronto,

taught the Cause, thanks

to the Eastern Proc Team,

put Picton on the map.



Fifty years after His passing1

I was in Australia

and praying again

To light up Whyalla

and my life,

both exploded

into more success

than I could imagine.



Divorce and two years

in South Australia

led to Tasmania, Victoria,

the NT, WA and back to

Tasmania and a thousand

upon thousand events

taking me to 57,

the opening of the Arc Project

and the Terraces.



Always the fragrance

has been there,

but to follow its journey

as Wordsworth followed his

must wait until another day.



1 'Abdu'l-Bahá: 1921-1971



Ron Price

28 March 2001


SHARED CELEBRATION



How we understand and appreciate a work of art has much to do with how we understand ourselves and the world we live in; our relations to art determine in part our relations to a culture and its traditions. -B.R. Tilghman, But Is it Art? The Value of Art and the Temptation of Theory, Basil Blackwell, NY, 1984, p.16.



The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. -Jorge Luis Borges in ibid., p.76.



Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. -Terry Atkinson, ‘From an Art and Language Point of View’, Art Language, 1, February 1970, p.23.





This beauteous place on the hill

is unconsciously surrounded

and enriched by a world

that is created by speech,

like this poetry, which condenses

and abbreviates making an energy

potentially explosive, a universe

in itself, in miniature, self-enclosed,

self-limiting, a little hypnotic,

but not as forcefully as music,

giving body and definiteness,

vividness and depth, even a purity

and undefiledness,

to this major historic thrust

of a mighty process.



The power to unite people

through shared celebration

has profound significance

here among these terraces.

This poetic office reaches out

to all the scenes of life

especially that infallible touchstone

of truth and beauty in the word

of the Mystic Herald

rendering people aware,

as much as he possibly can,

of the unifying forces emanating

from His retreat of deathless splendour.



Ron Price

24 December 1995


ANTICIPATION



The Four Quartets was not planned. It grew. Parts of it came quickly. Much of it left him feeling that the whole thing might have to be scrapped. It was finally published in England on 31 October 1944. I was three months old at the time. The major sources of the poem are Eliot’s experiences, both actual and revived. -Ron Price, On reading The Composition of Four Quartets, Helen Gardner, Faber and Faber, London, 1978, chapters 2 and 3.



When Eliot was writing The Four Quartets a world was ending; WWII was being fought. While Price was writing Anticipation that old world was still going through its death pangs and the new one, born in the writings of twin-manifestations and their legitimate successors, had in recent years emerged from obscurity. That emergence had yet to be registered on the consciousness of countless multitudes. This poem was written on the day Price received the announcement of the launching of the Four Year Plan one of whose aims was to see that these countless multitudes had registered on their consciousness this emergence from obscurity. Price drew on material in The Four Quartets and he drew on his own experiences past and present. Price derived much pleasure from writing the poem, although he could not help but be skeptical about the poem’s ultimate value to others and to the Baha’i community for whom the poem was ultimately intended as a literary enrichment. -Ron Price, 1:45 pm, Wednesday, 31 January 1996, Comment on the poem below.



I. They Are Coming:



So much time, time and half a time,

future, past and present all rolled

into a line and a dot and concentric

circles as I speculate with memory

and anticipation hugging at my shores,

with His words coming out of my pores.

To what purpose you ask? ‘Tis embedded

in this Dust to which I am wedded.



So many echoes inhabit this garden,

but I can not follow them all. I trust

they won’t all turn to silence; and I

can follow them urgently from my dreams.

With some bird of Paradise or a humble seagull

I can be lifted into their presence, the sound of their

low and mystic call and the magic at their gate where the

groaning of them that are devoted to Thee

can be heard and the beauty of the unseen

is savoured in this dearest home of Dust.



Sunlight glitters on this emerald green grass,

apple green hedges and white marble, a bird

sings: come, come, come, people have need

of celestial beauty and the reality of divinity.

All of time points toward the future, here,

right here, the future is in the bone and a joy,

a joy that defines us. While these words reach into a

silence below all that is history and the future, the now,

the stillness at the centre of this Dust, this holy Dust.



Off in the distance an axis where, spread out like

pearls on an island line, the world is cut in twain

and a dance along this great artery of life is figured

in the drift of stars and this drift of spiritual potency,

like some magnet attracts new life replacing at long last

the old and soon to-be-forgotten wars. While back at

the still point, the world turns; for here is

the real dance where all of time is gathered;

here, at this still point, the dance finds

its origin and its highest wish. For all there

is, is the dance and its wondrous release,

its grace, its boundlessness and what seems like

endless white light, concentrated, partial ecstacy,

protecting humankind from heaven’s endless

mysteries and what the flesh cannot endure.



And time, at last, is conquered and given

order, specificity, pattern and memory

here in this garden-by-the-sea, this place

of affection, where affection is cleansed,

where lucid form is invested with

stillness, shadows are turned into transient

beauty and permanence is tasted.

Here flickers of light dance and fill with

fancy and meaning the intersticies of lives

whirled by cold winds that still blow for more

of time than we’d wish to see.



But unhealthy souls come here, too,

driven by winds that sweep the gloomy

mountainside at times, driven by the

tempest which still blows unprecedented

in its magnitude. They seem unable

to descend into the world of perpetual

solitude, indeed, any solitude at all. Their

words, you find, will often strain, crack,

even break, under the burden, tension and

there will be mocking and more than just

chattering. This new Word in the desert

will be attacked by many voices while shafts

of sunlight continue to fall upon the Dust,

houses will fall and crumble, will be removed

and become as ashes, as the wind breaks loosened panes.



Of course, on a summer evening you can hear

the music here and see a dancing of the spheres.

Dawn points to another day, the long hoped for calm,

an autumnal serenity and, at last, the wisdom of age.

He and They have given us patterns, a foothold, but

there is so much that is new and immensely complex

in the moment and the day. And there is humility.

For the silent funeral is, at long last, ending and

they are starting to walk into the light: civil servants,

directors, men of science, chairmen, industrialists,

technologists, engineers, on and on they come.





II: We Are Getting Ready



For that bold and imposing facade is just about rolled away.

The lights are being extinguished in the theatre and

the new action is starting to take place, often tentative,

difficult, no easy trip, sometimes frightening, as it is in

all new begnnings. But we sit and stare: hoping, loving,

waiting with faith and thought---for we are now ready for

thought like the whispering of running streams, a wild

thyme and wild strawberries with laughter, at last, in

our garden, pointing to that consecrated joy, its agony,

its death and its birth and what we do not know, but will

learn slowly, necessarily in our years ahead, sometimes painfully.



For this is a raid on the articulate, a thousand voices with

a million messages and, of course, there are some for me.

My equipment’s getting better and the imprecision of feeling

is being replaced by a discipline to say what must be said,

a trying to say what must be said in this strange and mysterious

home where a lifetime burns in every moment, mostly at a low flame,

otherwise I would burn up in this intensity, but I am mostly cool.



I, too, have never known much about the gods, or God, but in

these forty years I have learned about the river within and the

sea all around; the great abyssal plains into which it flows,

sinks and is still; the beaches on which it tosses while the white

bird calls across the water in low cool notes and a rush of wings;

I have learned of the shells, the delicate algae, the endless sand.

I have lingered by the sea, walking along its shores and swimming

in its refreshing waters, sometimes burning myself in the sun. It

always seems to ask for more, but not urgently, like some compelling

force of attraction over which I have little control.



There are so many voices, though, that come from the sea

and from the world, they drift endlessly to me.

First, there are the silent sounds: the withering of flowers,

the growing of grass, the drifting wreckage of humanity

that I will never see, their heart-aches, the emotion and

emotionless years in this dark-heart of a transitional age.

The boat has gone on drifting with its slow leak and

it has nearly sunk, only a few more bells to toll, only

some more wasteage: for the destination calls now, clearly.

