Autobiography: Part 6

APPENDIX 1:
Introduction
to
SECTION IX
OF
PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS:
NOTEBOOKS
The material below, not originally part of the 6th
edition of my
autobiography, has been added as an appendix. This appendix may be
useful for future autobiographical, biographical and historical work.
Since such a substantial part of my life has been spent compiling and
utilizing notebooks in my teaching, my personal study and my writing, it
seemed relevant to include this commentary on my notebooks in this 6th
edition of my memoirs or autobiography.
Notebook is the general name I give to each file that I now have in my
study and to the files and notebooks I once had as a teacher and student as
far back as 1949. One can spend much time defining precisely what
constitutes a file or a notebook. I do that in several places in my literary
resource base and especially here in this Notebooks: Volume 5.1
This
Volume 5 of my Notebooks focuses on the Notebooks of other writers
and provides an overview of some 300 of my own Notebooks.
Insensibly, after I completed the first edition of my autobiography
Pioneering Over Four Epochs in 1993, and as the last 17 years since
1993 have run their course, I became aware of the importance of the
Notebooks of other writers as models for my own and of the genre
Notebooks to my literary products, to my oeuvre in all its forms. It was
my hope that I might learn a few things from these other writers and
define as precisely as I needed to do the concept of Notebook. This
Notebook, Volume 5, attempts, as I say above, to place the Notebooks of
other writers into some overview, some overall statement and perspective
to help give me an more accurate view of what constitutes my own
Notebooks. After some sixty years of keeping Notebooks of various
kinds I am beginning to get a feel for their role in my life. In 1949 when
I entered kindergarten I produced a Notebook, but it was another dozen
years before anything substantial, anything was created, that could, that
might, in time, become part of an archival Notebook.2
Now, like shards
of memory distilled from the past, my Notebooks provide scenes to be
1
1

contemplated, tasted, savoured when they serve my purpose. Now, after
collecting nearly fifty years of archival material in my Notebooks, I have
a type of memoir which contains a dialogue with the mixed legacies of
my life: religious, cultural, historical. For the most part, though, these
Notebooks are not poignant or provocative; they are, rather, workmanlike
collections, general repositories, of other people’s ideas and words.
Those who wrote autobiographies and memoirs in the Bahá'í community
were and are few and far between. Those who did were content, for the
most part, to write a short exposition what might become a chapter of a
book. The closest I’ve come to Notebooks is pilgrims’ notes. What I
have tried to do in my autobiography with its poetry, notes, journal and
essays is to do what Samuel Beckett did with his plays. He specified, not
just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots,
and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of
notebooks published by Faber and Faber.2
Where most great playwrights
were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical
event. In some ways my autobiography is an entire theatrical event. As
this theatrical event approaches some 2500 pages, this comparison of my
approach to Beckett’s is, I think, apt.
I now have some 300 files or Notebooks and it has become tiresome to
try and keep count. In the 48 years, my pioneering years 1962 to 2010, of
keeping material3
that has become part of a Notebook somewhere in this
vast collection of material, I have also discarded literally hundreds of
Notebooks. This Notebook:Volume 5 should be of value to anyone
interested in general perspectives, overall pictures, of my Notebooks. I
realize that future readers may find some ambiguity in my use of the term
Notebook. I apologize here for placing any individuals who take a serious
interest in all of this printed matter in these difficult positions with
respect to my terminology and the resources in question. But I am
confident that, should anyone really be interested in these Notebooks, I
have done an ample job of organizing my printed matter for any future
historical value it might have, if any.
2
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume IV: The
Shorter Plays, Grove Pub., 1999.
3
I do have some photographs going back to 1909 and my grandfather’s
autobiography takes his life back to 1872 when he was born. I have also
hypothesized my family history back to the 1840s and, possibly, back to
1826 and my great-great-grandparents. Grandparents: 1872(born) Great-
grandparents: 1850(born) guesstimation: Great-great-grandparents:
1826(born); Siyyid Kazim assumes leadership of Shayki-School in 1826.
2