This haul does bear examination and, as you say, there is

no end to it: the flowers will wither and wither and life will

cease to be a mere sequence, experience. We approach

the meaning, that of generations, that of the ineffable.

For the future, here, is both faded song and Royal Rose,

a spray of regret and joy. For the past is never finished,

the future is always here and the fruit of action is now,

this process, this doing, this Presence. And so I pray

for all those who voyage forth and for myself, for I am

the music, the indwelling God, the intersection of eternity

and time. I am the intersection of ardour, selflessness, self-

surrender, the unattended moment, heedlessness, evil doings

His benevolence, a melted heart and boiled blood.





III. The Beginning in the End:



The mystic and the practical, the active and contemplative

become one and right action is freedom in submission, with

past and present enriching all that is and will be. At least

this is the aim, slowly to be realized in this springtime,

seemingly suspended in time, up there on the mountain side,

between pole and tropic, between frost and fire, between

melting and freezing the soul’s sap quivers, neither budding

nor fading, with a bloom more sudden than summer thought to give

and a voluptuary sweetness in the hedges and terraces, sweeter

than you ever thought would be, altered beyond your dreams,

nearest now and in old Israel, home of our fathers, and their fathers.



And what have you come here for: to kneel and pray,

to communicate with the dead whose tongue is on fire

beyond our language, our living, where timeless time

and my moment intersect and the arts and wonders of the

world come to be manifest, unobtrusively. You come here,

too, to be close to the Dust, to taste of the roses before your

petals finally rust and your glad days are gone, torn from

the trees seemingly like unremembered leaves the wind weaves.

And you shall dry up in the dust with a ring to remind the Earth

that you came from God and you return to some new birth.



The dead leaves rattled on like tin, blown toward me like

you thought they’d go on blowing forever, unresistable,

in this urban dawn, half forgotten even now, half remembered,

brown baked strangers intimate yet unidentifiable, things

that have served their purpose, last season’s fruit, last year’s

words waiting for another voice, this voice, this new voice.

Amidst these dreary sounds, this death and birth and change,

amidst the agony and the solitary vigil, the eternal comes nearer

and the two worlds approach and history becomes transfigured,

renewed in its servitude to the living God.



This beginning is also an end, an end of so much that has been.

This beginning has a million words, a billion million, dancing

together in concert: all beginnings in an end, like some wondrous

epitaph, elegy for all that hath been and will be. And we go on

exploring, coming to understand this place for the first time

in this stillness between the waves of non-existence and eternity,

with a simplicity in which we read the book of our self and God.





Ron Price

31 January 1996


FIN DE SIECLE VISIONS



From the cemetary he looks up to Carmel needing

always to have replenished to his vision the slope’s

white ornaments: a dome gleaming, marble pillars

shining in the sun and green terraces one by one,

white-light on the run.

-Ron Price with thanks to Roger White, Notes Postmarked The Mountain of God, p.29.





Fin de siecle speculations are often apocalyptic,

end of time stuff, history over, intensified reflections,

chronicalling time’s fate,

tucking a panorama into a short breathed space,

some promise against our vanishing:

poems have been sewn into the end of centuries,

become the warp and weft of millennium’s end,

as if the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty

was blown into our faces giving account of our generation

and our age, with a tinge, a hint, of excitement,

in poetry’s calendric spirit.



The world has long been waiting for the Poet

and He has come with a legion of interpreters:

for the day of the theologian is at hand

and much new poetry is in the wind,

blowing from that mountain top,

that rocky hill, Carmel’s spine.



Ron Price

19 October 1996


PROPULSION





The whole race is a poet that writes down

The eccentric propositions of its fate.

-Wallace Stevens, “Men Make Out Words”, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens, editor, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1971, p.282.



Yes, Wallace, an eccentricity, a strangeness, a puzzle,

a fate, a freedom, a solitude and a sociality: I write

them down---a poet telling of his defeats, dreams,

victories, crises, calamities, those reveries, Wallace,

those reveries, certain propositions and descriptions.



Those terraces, the emerald green grass, Zoysia,

bush-hammered, white sand, fair-faced, special

release agent on a tapestry of beauty so right for

the time, so right for that history of a century and

a half and all those men and women and children.



Italian marble, tonnes of steel fixings, contracts

for this roadwork and that building in a stupendous

architectural ediface at this climacteric of history

with its marble columns, immense stone work and

a Strong Room so fitting for their sacred texts.



And, Wallace, none of it was easy, hard stuff,

the kind of thing to make you cry if you had

not seen the same thing for fifteen decades,

right from the first burn-outs and another

propulsion of a galaxy of God-intoxicated heroes.



Ron Price

22 May 1996


THIS THRESHOLD





Life, the inner life, the life of the imagination, in which the senses are messengers from the outer world brings joyous and disquieting tidings: this life of crisis, of ecstacy, of a hundred differently defined sensibilities. This too is the life of poetry. Poetry is, then, a language, a language of crisis, of ecstacy, of these varied sensibilities. Poetry arrests these various states in mid-flight and mentally transposes emotions and sensations, creating an atmosphere along the way.



A poem is a becoming, a process. A landscape is magically evoked and blended into a single effect. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself, gives a singular gravity, a quality of joy, of the exquisite, to poetry. Much of life is trite, humdrum, tedious, trite. These emotions of quieter intensity become part of poetry, of poetry's voice. -Ron Price with thanks to Walter Pater and Edward Engelberg in The Symbolist Poem: The Development of the English Tradition, E.P. Dutton and Co., NY, 1967, pp.289-345.





Marble pillars and garden terraces

are fellow travellers on this mountain side

and with them I did pass several days

at a slow step, my mind on fire

with emotions of a lifetime.

This vastly augmented World Centre reared

for that Divine Target of grief,

creating a tranquil calm, an efflorescence

on God's Holy Mountain, of profound significance,

of providential opportunities where tribulations

are transmuted into instruments of redemption.

And now constructing, landscaping, erecting

edifaces imbued with sacred remembrances

at this culmination of a cycle of six thousand years

in an age of fulfillment of five thousand centuries

in which we have just finished the first

and a flight of stairs to meet His majestic shrine,

this Threshold of the City of God

where a welter of concrete, steel and stone

are strewn across thousands of square metres.



Ron Price

27 April 1996


THE NEW JACOB’S LADDER



The Book of Genesis derives the word Babel from balal, confusion, but Babel actually means what Jacob called the place of his vision, the gate of God.1 Jacob’s ladder, or staircase, which in the imagery of the Judaeo-Christain tradition has come to be associated with reaching a higher state of existence than the ordinary one, is sometimes associated with a mountain or a tree, the world tree, the axis mundi, connecting heaven and earth. Indeed, the imagery of ladders, stairs, mountains and trees is almost universal. But humans must climb if they want to ascend; they cannot fly. -Ron Price with thanks to Northrop Frye, The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979 to 1990, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1993, pp.38-39.



The mystic has always been attracted to ladders,

staircases: the imagery is compelling. Here is my

historical panegyric leading to this gate of God1.



There were winding stairs in Solomon’s temple,

with its three stories; Persian temples

with seven stories and seven flights of steps

for the seven planets; they say the bride

of the god was laid at the top;

Danae was shut up in a temple

and impregnated with a shower of gold by Zeus;

in Egypt the pharoah ascended a stairway

after his death; here he met Osiris

‘the god at the top of the staircase’.

In Dante there is a seven story mountain

which Dante climbs and at the top

meets Beatrice who symbolises divine grace;

then there is another seven stories

and at the top we see Jacob’s ladder

again-going down-but none of this

would be present without divine power,

God’s love: it is all built by God,

beginning in heaven.



In Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and many others

the ladder2 continued and we have now,

in this apotheosis on Mount Carmel,

a scale, a comely proportion and method

with everything in this gigantic enterprise

having some trans-historical meaning

in a great new chain of being

from chaos to God, the great sea of life,

from the Dot to the Circles,

from anarchy and savagery

to a great structure of authority,

obedience from within and protection

from without-that great feudal principle

preserved forever-in a significantly altered form.

So is this ladder: now terraces, eighteen

with more steps than you can count,

a task of such urgency, complexity

and sheer titanic power as to challenge

the spirited paintings of animals in caves.



In Paleolithic times, animals

which were extensions of human

consciousness: the beauty created

is eternal as the traffic on Jacob’s ladder,

the communication between God and man,

is eternal.



9 October 1996





1 The Bab means ‘gate of God’.

2 In Latin ‘ladder’ is scala. This extends the image of ladder to ‘scale’ or ‘measurement by degrees’.

Ron Price

9 October 1996


ALL I NEED TO KNOW





For Hayden did Keats an enormous service. He introduced him to the marvellous sculptures...from the Parthenon....to Keats they were sublime because they gave him a vision into the Greek world....

-Morse Peckham, The Romantic Virtuoso, Wesleyan UP, London, 1995, p.104.



“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”-that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.





Not some vision into the Greek world

do I get here, some sublimity rescued

a hair’s breadth from incrustation of

a dieing Renaissance tradition. Some

beauty in truth and truth beauty that

looks into the future, my future, the

world’s future, utopian vision, takes

your breath away, something not quite

born, here, just off in the distance, hope,

feeling, educating me with instructions and

controls transforming a whole world in infinite

gradations, and me. Now taking these stones

and terraces and giving me an experience of

such value that it is all I need to know.



Ron Price

22 January 1997


IN MEMORIAM: B, B, A.B. & S.E.





On 15 September 1833 Tennyson’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam died. In 1850 Tennyson published anonymously his In Memoriam A.H.H. The poem, footnotes and commentary can be found in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, editor Christopher Ricks, Longman, 1969, pp. 331-484. In the period 9 July 1850 to 4 November 1957 the Bab, Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi passed away. The following eulogy is written like Tennyson’s: “It is...the cry of the whole human race.” (ibid., p.339) It, too, begins with death and ends with the promise of a new life. Tennyson took some seventeen years to finalize his poem. The exercise below is a beginning which the mysterious dispensations of Providence may allow for some expansion as the years go on.

-Ron Price, Written over a two day period, on the 23rd and 24th of December 1997.







I



Strong God of love, immortal Love

Who sent two heavenly Beings to give

man a Luminous Book unto those who

Believed and surrendered themselves.



This is Thy kingdom, every atom in

Existence and the essence of all

Created things You have given, too,

For their training with suffering the way.



Also for them the fruits of holiness

You have ordained on the trees of

Wondrous glory for You are just

And they are created from the same dust.



And the rest is found in submission to

Your command and humbleness before

Your face. This they will find as true in

All the expanse of heaven, immensity of space.



Light has grown from more to more

And knowledge, too, its infinite store.

Thanks to them they’re on their way

To one great music as in Pythagorean1 days.



All these great ones had come and gone

Before their life had grown to full.

Make them worthy of their words

Forgive them their sins which push and pull.



II



‘Tis a tragic thing that they’re not known

After all this heat, this sturm und drang

After all their words profound they sang

As if from some eternal fount they rose and rang.



Across the years they come to us now

Like angels of fire and snow

Some spectacular tragedy

They come in meteoric-sombre show.



They look like men who loved and lost

But far from below they sent a flood

Of sweetest sound they gave to drink.

Which comes up silently as if in our blood.



Now these marble, stone places on the hill

And terraces up to mountain top

Tell of inaccessible mysteries and

Ordinary dust flanked by cyprus trees.



What can you and I make of all this?

The obtuseness of the geranium,

Some lavish investment from within

We give to a place where they now all lie.



Now these wondrous souls have a home,

A place of honour on this sacred mount.

They have been coffined clean in glass,

Their beauty set in gems and jewels of mystery.



‘Tis a wonder that their soul now energizes

More, now gone from human temple

And moves the whole world to a degree

Unapproached when their radiance was beclouded.



The Light which had glowed with dazzling

Brightness in the heart of Asia and

Travelled and diffused throughout

The world from plan to plan, baptized by fire.



I wind my thoughts now close to thee

And tell the world you’ve been

A league from immortality

Now draw my chair beside the fire.



I think about those who’ve soared away

To their pure and gleaming Kingdom,

Out of this world of brown-grey dust

Safe in their celestial gathering place of splendour.



Not all, of course, will see their beauty.

Lifeless hearts know only withered bloom.

But those like them will find their pleasure

And in this springtime find their consecrated joy.2



Ron Price

24 December 1997





1 In the sixth century BC at the fount of science during the days of Pythagorus in ancient Greece religion and science walked hand in hand, in harmony.

2 Some poems never feel finished; they never feel they have been polished enough; always feel that the edges are rough. This poem is such a poem. Perhaps that is why some poets, like Tennyson, spent 17 years on a poem.


RELINQISHED AND UNRELINQUISHED





I watch them climb. A panorama and enhanced perspective are the rewards. Some are barely able to withstand the beauty, the acuity of vision, the intensive joy. Others are in laggard wonder and atrophied awe; they distrust the prompting of angels, the voice of the thunder. I can almost hear them say: It is too late, too late. They do not hear the battered bird fly by in the tortured wind near my plate of gold: Pass! Pass! With adamant soul on feet of brass! -Words of Roger White in Notes Postmarked The Mountain of God, New Leaf Publishing, Richmond, BC, 1992, pp.1-10.





I am a cold stone, a gold-inlay tile

set on the top, on the curved roof

of the Shrine of the Bab. I can see

into the far off Mediterranean below

my terraces, so green and white. I am

a very small part of what is loved here,

cherished. I see them come with their

untried convictions, their rusted resolve,

their unrelinquished disappointments, with

their hope, their random indiscretions, their

outworn hesitancies, not knowing that this

trip, this pilgrimage calls for new beginnings.



Many, out of familiarity, feel as if they own me;

they feel accepted in a silence that is resonant

with an anguish deposited by history’s fate. I

am part of that gold tip on the whitest marble

taper which has been gleaming serenely for

fifty years. I watch, endlessly, as unassimilated,

tangled and opaque pasts go home transmuted.

From early dawn, as the sky slowly turns to blue,

prescribed prayers ascend and I find the past is not

so slowly relinquished even on this sun-drenched

vista known as the mountain of God where gardens

have been coaxed from grudging soil and multitudes

advance on feet of brass where once stood feet of steel.





Ron Price

12 August 1997


THE OCEAN FLOODS IN SILENTLY





The most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming, not at that goal itself, but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. This is one of the laws of life.

-Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 7B, Oxford UP, 1963(1954), p.546.





Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.1



It yields, with the years, to ever-

Lasting beauty, far, far

From this withered bloom, just

One step from eternity.



While on this earth I shall not cease

The mental fight, though I

Shall often slip with sword sleeping

In my hand while we build

Jerusalem on Carmel’s mount and

Green terraces caress that land.



The tired waves continue breaking

And often weariness I gain,

While back in quiet creaks and rivers

The ocean floods in silently

And the Sun which climbs so slowly

Fills my sky with light and joy.



Ron Price

27 December 1997



1 This poems contains lines quoted by Toynbee in the above volume, pp. 513-515.


VISIONARY



Visionary poetry can live with the uncertaintly principle, but not with total skepticism or with the belief of many of the newest critics that poetry is not “about” anything. As it has been said “where there is no vision, the people perish.”(Proverbs 29:18) Without vision behind it this poetry, I’m sure, would not have been written. All perception is theory-laden and we need the power of symbols to extend our perceptual models. Perception itself is a dynamic searching for meaning. Visionary poetry begins in perception, in the ‘suchness’ of things, in us as participants, in the last two centuries, since Shaykh Ahmad left his home to prepare the path for the Bab, about 1792, and since Wordsworth began writing his poetry about the same time. -Ron Price with thanks to Hyatt Waggoner, American Visionary Poetry, Louisiana State UP, Baton Rouge, 1982, pp.1-18.