FOOTNOTES
1
Generally, though, I define a Notebook as an arch-lever file, a 2-ring
binder, an A-3 manilla folder or an easy-glide desk file. Of course,
within most of these different collecting points there are sub-files or
separate notebooks. If I considered these sub-sections, these
separate/discrete sections as Notebooks there would be several thousand
Notebooks in my collection. The Notebooks that I once kept as far back
as 1949, nearly 60 years ago, were found in myriad forms in ther primary,
secondary and post-secondary schools I attended.
2
The oldest document I created is an essay I wrote in the early months of
1962 in English class.--February 12th
-March 4th 2006
NOTEBOOKS: GENERAL OVERVIEW
OF A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING
In the more than fifty years(1949-2010) that I have gathered my writing
into Notebooks the writing has fallen into three general categories:
school, job and personal/Baha’i. The first category was created in the
years 1949 to 1988 in primary, secondary and tertiary education and then
external studies programs(1973-1988). From the hundreds of Notebooks
created in these years only two remain. From the hundreds created in the
dozens of jobs I have had the only ones remaining are the approximately
30 files/Notebooks from my last job at Thornlie College, Notebooks from
several of the social sciences and humanities.
The final category of Notebooks now in my possession are what I would
term personal/Baha'i. They were created not for use in a place of
employment, not as a teacher or in a school system. They were created
for my own use in my work as a Baha’i or in my personal use as a writer
and poet. I have been gathering resources now for over forty years, 1966-
2010, but only seriously for the last twenty, 1988-2010 since moving to
Perth in the late 1980s. I have been fine-tuning this 20 year collection of
Notebooks in the last ten years, 1999-2010, after I retired from FT work
and enaged in refining my scholarly activity. I now have some 300
Notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics.
These Notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the
base for my many writing projects in these middle years (65-75) of my
late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should I be granted a long life.
Little did I know when I created my first Notebook at the mid-point in the
twentieth century that sixty(1949/50-2010) years later Notebooks would
come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. -Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Updated 21 March 2010.
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THE CONCEPT OF NOTEBOOKS
Anselm Hollo wrote: "I love reading poets' notebooks. Poets are curious
critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other
practitioners."1
Many writers and poets, though not all, keep Notebooks.
This part of Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, contains
information relevant to my Notebooks. What readers find here provides a
general framework for the many Notebooks I have kept over the years.
If there is any threat of philosophical textbookism hovering in the
margins of my Notebooks, and the threat does exist, there is also my
determination to "see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and
social situations in which I find them." This tends to fend off that danger
of textbookism with what I hope is, at least sometimes, a dazzling effect.
There are generally three types of Notebooks which I use. One is the type
where I keep notes on a particular subject. The subjects on which I kept
notes--and booklet, the notebook names--are not listed in this section.2
Another notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the subject of
writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal
keeping and letter writing, inter alia. In this latter category I have some
20 major files and in the former category I have some 280 files. There is
material in these Notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my
pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks assumed the
form they did in the last ten years and especially after I retired from full-
time employment in 1999. A third type is found in my 61 collections of
poetry, some 6500 prose-poems, and these 61 booklets could easily fall
into a separete category of Notebook.
FOOTNOTES
1
Anselm Hollo, The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26
American Poets, WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et
al., 1995.
2
Too many to list here on 25/8/’08. I have listed them elsewhere.
SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ON NOTEBOOKS
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. The significance to Marx of the
thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the simple fact of his copying
passages of Spinoza.1
The massive quantities of copied material in my
Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering over
three hundred, could be viewed for the significance of the thought of
these various authors in relation to many Baha’i themes. There is, of
course, significance beyond Baha’i themes but, after 46 years of
4