Something out there on that hill,

quite beyond what I see, running

way down to the ocean depths,

identities of a spiritual world,

beyond my praise, an eternity

of men and women, a thought

rising, calm, like the stars shining

immortal, luminous, real vision,

taking possession of my soul,

celestial light, mystery and weight,

a divine perplexity, the infinite hidden

in the infinite to this peculiarly intimate

bit of world, this joyous seer. Flood tide

above me. I see you, at last, face to face!



Thousands go up with loving and thirsting eyes,

fine spokes of light leading to the unseen.

Grand is the scene here to me

and the unseen buds hidden under the terraces

and marble like babes in wombs, latent, compact,

sleeping, billions of billions beckoning—

out beyond Mars-beyond all these computers,

engineering miracles, medical breakthroughs,

the staggeringly complex knowledge explosion

and that burnt match in the urinal1.

Not just memories of spiritual gates2 here,

intricate iron tracery, real and bathed in blood.

No need for me to create a new Bible

for one has come, spring-board , luminescent

source that helps me stab at truth,

evoke a common consciousness, an innocence,

an absolute beauty amidst all the tears,

the broken bones, all the boredom and chouder.



1 Hart Crane in ibid., p. 78

2 idem


ALWAYS TO TASTE HER HONEYED-TONGUE



Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To see forever her green gardens and marble lines,

Awake at last on that sweet mountain side,

Now, always to taste her honeyed-tongue with

My spirit as close to that Dust: abide, abide.

-Ron Price with appreciation to John Keats quoted in The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, Harold Bloom, Cornell UP, London, 1961, p.437.





I seek more wonder than the human face

here among the terraces and marble, more

beauty than the sweetest lips or breast or

hair falling to a waist, a happiness which

becks my ready mind to fellowship divine,

with essence, on my way to freedom from

space and a religion of heaven which I trust

will grow out of this consciousness like leaves

from a tree, fruit from a tree of endless glory,

born of some seed I found standing within me,

mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.



Ron Price

25 April 1998


FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF LIGHT





Percy Bysshe Shelley began the poem 'The Triumph of Life' in 1822 in the spring. It was unfinished when he died on 8 July 1822. To Shaykh Ahmad , who was in the last several years of his ministry, there was no question what 'the life' meant, or what 'the triumph' would involve. Shelley's poem was as enigmatic to western literary critics as the mission and meaning of Shaykh Ahmad was to the masses in Iran. His poem suddenly breaks off in line 548.



I found many of the lines of Shelley's poem of inspirational value in contemplating the recent developments on Mt. Carmel often referred to by the Bahá'í community as the Mt. Carmel Project.

-Ron Price





This old root1 which has grown

to an immense and strange distortion

out of the hill side, a celestial

implantation,2 culmination of the

spheres in this galactic sector and

which now with the weight of my

own words staggers me with weary

contemplation, at times, child of

a fierce hour who seeks to win this

world but, in the end, loses all it

does contain of greatness, with

hope transferred from earthy-rock

and mountain peak where power and

will rule in opposition, irreconcileable.



But while my eyes are sick of this

perpetual flow of people and sad

thought from day-to-day, there is

a golden seam of joy, a kindling

green, a gentle rivulet with its

calm sweep where sweet flowers

and wet stems, a scene of woods

and waters, a Light diviner than

the common sun and sounds

woven into one oblivious melody,

threading the forest maze with

winding paths of emerald fire

and dew, invisible rain, forever

seeming to sing a silver music

on a mossy lawn, a crystal

grass which whispers with

delight, enamoured as if in

dream, to kiss the dancing

foam, on a summer dancing

breeze...it is all emerging here

beside my path, this new Vision

surrounded by a savage and a

stunning music amidst a war

returning and triumphant

wilderness before me eyes,

always returning, tempest of

splendour and chaos, dance

and cheer.



This embroidery of flowers

that does enhance this grassy

vesture in the desert, this

moving chariot whose swift

advance is so still as to pose

no threat, as others gaze and

circle 'round it like the clouds

that swim round a high noon

in a bright sea of air or like

bubbles on an eddying flood

borne onward. And I among

a multitude am swept, my

sweetest flowers with the

thickest billows of this living

storm, and plunged with bare

bosom to the clime of this

holiest spot, love led serene

and awe of this wondrous story,

though the world can hear not

these sweet notes whose sphere

of light is melody to lovers



And so, the earth, though peopled

with dim forms which dance in a

thousand unimaginable shapes,

possesses now a marble brow of

youthful vision: terraces and eagles,

pillars, white and green on mountain

slope. Happy those for whom the fold

did fold and encompass in its eternity

fresh cool waters and fruits of being.



Ron Price

17 May 1998



1 civilization has often been a source of great evil

2 human beings, it is my philosophy, are at the apex of creation, possessed

as they are with the rational faculty.


THE ARCHITECTURE OF OUR MINDS



There exists in Haifa a structure so potent and glorious that I would like to think that its existence in my mind becomes the actual architecture of my mind, a structure through which all my dreams and ideas and hopes are funnelled. While this is partly true, I know only too well, that the architecture of my mind contains much else. Buildings transform space into location and thus perform a function that is essential to human dwelling or emplacement. The buildings, the gardens, the terraces in Haifa do not just connect pieces of land that are already there they designedly cause them to lie beside and across from each other by setting one side against the other, one part in juxtaposition to the other and, in so doing, they bring to the port of Haifa a path for Kings and to the mount of Carmel an expanse of landscape that is redesigned, renewed, rebuilt. The whole entity gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Borders or boundaries are certainly sites, locations, from which something exquisite begins its presencing. They are also places that demarcate the distinction between Holy Place and Other, perhaps “us” and all “others.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Anthony Wilden and his discussion of the complexities of boundaries or borders as barriers and loci of communication. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: quoted in D.M.R. Bentley, Essays on Literature and Architecture in Canada: 1759-2005.



I came to stare and walk

upon her, above her,

below her and kiss her

ever-sleeping lips, hands

and beauteous face or,

should I say, gaze on

that portrait, that photo,

so rarified and perfected

there across the room.



What was the exquisite power

she wielded in this huge place,

these big rooms and small,

intimate ones where she had lain

for years in a crystal concentrate

of beauty, in this artefact, placed,

marvelled at, forgotten by many,

by most, by millions who once

stopped to amaze, be amazed.



There was a grace here so contained

as to pose no threat, undeserved

was our age but so needy

and our days have grown

more troublesome, many have wept

beyond the borders. We circumambulate

mostly in our minds where the architecture

of this place will live forever

in our hopes and dreams,

funnelled into everyday reality

half-remembered, half-believed. -Ron Price September 15th 2005


THEY CAME



They came as separate poems and when I had what seemed like a sizeable number, I think it was usually somewhere between about fifty and a hundred, I made them into a little booklet. The plastic binding cost me five dollars at a local Xerox shop; the paper and the ink cartridge had another cost, let's say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2004 I produced 53 booklets of some 6000 poems. It works out to a little more than a poem a day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of eighteen with Cathy Saxe who lived in George Town Ontario. Then, in 1980, I started saving the poems I wrote. I was thirty-six at the time. At 48 I became even more serious about poetry. It was then 1992. As far as direction in my poetry was concerned, well, I really didn’t know where it was going. I had, from time to time, several senses or intimations of direction and, after one period of strong intimation in the mid-1990s, I organized my poetry into four time periods, each with a different heading or title drawing on the historical construction of the Shrine of the Bab and its embellishments in the gardens and terraces on Mt. Carmel as my metaphor, my physwical analogue.



I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger White's poetry. I don't lay them out like my website, my letters, my essays or my attempts at novels. My poetry has some inner evolution which, even after 42 years, is essentially mysterious.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 12, 2004.



Back in the '80s

I took little interest

in rhyming bed & head:

there were enough, I thought,

banalities in life

without my adding to them.



There was so much

I did not need to know:

the Hang Seng, the FTSE

the price of gold,

the price of a new hoe.



My eye, as Shakespeare said,

was in a fine frenzy rolling

from earth to heaven and

heaven to earth........,with

my imagination bodying forth,

turning things I did know

into a shape, giving them a name,

a habitation--something more

than airy nothing.



Ron Price

May 12 2004


REFLECTION, ACTION AND SORROW



Several days before the official opening of the Mt. Carmel Project I opened on the internet my website entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. It needed to be given a face lift; it needed it in 2001 and it still needs it, but I have not had the technical skills to do the job. In the three years, three months and three weeks(19.5.’01-3.9.’04) since that website opened, I have accumulated between 600 and 700 websites, approximately four hundred of which were suitable for posting my writing and various kinds of references to the Baha’i Faith. Most of this website accumulation and posting was done in two of these years with the remaining time devoted to writing an 800 page autobiographical study also called Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Both these projects are ongoing ones, but in this first week of spring in Tasmania I have reached a point of saturation with respect to each of them. I am now ready to go back to (i) reading, (ii) note-taking and (iii) trying to write a novel.



I am ready for His guidance “in all that pertaineth to the exaltation of Thy Cause and the magnification of the station of Thy loved ones.” I shall now reflect and do “what comes to mind.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to the words of Baha’u’llah, sent to me by Roger White from an unauthenticated Tablet.



Urgent and sustained attention,

accelerated advance in the process,

continuity in systematic endeavour

in a Plan that has seen unprecedented

writing, a pause, a review of a life

and a Cause, a sharing of the Bread

which has come down from heaven,

an ushering to the banquet table

of the wondrous Lord of Hosts

the souls that hunger after truth.



This unprecedented project,1

this momentous transition to a time

when the world’s great pain shall pass

has seen in these years of this Plan

a stimulus that has been exhausting,

especially with the approach of night

when, yet again, exhaustion sets in,

a sense of disillusionment and a sorrow

at my utter inability to conquer

the pitfalls of self, of instinctual urges,

to subordinate my natural inclinations

and overcome the allurements

and trivialities of the world.



1 The Universal House of Justice, “Statement on the Official Opening of the Terraces,” May 22, 2001.



Ron Price

2 September 2004


REFLECTION, ACTION AND SORROW



Several days before the official opening of the Mt. Carmel Project I opened on the internet my website entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. It needed to be given a face lift; it needed it in 2001 and it still needs it, but I have not had the technical skills to do the job. In the three years, three months and three weeks(19.5.’01-3.9.’04) since that website opened, I have accumulated between 600 and 700 websites, approximately four hundred of which were suitable for posting my writing and various kinds of references to the Baha’i Faith. Most of this website accumulation and posting was done in two of these years with the remaining time devoted to writing an 800 page autobiographical study also called Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Both these projects are ongoing ones, but in this first week of spring in Tasmania I have reached a point of saturation with respect to each of them. I am now ready to go back to (i) reading, (ii) note-taking and (iii) trying to write a novel.



I am ready for His guidance “in all that pertaineth to the exaltation of Thy Cause and the magnification of the station of Thy loved ones.” I shall now reflect and do “what comes to mind.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to the words of Baha’u’llah, sent to me by Roger White from an unauthenticated Tablet.



Urgent and sustained attention,

accelerated advance in the process,

continuity in systematic endeavour

in a Plan that has seen unprecedented

writing, a pause, a review of a life

and a Cause, a sharing of the Bread

which has come down from heaven,

an ushering to the banquet table

of the wondrous Lord of Hosts

the souls that hunger after truth.



This unprecedented project,1

this momentous transition to a time

when the world’s great pain shall pass

has seen in these years of this Plan

a stimulus that has been exhausting,

especially with the approach of night

when, yet again, exhaustion sets in,

a sense of disillusionment and a sorrow

at my utter inability to conquer

the pitfalls of self, of instinctual urges,

to subordinate my natural inclinations

and overcome the allurements

and trivialities of the world.



1 The Universal House of Justice, “Statement on the Official Opening of the Terraces,” May 22, 2001.



Ron Price

2 September 2004


SEVERAL TURNING POINTS



If one reads my poetry over the last ten years or over more than twenty, going back to, say, the first two poems I wrote in the winter of 1980 after finally being treated for a bi-polar disorder, such a reader will get the overwhelming impression of a very personal spiritual journey,1 a journey of healing. One will see spiritual crises, complexity and depth of struggle engaged in as the stuff of life that underpins my poetry and its emotional tension. There is a vulnerability and an openness underneath a bittersweet complex poetic design etched in an acid of remorse and sadness, a meditative and solemn consciousness and an identification with powerful and wise prophetic Figures in my religion. My poetry found several critical turning points: it began its spiritual journey with a special healing; it developed and became associated with the building of the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, especially beginning in that Holy Year of 1992-1993; and it developed still further when I retired at the age of 55 from my profession. That solemn consciousness,2 one that had been with me as far back as the first months of my pioneering experience from August to December 1962, became the wellspring of the most exquisite celebratory joy. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Stuart Hirschberg in Poetry Criticism, Vol.7, Drew Kalasky, editor, Gale Research Inc., Detroit, 1994, p.155; and 2The Universal House of Justice, Letter April 3, 1991.



My poetry proclaims and acclaims

the pivotal centre

of the unity of humankind

in the Covenant.

My poetry illustrates

the dynamic effect

of the Covenant

on the struggle, spread

and redemptive achievements

of the Bahá'í community

since His passing

in that fin de siecle

when His soul proceded

to energize the world



There is here a thankful gladness,

a celebratory joy,1

a journey into an inner world,

an exploration of a genuine self,

an unlocking of a door of many mansions,

of deep complexity, of inaudible music.



Here is a protective structure

I negotiate as I conjure into being

people from the past

and take the long journey of healing.



1 The Universal House of Justice, Letter, April 3, 1991.



Ron Price 5 March 2002


A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY



If one reads my poetry over the last ten years or over more than twenty, going back to, say, the first two poems I wrote in the winter of 1980 after finally being treated for a bi-polar disorder, such a reader will get the overwelming impression of a very personal spiritual journey. One will see spiritual crises, complexity and depth of struggle engaged in as the stuff of life that underpins my poetry and its emotional tension. There is a vulnerability and an openness underneath a bittersweet complex poetic design etched in an acid of remorse and an identification with powerful and wise prophetic Figures in his religion. My poetry found its critical turning point in its spiritual journey, associated as it was with the building of the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, especially beginning in that Holy Year of 1992-1993. A solemn consciousness, one that had been with me as far back as the first months of my pioneering experience from August to December 1962, became the wellspring of the most exquisite celebratory joy. -Ron Price with thanks to Stuart Hirschberg in Poetry Criticism, Vol.7, Drew Kalasky, editor, Gale Research Inc., Detroit, 1994, p.155; and The Universal House of Justice, Letter April 3, 1991.


THOSE MINARETTES OF THE WEST



Today we all witnessed on our television screens the collapse of the twin-towers of the World Trade Building. Thousands were killed and another eight-hundred in the Pentagon when a jet crashed into its centre. The heart of America's military and industrial complex shattered in the most savage act of terrorism in American history. This poem is an attempt to make some sense, to express some understanding of the tragedy that occurred. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 12 Sept 2001.



He called them minarets

with such gentle irony

that we nearly missed His point.



I'm sure He knew they would

come crashing down upon our heads

as our civilization was to come

undone in the years, the decades,

perhaps, centuries ahead....



For those time-honoured

and powerful strongholds

of orthodoxy, political

and religious, can not save us....



And this military and industrial

complex, blown apart

in front of our eyes

one-hundred-and-twelve days

after the Opening of the Terraces.



Is there any connection, Horace?1

You always said:

religion is cause

and history is effect

in a tortured interaction

just about beyond reason.



It reminded me of the Kennedy

tragedy, World War II and I,

horrific events following

in rapid succession:

(i) the election of the House,

(ii) the beginning of the Plan, and

(iii) 'Abdu'l-Bahá's trip west,

....respectively...respectively....