pioneering, the main focus is the connection of these resources to the
Baha’i Cause. If a reader sifted my entire oeuvre and any specific writer
through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings, I’m sure he would find
many interesting connections. These Notebooks were themselves a
significant sifting mechanism.2
-Ron Price with thanks to 1
Eugene
Holland, “ Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, 2002; and 2
Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.
I take a hint from Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly
Everything, that there may be a couple of good ways to think about
ideas, and it would be a shame to blur them. Here he reports on a poet and
a physicist talking about their work habits:
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to
record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise.
"Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one"(p.123).
Writers very often keep Notebooks and dip into them for ideas later on.
They do this for at least two reasons. They want to preserve the energetic
bits of language that come to them from time to time because they know
that inspiration usually doesn't deliver whole poems and certainly never
whole novels. Instead, they have to come back to the inspired bits and
grow them into larger works, through regular practice of their craft. And
they know that if they write regularly they will have more inspired bits to
come back to. Good language comes to a writer who is working regularly
with language, and not so much to one who writes only when on holiday,
sporadically as if part of leisure time.
Einstein’s point needs emphasizing here because my Notebooks are full
of ideas but they are significantly the words of others. To have an idea
that is all yours is a rare experience. Poets have inspirations in all sorts of
situations: as they walk along, sit, eat, or whatever. I knew a fiction
writer once who said he thought poets were always "working." “Working
is” that magical insider's word that writers use with each other to describe
their writing activity. But there are different styles of working. T. S.
Eliot once said in an interview that he didn't keep notes of ideas for new
poems because he thought they froze when they were written down, but
they kept evolving when he had them in his head rather than on paper.
The French poet Valery is surprised at Einstein, I believe, because as a
poet he thinks through the specificity of language, and needs to keep the
rich, promising clusters of new writing at hand somewhere, somehow, in
order to save and work with the specificity. One way or another, Valery
5

needs to preserve the hints, the false starts, the fragments, that might lead
him in the direction of that specificity. Language is not the form his work
takes; language is his work. And for me, of course, the language bites are
different. Each writer has a different game and his Notebooks reflect his
game and the quality of his intellectual clearing house.
I can't speak as clearly about the specificity in Einstein's field. I don't
know it very well. I recognize its power, its workable specificity, even if I
don't speak his language and don't know, perhaps, what to make of his
allegiance to mathematics and quantitative analysis. But Valery offers a
clearer clue, at least to this reader, about writers having a generative
relationship to language. It's visible in the ways they work, as mine are
visible to me in the ways I work. –Ron Price with thanks to Ken Smith’s
website, 03/07/03 at 8:33 pm.
And finally a reference to Goethe and his way of seeing life. The
following words offer views of my Notebooks over six decades. “People
always fancy,” said Goethe, laughing, “that we must become old to
become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves
as wise as we were. Man becomes, indeed, in the different stages of his
life, a different being; but he cannot say that he is a better one, and in
certain matters he is as likely to be right in his twentieth as in his sixtieth
year.” And so it is that the mere accummulation of Notebooks do not
necessarily make me a better person or a wiser person.
“We see the world one way from a plain, another way from the heights of
a promontory, another from the glacier fields of the primary mountains.
We see, from one of these points, a larger piece of the world than from
the other; but that is all, and we cannot say that we see more truly from
anyone than from the rest. When a writer leaves monuments on the
different steps of his life, it is chiefly important that he should have an
innate foundation and good will; that he should, at each step, have seen
and felt clearly, and that, without any secondary aims, he should have
said distinctly and truly what has passed in his mind. Then will his
writings, if they were right at the step where they originated, remain
always right, however the writer may develop or alter himself in after
times.”4
Would that not be wonderful: to have one’s Notebook writings
“remain always right.” Timewill tell.
________________________________
THOMAS HARDY AND HIS NOTEBOOKS
4
Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 17 February, 1831.
6

I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty
years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-
Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on
the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House,
London, 1959, p.26.
Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;
confusing burying with repressing is understandable.
For me burying is an unconscious process
associated with memory, so that remembering
is like creating something anew,
not always mind you, experiencing it
for the first time, again and again.
If I have any gift as a poet it is this
and it extends from strong experiences
to minute observations. This is the fresh centre
of richness which feeds imagination,
feeds the present with charged particles,
with blood and bone, with glance and gesture
and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix
from ashes where emotion lies buried,
exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world
by some other me, as if for the first time.
17 September 1995
7 REECE MEWS/6 REECE STREET
I think what caught my fancy about the story of Francis Bacon1
, in
addition to his works of art and some of the quite stimulating and
provocative things he said about art and the creative process, was the
transfer in tact to Ireland of Bacon’s entire art studio at 7 Reece Mews in
South Kensington. Bacon worked in this studio from 1961 to 1992. It is
unlikely that this will ever happen to my study. The reasons for this are
complex but obvious after a brief reflection.
My study holds less interest for the eye than Bacon’s studio. There is less
colour, little clutter, far less heterogeneity and diversity of materials here.
What I have here in my study is an orderly arrangement of books, files,
furniture and stationary resources. In a general culture that takes more
interest in the visual than in print a place like this study has virtually
nothing to offer the art gallery, the library, the museum. The archivist or
the librarian might find some print materials here that they could integrate
7