1 Horace Holley, secretary of the NSA of the United States for many years and Hand of the Cause.



Ron Price 12 September 2001


THERE'S A LOT RIDING THERE



The past is the domain of contingency, uncertainty, in which we accept events and from which we select events in order to fulfill our potentialities and to gain satisfaction and security in the immediate future. It is there for our exploration and study, especially the autobiographer. We remember what has significance for our present style of life. This remembering is a creative process; it is a mirror in which we examine our lifestyle in the present. What we seek to become determines what we remember we have been. Whether we can even recall the significant events of the past depends upon our decisions with regard to the future. Our past will not even become alive if nothing matters enough to us in the future we envisage. If we want our uncovering, our examination, of the past to have reality we must possess some hope and commitment toward working and changing the future, toward integrating ourself for future creativity. -Ron Price with thanks to Rollo May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology, W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 1983.



We've got a lot riding

on that vision,

those buildings of light

up there on the hill.



My life, all that's gone

before, is riding there

in an aliveness, a reality

born in those very terraces,

in that water trickling down,

in a tall marble column,

in the spirit and lives sown

in a history oh so solemn

but with a consciousness,

itself a wellspring of

an exquisite celebratory joy.



Ron Price

13 November 2001


NEW STRUCTURE



After reading and indexing my poetry from 1980 to 1995 I feel as if the entire body of work is "Warm-Up." The period September 1992 to June 1995 inclusive I shall now call "The Golden Dome." It is phase three of my 'warm-up.' The period July 1995 to May 2001, nearly six years, I shall now call "The Terraces." Reading my poetry from phase three, perhaps the first time I have read it as a whole body of work, allowed me to make the first overall assessment of my poetry from this phase of its development. It still seems to be, for the most part, 'juvenilia,' immature and, except for the occasional poem, singularly unimpressive. And so I have established a new general struture for my poetry during the years 1980 to 2001, a twenty-one year(less two months) time span. It is a structure that follows the names of the general phases of architectural development for the Shrine of the Bab and the gardens and terraces which embellish it. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 17 April 2001.



I am that modern hero

who preserves and maintains

a face of my own--no epic

or romantic hero--just

a personal self now formed

around more than twenty years

of poetry symbolically developed

as the Shrine of the Bab was developed

over more than one hundred years.

And here I have access to such power

as can generate the attitudes and names

of God1 as citizen and philosopher,

as public and private poet and person

in this the beginning of the fifth epoch.



1 Thomas Lysaght, "The Artist as Citizen," The Creative Circle: Art, Literature and Music in Bahá'í Perspective, editor Michael Fitzgerlad, Kalimat Press, 1980, pp. 121-157.



Ron Price

18 April 2001.


THIS SILENT GRASS-GROWING MOOD



The 14th Dalai Lama left his home in Tibet in 1959 along with one hundred thousand Tibetan Buddhists when the Chinese invaded his homeland. He found political asylum in India. This man, who has claimed to be the incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, has spent the last forty years promulgating Buddhist teachings around the world from his centre in India. Six months after this invasion of Tibet, while the Dalai Lama was preparing to enter his country of exile, India, and the Chinese were occupying his Tibetan home, I became a Bahá'í in Canada. I began to promulgate the teachings of a Man Who claimed to be the Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of Universal Fellowship. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 July 2001.



It has been a delicate operation since 1959

promulgating the teachings

of another Claimant to the throne

of that Buddha of Compassion

Whose home was invaded

a hundred years before

by men of His homeland

and sent Him to His exile

for forty years.



I have had to keep faith

in myself and my beliefs

while the world assailed

me in its utter disbelief.

I have had to stand up

against humankind

as if I was the sole disciple

of this precious Being.



And now in this calm,

this coolness, this silent

grass-growing mood,

I write, not for fame,

that most transparent

of all vanities,

but for what I feel to be

so terrifically, terribly, true.1



1 Herman Melville's words about writing. Price's poetry, like Melville's Moby Dick, is not uniformly excellent or interesting. But, like Melville's work, it dares greatly and soars high. Melville completed his work in the 17 months after the Bab was martyred; Price completed his initial poetic opus while the Terraces, the embellishment of the Bab's holy place, were being completed.



Ron Price

4 July 2001


A MANIFESTATION OF BARBARISM?



In December 1989 The Simpsons aired for the first time on television. In the last 12 years, 1989 to 2001, this program and its characters have become an institution, a mass phenomenon. I was first introduced to the program by a class of 18 year old boys in a Tafe College in Perth about 1990. In the dozen years since its inception, I have met people who love The Simpsons and people who hate it, appauled by its moral tone. It was with interest that I came across an article yesterday "Simpsons at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism" located at The Simpsons Website. The author, Keith Gessen, makes many points about The Simpsons in his article. He talks about stories we tell in order to live. We order, he says, the anarchy of our experience into useful narratives. Glessen refers to Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind and Bloom's concern at the collapse, the irrelevance, of the referenceable reality of the classical canon of western literature, the once critical provider of our stories. Glessen sees The Simpsons, among a host of other programs, as devouring western culture with their idiocy and videocy, their humour and their delight. A plethora of cultural material has entered society since WW1. One thread among the millions of threads of the many garments in the current cultural melange is this poem. -Ron Price with thanks to Keith Glessen,"Simpsons at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism," Internet, 13 October 2001.



We were just experiencing

some of that longed for

entry-by-troops,

signs of an acceleration

yet to come....



We were just experiencing

our first heightened expectations

from the architectural design

just adopted for the Terraces

and the realization

of the Guardian's vision

along the path of the kings.....



We were just experiencing

those changes in attitude

in the early stages of

the fourth epoch

and thought, perhaps,

peace was breaking out.....



We were also experiencing

the verve, vision and versatility

of the International Teaching Centre

with warm admiration.......





As we entered the second half

of the then Six Year Plan1

what some thought to be

a manifestation of barbarism

entered our culture.

It insinuated itself

into the hearts of millions

with a laugh and a chuckle.



The barbarians had finally arrived.

Were their names The Simpsons?



1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1989.



Ron Price

15 October 2001.


THIS SHIPWRECKED VICTIM STILL POSES NO THREAT





Here I am on a lower terrace, enjoying a spot of shade on a hot afternoon in early summer in Haifa. It is Day Three of a nine day pilgrimage program. We are walking up from the fifth to the ninth terrace below the Shrine of the Bab. It is a very steep incline. I can hear the water of two fountains. I can see two huge eagles at the gate to the ninth terrace. There is much for the eye to see and the ear to hear. We approach the Shrine of the Bab and around this place conversation, small-talk, ceases. This is a place of prayer and meditation. It is now 3:25 pm. Our afternoon on the terraces has ended.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 June 2000.



I looked at the dome,

that gold dome,

after all these years

of a post-card Faith.

It’s bigger than I thought

and it’s all the fulfillment

of my heart’s desire, on

this Isle of Faithfulness.



Yes, this shipwrecked Victim

has been washed ashore and

coffined in glass. I have come

to stare and lean on Her.

I have sobbed many a time

these long years for Her.



There is beauty here,

but it poses no threat,

at least not yet.

It fits into the mountain-side

like an accommodating moss.1

But come close and you will

be filled with delight

and your eyes cheered.2





1 Roger White, “Artefact”, The Witness of Pebbles, p.96.

2 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.



Ron Price

8 June 2000


THRUSTING GROWTH



On the second last morning of the pilgrimage, Day Eight, Monday 12 June, I slept late: too tired for more walking, talking, listening and diarrhoea. About mid-morning, too late for breakfast in the hostel, I headed for the nearby MacDonald’s for its air-conditioning and some soft food to swallow with my pills. For there were aspects of life that had to go on even during pilgrimage. One advantage of MacDonald’s small cheeseburgers is that they hardly require any chewing before swallowing, an excellent accompaniment, therefore, to one’s necessary morning medication. I then walked to the Pilgrim House from the end of Ben Gurion Street, a half hour walk, and arrived in a bath of sweat.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 12 June 2000.



The first Coke-Pepsi-MacDonald’s

generation: going through to 2000,

trying to make it with their affluence,

their knowledge explosion and, for a few,

a very few, their new religion from Iran.



And me, after forty years, here I sit

below the terraces, below that

immense project-in-green

up on the hill, nearly completed,

And this pilgrimage nearly ended,

after a long wait for that salient dove

and that Living Twig. Devotion has

often been a lean provision for this journey.1

Indeed, one often wondered just what prayer

would do beside producing the heart’s voice.



But now, as I gazed up at that Shrine,2

I got an inner sense of having fertilized

the thrusting growth of, what was it, love?

Yes,love has, indeed, thrived in the desert.

It has insinuated through the socket

of despair’s bleached skull

with the aid of those souls, that leaven

that leaveneth the world of being:

surely that is what it is? Yes,

love renews itself under the cool metallic stars

and is the taste of wet leaves on the tongue

It seems, Roger, that even neglect

has fostered its thrusting growth.



1 Roger White, Pebbles, p.70.

2 From the window of the Pilgrim House.



Ron Price

12 June 2000.


SILENT WORKINGS



The Christianity and Islam of the Middle Ages made their way partly by their aesthetic and intellectual beauty. It was a beauty, so profoundly felt by artists, writers and thinkers who for one moral or spiritual sentiment had a hundred sensuous images.1 When one adds to this sentiment a passion of which the outlets are sealed a tension of nerve results in which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliancy and relief. This sensible world comes to the imaginative mind in the repetition of its own silent workings; it comes continually to the Spirit with a fine suddenness.2



So is this true of the Baha’i Faith and the poet inspired by its force. Slowly this new Faith has been making its way by an especial aesthetic and intellectual beauty, a beauty profoundly felt by increasing numbers. For them, a whole world has become alive through art’s distinguishing capacity of restoring consciously, on the plane of meaning, the union of need, creed, impulse and action. For art, for poetry, is essentially a conscious idea, the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.3 Moments become charged with accumulations of long-gathering energy and poetry is the result.

-Ron Price with thanks to 1 Walter Pater in John Dewey, Art as Experience, Perigee Books,NY, 1980(1934), p.31; John Keats in ibid., p.33; and John Dewey, ibid., p.25.



Here are deeper moments

running unseen below

these grey waves and

stormy white-edged waters.

Calm, quiet, flowing cold,

they are a celebration of one,

with peculiar intensity:

the past, present and future

in one quickening moment,

burden released, hushed

reverberations, deep-bladed

grass and water chopping

as far as the eye can see,

still living in me way down

in my memory, reaching

down to some new harmony:

attendant of these shrines,

terraces and tapestries

of truth and beauty,

beauty and truth.



1 artists often find it incumbent to betake themselves to their work in order to find that self-expression that can only come from isolation; often they feel it necessary to exaggerate this separateness to the point of some indefinable eccentricity.(Dewey, op.cit. p.9.

2 the poem develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. (Dewey, op.cit., p.11.)

..........Ron Price 14 September 2000


NO MANNA FELL FROM HEAVEN



I am at the top of the terraces and listening to a middle-aged man play an electric piano. Soon we will have dinner. Day Nine of the pilgrimage has come to an end, except for a closing ceremony in the next two hours. I am looking out over the Bay of Haifa in the early evening. This afternoon I listened to the Project Manager, Mr. Sabah, discuss the overall program of the Arc, its conception and announcement back in 1986 and its final realization at the end of this year, December 2000, before the offical opening in May 2001.-R Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs,13 June, 2000.



These clean cool notes

inspire my very soul,

an unplanned interlude

in the nine-day-pilgrimage

where no manna fell from heaven

as I walked amidst the marble columns,

edifaces, their inaccessible mysteries

and their ordinary dust. What is here?

Only what I lavishly invest with meaning.1

Yet I stand uncomprehending before all

this beauty and what is truely awesome.



I have gazed at old photographs

and a thousand ancient stones

to get some idea of what defines us

up here on the hill and down there

on the plain across the bay by the sea.

Nothing is the same here as what there

is back home in my town on my street.



This is no Disneyland of religious sites

soon encompassed in my camera’s sights.

As they herd us onto buses, to lunch hours,

to our various appointed assignations,

the tour guides become our friends,

for an instant, for an hour, for nine days.

As we drink our cold lemonade,

we take a deep breath,

waiting for the next installment.

I suppose the birds won’t be dieing over Akka, today.

A light repartee is part of the language of the pilgrim.

For he must live in this new world

and satire need not be wasted on trivia.



Another pilgrim remarks how the time has flown:

The moon is full tonight, the weather’s clear.

Did you see my souvenir? They idly chatter here.

By tomorrow night they’ll all be gone.



1 Roger White, Pebbles, pp.68-9. Ron Price 13 June 2000.


I THINK I MIGHT BE



The poetry of America, some have said, is in its bridges; the poetry of Christianity is, for the most part, in her churches; the poetry of Islam in her Mosques and of the Baha’i Faith in what has come to be known as the eighth wonder of the world among several outstanding pieces of architecture at Baha’i centres around the world. And then there is this poetry: great I do not know. But, written during the forth epoch of the Formative Age, it is part of a wider artistic experience of the time when this eighth wonder was designed and constructed: 1989-2001. If this poetry comes to be seen in no other light than as basquing in the reflected, refracted, light of the spiritual and administrative centre of that eighth wonder of the world on Mt. Carmel I will feel I have made a useful contribution to civilization. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.



Perhaps the reason this poetry

has taken on such importance,

such meaning, to me during

the construction of these

monumental terraces is

the fact that I’ve spread myself

out over two dozen towns

during a pioneer life across two

continents and nearly four decades.



Now that I have been able to give

my spirit1 a rest I am ready to launch

out into a series of short teaching

exercises like the ones I’ve already

had in:

Hamilton Ontario:

September to December 1965 Brantford Ontario May to August 1967

Whitby Ontario

July to December 1968 Toronto Ontario January to May 1968

King City Ontario:

June to August 1969 Elwood Victoria December ‘75-Feb ‘76

Smithton Tasmania

February to May 1979 Wagga Wagga NSW July to Oct 1995



I write it down to tie it down

and so define my life and who

and what I’ve been; so as not

to scatter my psyche so thin

and lose the sense of who I am.



I write it down to get ready

for another launch, for I can

feel it coming on like a

pregnancy. “I think I might be....”



1 April 1999 to April 2000



Ron Price

9 April 2000


THE LAST THIRTEEN YEARS

IN 5000 POEMS



On May 30th, my last day in Canada, after spending half my life there as a child and young man, I visited The Art Gallery of Ontario. There was a special exhibition of the work of Charlotte Salomon, an artist during the Nazi era. She was an artist for whom her painting was her autobiography. The following quotations from books of her work and about her work convery what she was trying to do. They both contrast with and compare to what I am trying to accomplish in my own poetic autobiography. And so these few days in Canada will close with a meditation on autobiography. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 30 May 2000, written at ‘The Village on the Grange shopping centre,’ 275 Dundas Street West, Toronto, 4 pm.



Whereever she happened to be she pulled out her sketchbook. She had to unburden herself and her language was paint and brush. -Emil Straus, a friend: Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?, Zwolle, 1998, p.6.



She used her lifestory to create a unique work of art. -ibid.,p.31.



She used colours, people, rooms, environments, texts, music and film to serve one goal: to create for an audience a certain distance between herself as the subject of her own life story: herself as the story-telling artist. At the same time she aimed to provide as much emotional information as the audience needed to feel at one with her, as the artist; to feel close to the story she was creating on each page and in her total pictorial opus. -Ron Price with thanks to the publishers, Zwolle, as above: idem.



She passed the last year of her life in more than 700 scenes. -Mary Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era, U of Cal. Press, Berkeley, 1997, p.ix.