into their wider collections. But I can not think of any reason to keep this
study at “6 Reece Street” in tact for some future generation, as the studio
of Francis Bacon has been kept.-Ron Price with thanks to 1
“7 Reece
Mews,” ABC TV, 11:20-12:20 p.m., 14/15 August, 2005.
I watched “7 Reece Mews,”
on ABC TV last night
14th
/15th August 2005
and wondered to myself
if there was any point in
transferring my study to some
home for tourists to come,
a place to serve as model
location for serious reflection.
But after brief consideration
I concluded that this could
never happen to my world,
this extension of who I am,
this identity framework
that tells much about this
self, this person, this man
from Canada transplanted
to the Antipodes near the
end of the Nine Year Plan
to spend the rest of his life
and lay his bones in the soil
at the southern end of the axis.
Ron Price
August 15th
2005
AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS
In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing
at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the
most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because
da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci
accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death
Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His
wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built
for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the
things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but
intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks.
8

These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They
are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to
1519. His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific
enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture,
mechanics and anatomy made from the age of 37 to 67.-Ron Price with
thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October
31st, 2004.
___________________________________________________________
Some may regard me as a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks
to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih
Nakhjavani writes in her article “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” our greatness
“rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle
around the great.”1
‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my
Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t enumerate all
the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work
and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da
Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949-1950 in
kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school
Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English
class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1.
I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start
of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard
Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s. Most of these
notes are: (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill
Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook:
“Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974
and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the
vast bulk of my notes comes from the quarter century, 1981 to 2006.
Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i
Council of the Northern Territory as part of The History of the Baha’i
Faith in the NT: 1947-1997; many were given to my colleagues when I
left the teaching profession in 1999; many were thrown out when I
reorganized my Notebooks on retiring from teaching in 1999 and retired
from casual and volunteer teaching by mid-2004.
What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five
year period, 1981 to 2006, from the age of 37 to 62.2
The collection of
alia, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of
subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes
taken mostly from my reading and, to a far lesser extent, my observations
and experiences. There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i)
journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks
9

on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines /topics in
300(ca) Notebooks in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files,
inter alia.
I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX of my
autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have also added
additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide
perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping. I should add, too, that
there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive
category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories
of Notebooks that I have in my study twenty-five years after I began to
keep notes that became the collection that now exists.3
New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have
squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of
different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was
teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated
with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write
about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the
words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any
detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my
experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry. They are
scattered like seeds on page after page and sometimes they fall on the
right soil and grow into poems, essays or chapters of a book.
There are now 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to
count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their
origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are
worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were
written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I
can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living.
For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.4
_______________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
1
Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10,
p.19.
2
My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1984, are so
minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18,
although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first
notes from the period 1984 to 2004 come from January 19th 1984, a
journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may
reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
10

3
Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the
early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 by which time I was in
grade 4 and nine years old.
4
Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing
of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs. –2004 to 2006.
___________________________________________________________
UNPRECEDENTED DIGNITY AND EASE
It is by a continual effort that I can create....My deepest, most certain
leaning is toward silence and everyday activity. It has taken me years of
perseverance to escape from distractions....It is how I despair and how I
cure myself of despair.-Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks,
Penguin, 1970, p.276.
I tend toward ‘the work’ every minute
and can sit vacant staring at the garden
or some inane bit of TV or some vacuous
act for only so long without a feeling of
great emptiness invading which I must fill
with my ‘planned program’.* If this cannot
be done, I fill my own mind with my own
thoughts or some Passage. But, generally,
in a chaos of reading, silence and creation
I keep out a distracted, frenetic passivity
and a mountainous world of trivia as far
away as I can until necessity intervenes.
And then, then.... some holy simplicity,
some rest, plain mysterium, a feeling of
the numinous, a nothingness, an idiosyncratic
something that is incommunicable, gliding on
a sea of faith with reason resting in the wings,
the burning desire to seek enjoying a low
flame, quietly flickering, in a free zone
of some unprecedented dignity and ease.
12 January 1996
MY TRIBUTARY
Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long
as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs
dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert
11

Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin,
London, 1970, p.18.
There’s been a stream, scented,
I’ve been drinking from since
before I came of age. The waters
have been sweet and deep, with
periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry
and the blackest soil filled my soul
with fear, disorder and dessication.
My own tributary of this stream
only began to run in my middle years.
Inspiration has run with a force
that I barely understand, nor can withstand
its roving eye and hand like an interwoven
carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.
Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed
my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,
more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve
in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary
of a great and thundering river whose waters will
flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:
as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;
I know many who have not
the will that will not will belief.
The mood will not strike them here below:
I know not why?
12 January 1996
MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS
...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the
acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime
knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved
of Thee....-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.
To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his
essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and
intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the
microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you
12

like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from
the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did.
The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that
trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in
the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form
of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This
process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price
with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From
Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.
It was not all risk, though;
some of it was simply pure
surprise and wonder: like
the two exploding stars colliding
17 million light years from Earth
and taking, according to one astrophysicist,
1200 years to do their colliding;
shooting out gas in all directions
at 36 million kilometres per hour,
creating a supernova,
a brilliant light show, in a place,
a galaxy, where six supernovas
have been produced
since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His
Tablets of the Divine Plan.
And me, defining myself,
my sense of nothingness,
in the face of that immensity.
Ron Price
14 June 1997
NOT QUITE ME
It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the
mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams
Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last
thing the poet would ever say-like a will. -Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s
Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W.
Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.
Every once in a while I go
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to some plush joint on the
sixteenth floor and get a view
of the big smoke, or eat a lunch
in the finest restaurant in town
and discuss the state of the world,
or travel in the fast lane for an afternoon
with dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car
for the day; it’s a dip into another world for
an instant in time, a world that belongs to
someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for
a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new
desires, significations, to savour, like a dream,
vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.
MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS
We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of
people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is
something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true
artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both
separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer
world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to
reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an
interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with
thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan
Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London,
1968(1965), p. 26.
I feel as if I have become
more introverted with the years.
I bring the world’s wonders
into myself.
I put words around
every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
as much as I can,
within my limitations,
except what the garment of words
can not clothe
and what those mystic tongues
and their mysterious melodies
find no ear with which to hear.
9 October 1999
14

THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW
I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems.-Octavio Paz in The
Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets,
W.W., Norton & Co, NY, 1995.
A poem is to keep a now for then. -Felix Pollak, ibid.
What we see here towers
far too high for us to grasp.
These terraces and marbles
elude our mental clasp.
The anguish and the loss
that make our furrows
of sweet toil, now spur-on
striding spirits every morning,
on the boil.
The world sees a lovely hanging
garden on the way to work,
a place for flowers and for laws,
a crystal concentrate of beauty,
a blissful vision and a cause.
No one knows what lurks
beneath the ground
of this vast expanse.
The vision’s coming faster now:
the dancer and the dance.1
6 January 1999
1
This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines,
NOTEBOOKS: Fitzgerald’s and Mine
F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"1
some time after
May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death
in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations.
Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that
interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald,
they are important.2
Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared
from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.
15

R. Frederick Price "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and
1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s
Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the
humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as
quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and
journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast
amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he
lectured and taught. His poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes
that came from observations and ideas. By 2006, as this statement was
being recorded, over three hundred two-ring binders, arch-lever files and
booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of
Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2
Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The
Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY,
1945, p.viii & p.ix.
It had become a massive embrace,
filled the spaces all around him
like a sprawling glove
that noone could wear,
like a collection of old shirts
nicely hung and arranged
to wear on cold or warm days.
He'd been warming to them for,
what, forty years now?1
It had been a lifetime
since that early start
with lots of practice
even in those earlier years,
perhaps as far back as '53--
surely not that soon,
not in grade four2
when the Kingdom
was just arriving
and that Crusade
to conquer the world?
1
1962-2002
2
I have vague recollections of notebooks from school from about 1949
through 1962, from kindergarten to grade 12 in Ontario Canada. Nothing,
of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The
oldest item from a notebook that I possess comes from 1962.
16