We have here an autobiography without an “I.” It is a chronicle with visuals.-ibid.,p.xi.



I passed the last thirteen years of my life

in over five thousand poems,

from the age of 43 to 56

while the Hanging Gardens,

the terraces,

the Mt. Carmel Project

was being constructed.

This was the sustaining pattern

behind the jumble of human existence;

this was the source of the great renewal.

This was what whipped up

the autumn leaves

into dancing forms

and kept at bay the world’s sadness.



Ron Price

30 May 2000


THIS NEW GREEN SHOOT



Art discovers and creates a new immediacy. It is an immediacy that is attained in the process of recollection. Images, concepts, ideas, long since known, find in the work of art, their sensuous representation. And so it is in the poetry that I write, the form of art assembles, determines and bestows order on matter so as to give it an end, definition, meaning. It is meaning, order in the service of sensibility and joy. This is achieved partly by bringing all of life, joy and sorrow, to a standstill; partly by giving the fleeting moment an enduring value; partly by transforming pain and anxiety into present pleasure and even entertainment. I see my poetry, too, as part of a reconstruction of the polis, not part of a partisan political poetry, but poetry in a wider political sense; as part of the total architecture of a new society where my poetry has a home, a place of significance, somewhere in the central square; part of the construction of a qualitatively new environment, by an essentially new type of human being, a human being I am striving myself to be; part of a new language, an artistic language as revolution, as separate from the Establishment, the traditional forces of the left and right. This seems to me absolutely necessary if the age of advanced barbarism and brutality, which has characterized our society in this century, is not to continue indefinitely.

-Ron Price with appreciation to Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society”, Radical Perspectives in Art, editor Lee Baxandall, Penguin, Baltimore, 1972, pp.53067.



Yes, Jean, the world is illusion1

just a semblance of reality

from which we must construct

the real reality,

the spiritual world

which is reflected in our midst.

This world is our means:

concrete, material, sensate,

of gaining access to that other world,

often subtle and always pervasive.

It is our school,

the schoolhouse of oneness,2

given us by that Master of Love.



Yes, Jean, there is

a staggering passivity,3

a preference for sport,

in the human drama,

in a hyperreality

where the system no longer

has control over the mass:

cynical, silent, defiant,

apathetic, it waits

for western civilization

to continue its long, long,

bottoming-out,

its rootless circulation,

as new roots spread

their tendrils,spread

their tendrils. For the

old tree has died,

smooth, bare wood

everywhere,

like a ghost on the horizon

and this new Green Shoot

and just stuck its head

above the ground:

some see it as an

unfolding magnificence.4



Ron Price

18 November 1999



1 Jean Baudrillard represents post-modernism in the social sciences better than anyone, some argue. His works remind us more of poetry. In a recent article on the Internet he referred to our immediate experience of the senses as “illusion”.

2 Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952(1945), p.28.

3 Jean Baudrillard often alludes to the staggering passivity of the mass and the meaninglessness of the political process to that mass.

3 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, BE 156, reference to the nineteen terraces on Mt. Carmel.


THE I-THOU RELATION





The poet tries to give embodiment to spiritual life in language. He sees his poetry as enticement, as a literature of depths which grows roots and these roots fly. His words express an intense intimacy, an enchantment, an element of shock, of swoon, of bliss. If this he can not do, he at least sees his poetry in a musical metaphor: as the score and himself as the instrumentalist. If it is difficult to achieve a sense of music he at least sees his writing as part of that beginning which is, as Martin Buber put it, the relation, the I-Thou relation. -Ron Price with thanks to Edward Hirsch on Writers and Writing: ABC Radio, 25 January 1998, 7:30-8:20 pm.





Oh if only this too sullied flesh

could melt into a clear crystal dew

and gaze with these eyes forever

through what is fresh and sweet

and new onto these gardens and

terraces with their peculiar charm,

these sacred precincts where lies

embosomed that mausoleum, the

shell, the home of that Pearl of

Great Price where I would see

the holy of holies and feel that

air around that vault, that tabernacle

wherein the casket lies and the

sarcophagus and His holy dust.



Ron Price

26 January 1998


WALKING UP AND UP AND UP!





It was not the process of life that aroused him but taxonomy, listing one detail after another and writing was what he lived for, lived by, lived in. Some kind of almighty purpose seems to endow every atom of existence, as if for our training. It all began, he thought, in what we see, what we feel, the kindling of desire and the breeze of His loving-kindness being wafted upon our souls. Only in his writing and his writing alone would there be any testimony to this fact.

-Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Kazin, 'On Thoreau', God and the American Writer, A.A. Knopf, NY, 1997, pp.53-55.



There's an entrapment in the solitude

of one's heart here, the only place where

obscuring dust and life's defilements

can find no trace and speech's poison

can not devour the soul. Here I wander

free on mountain side amidst terraces,

pillars and holiest of holies, the home

of the City of God, resplendent as the

morn, endowed, it would seem, with

a new eye, inhaling a fragrance, subtle

mysteries in the green gardens that

grow in this land of knowledge beside

the orient lights in the many mirrors of

names and attributes walking up and up.



Ron Price

6 June 1998


FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF LIGHT





Percy Bysshe Shelley began the poem 'The Triumph of Life' in 1822 in the spring. It was unfinished when he died on 8 July 1822. To Shaykh Ahmad , who was in the last several years of his ministry, there was no question what 'the life' meant, or what 'the triumph' would involve. Shelley's poem was as enigmatic to western literary critics as the mission and meaning of Shaykh Ahmad was to the masses in Iran. His poem suddenly breaks off in line 548.



I found many of the lines of Shelley's poem of inspirational value in contemplating the recent developments on Mt. Carmel often referred to by the Bahá'í community as the Mt. Carmel Project.

-Ron Price





This old root1 which has grown

to an immense and strange distortion

out of the hill side, a celestial

implantation,2 culmination of the

spheres in this galactic sector and

which now with the weight of my

own words staggers me with weary

contemplation, at times, child of

a fierce hour who seeks to win this

world but, in the end, loses all it

does contain of greatness, with

hope transferred from earthy-rock

and mountain peak where power and

will rule in opposition, irreconcileable.



But while my eyes are sick of this

perpetual flow of people and sad

thought from day-to-day, there is

a golden seam of joy, a kindling

green, a gentle rivulet with its

calm sweep where sweet flowers

and wet stems, a scene of woods

and waters, a Light diviner than

the common sun and sounds

woven into one oblivious melody,

threading the forest maze with

winding paths of emerald fire

and dew, invisible rain, forever

seeming to sing a silver music

on a mossy lawn, a crystal

grass which whispers with

delight, enamoured as if in

dream, to kiss the dancing

foam, on a summer dancing

breeze...it is all emerging here

beside my path, this new Vision

surrounded by a savage and a

stunning music amidst a war

returning and triumphant

wilderness before me eyes,

always returning, tempest of

splendour and chaos, dance

and cheer.



This embroidery of flowers

that does enhance this grassy

vesture in the desert, this

moving chariot whose swift

advance is so still as to pose

no threat, as others gaze and

circle 'round it like the clouds

that swim round a high noon

in a bright sea of air or like

bubbles on an eddying flood

borne onward. And I among

a multitude am swept, my

sweetest flowers with the

thickest billows of this living

storm, and plunged with bare

bosom to the clime of this

holiest spot, love led serene

and awe of this wondrous story,

though the world can hear not

these sweet notes whose sphere

of light is melody to lovers



And so, the earth, though peopled

with dim forms which dance in a

thousand unimaginable shapes,

possesses now a marble brow of

youthful vision: terraces and eagles,

pillars, white and green on mountain

slope. Happy those for whom the fold

did fold and encompass in its eternity

fresh cool waters and fruits of being.



Ron Price

17 May 1998



1 civilization has often been a source of great evil

2 human beings, it is my philosophy, are at the apex of creation, possessed

as they are with the rational faculty.


That's all for now!