CRYSTALLIZATION AND THE OCTOPUS
The octopus is the most ambidextrous creature alive. Man, in his ability
to live and work within a multitude of polarities, has the most flexible
mind of all living creatures. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV,
“Incredible Sickers”, 6:00 pm, Sunday, 25 August 1996.
I feel no division between art and action, no social fragmentation of
poetry from life, no ivory tower, no barricades. I work in solitude
surrounded by community, many communities, in dialogue and silence,
alternating between myself and some collectivity. This poetry and this
action moves through my solitude and its membrances. I experience the
pull of the inner and the outer, voices often wrenching me between poles,
between the dichotomy of active and contemplative. This dichotomy, part
of the very mystery of polarity, is at the heart of oneness. The experience
of oneness is the experiencing of an alternation between the active and
the contemplative, an alternation as necessary as day following night. For
this is oneness. -Ron Price, thanks to Adrienne Rich, What I Found
There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, WW Norton and Co, NY, 1993,
p.53.
If you want an experience of an alien life form,
you could just dive into the sea in the right
places and meet the Houdini of the ocean deeps.
This hunter and gatherer of the last frontier on
earth-the great abyss-this cephalopod, the octopus,
a skeemy predator, swimming and foraging as he
has for one hundred and fifty million years. He was
a professional long before homo sapiens sapiens
emerged looking like the mammals of yesteryear.
He is still a professional, as we learn to map his
life in this most recent epoch of the Formative Age
when knowledge continues its explosive journey from
these abyssal depths to the edges of the universe,
pioneering processes crystallized by other pioneers.1
26 August 1996
PS. I often wonder what the relationship is between the extension of the
Baha’i Faith, an extension based on The Tablets of the Divine Plan and
promulgated since 1919, and the extension of knowledge on this earth. I
like to think that the Baha’i pioneer has been a critical variable in this
complex equation. Pioneers have been so critical to the extension of the
17

new light that their true value is largely unappreciated, even by
themselves.
______________________________
MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS
We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of
people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is
something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true
artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both
separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer
world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to
reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an
interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with
thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of
Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London,
1968(1965), p. 26.
I feel as if I have become
more introverted with the years.
I bring the world’s wonders
into myself.
I put words around
every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
as much as I can,
within my limitations,
except what the garment of words
can not clothe
and what those mystic tongues
and their mysterious melodies
find no ear with which to hear.
9 October 1999
____________________
THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW
I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems. -Octavio Paz in The
Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets,
W.W. Norton and Co, NY, 1995.
A poem is to keep a now for then. -Felix Pollak, ibid.
What we see here towers
18

far too high for us to grasp.
These terraces and marbles
elude our mental clasp.
The anguish and the loss
that make our furrows
of sweet toil, now spur-on
striding spirits every morning,
on the boil.
The world sees a lovely hanging
garden on the way to work,
a place for flowers and for laws,
a crystal concentrate of beauty,
a blissful vision and a cause.
No one knows what lurks
beneath the ground
of this vast expanse.
The vision’s coming faster now:
the dancer and the dance.1
6 January 1999
to December 29th
2005
1
This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines.
_______________________
FILE TO BIN
A part of the written record of this autobiography, a part that with the
passing of time is likely to get lost when my days are gone and someone
has the responsibility of keeping all my writings safe and sound, is what I
have numbered Section VII: Notebooks and Section II: Parts B & C:
Journal. The Journal is currently in three volumes and the Notebooks in
some eighty volumes. When I retired from teaching in 1999 I left another
fifty(approx.) volumes of notes with my coworkers in the Human
Services sector at the Thornlie Campus of the South-East Metropolitan
College of Tafe.
My Journal contains the more spontaneous, personal, intimate
connections with my real world. The Notebooks, spread as they are over
such a wide range of subject matter, and organized in more systematic
and orderly arrangements of material, could easily be dispensed with, in
19

most cases, and there would be little loss, unless, of course, all of this
wealth of academic resources and this life becomes more important than
can be envisaged at this early stage of its existence. Then, in that future
age, these notes might prove useful in some minute investigation, in some
embellishment of this autobiography. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over
Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.
So much writing and note taking
over thirty years of teaching and
Baha’i community consolidation
and most of it gone now into that
part of history which is oblivion.
Only some fifteen volumes left of
any personal, intimate, relevance;
the rest just resources for the work,
and these resources listed elsewhere1
should anyone really be interested.
Can I really contain all those 1000s
of hours of my life in one sonnet?
What does all of that paper mean?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, file to bin.
1
See Section VIII, kept in “Latest Poetry for Latest Booklet” File
listing all the subject files I have kept and all the ones I left in the last
school where I taught.
6 March 2000
__________________
WRITING FOR THE PLANET
Two years before the outset of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, Thomas
Wolfe delivered a lecture at the Colorado Writers’ Conference. What
Wolfe said then, about American writers, could well apply to the Baha’is
who are writing now at the turn of the century and the millennium from a
planetary perspective. I have summarized Wolfe’s words below and
turned the message toward myself and my fellow Baha’is who are trying
to be writers.
The Baha’i who is also an aspiring writer has a task that very well may be
the hardest that any writer has known. The physical proportions are
vaster and more difficult than those that the writer in any individual
nation on the earth must contend with. There is no antecedent, no
structural plan, no body of tradition that the writer can draw on. Such
20

writers must make a new tradition for themselves derived from their own
life, from the immense space and energy of the planet. They must labour
in the direction of a complete and whole articulation; they must attempt
to discover the entire universe; they must try and form a new and
complete language. This is the struggle toward which their lives must be
devoted. From the billions of living and non-living forms, from the
swarming complexity of life everywhere, from the world’s violence and
savagery, from the uniqueness that surrounds us everywhere, we aspirants
to the vocation of writer must draw on that power and energy in our own
life, a power and energy furnished by those who have been “faithful to
the Cause of God.”1
We must find that special voice that is in our own
speech and that becomes over time the substance of our art.
-Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, editor, The Notebooks of
Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970,
Introduction; and 1
Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161.
I have tired to capture and subdue
the enormous multiplicity
and what is so often the grey wash
of existence, of what comes
into my sensory emporium
and mind from outside, external.
There is a staggering muchness,
pictures, events, happenings
pouring in from all compass points,
sifted through my active brain,
leaning to the side of solitude now,
the deep-sea diving of memory
and the world’s invisible, infinite
sources that swim and float.
24 August 2000
_____________________
VISIONS: 1937-2000
“The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe show us the difficulties that the
autobiographical method created for him due to an ever-expanding, ever-
detailed proliferation of material,” writes R.S. Kennedy in The
Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe(U. of N. Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
1970). Rather than small pocket notebooks, the informal records of a
literary career, a mixture of day-to-day jottings of a most miscellaneous
kind, a jumble of literary ideas, readers of my autobiographical pot-pourri
21

get a mixture of poetry, essays, letters, narrative, journal, history,
biography, criticism, notes from reading, newspaper and magazine
articles and incompleted novels, mostly from the fourth epoch but some
from the third, of the Formative Age. This mixture of genres provides
readers with an unusual, a rare, acquaintance with the inner life of a
Baha’i who is an aspiring writer, a fascinating glimpse of a poet at work
and a close look at the creative process which transformed his experience
into writing. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, The Notebooks of
Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, p.
xvii.
I, too, Thomas, have a hope,
a conviction, of a high,
a glorious fulfillment.
No abortion here, Thomas,
no corruption,
no infection of disease
will dull the vision,
the golden dome,
the silver thread,
the amethyst, the diamond:
they will shine
however bleak the scene,
however much the revulsion
that is felt from time to time.1
Yes, there will be shame, anguish,
loathing, follies, stupidities,
crises that threaten to arrest
its unfoldment and
blast all the hopes
which its progress has engendered.2
And there will be a taste
of bitterness with the years,
made sweet by death’s final call
and that Wondrous Vision
that is the brightest emanation
of His Mind.3
1
When the Seven Year Plan began in 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the
last year of his life and the vision, the dream, he had had of America
seemed mortally wounded.
2
Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.111.
22

3
Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p.48. //Ron Price
25 Aug 2000
_____________________
A DIFFERENT PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
It is difficult not to regard, indeed it is quite fitting to regard, James
Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in autobiographical light.
It would seem that Joyce intuited this autobiographical reality early on
and most certainly was consciously aware of this personal nature of his
writing by the time he undertook the novel. This book is, I think, a sort
of 'Pilgrim's Progress' from the world of objectivity to the world of
Einstein's relativity which had entered the world more than ten years
before Portrait. I could illustrate this by dealing with several facets of
the novel, beginning with the overarching guide through the novel: the
narrator. The first chapter of Portrait, too, begins with a montage of
memories of very young childhood. If Joyce first approached his
autobiography through this novel, I first approached it through a narrative
of my life and this led, by 1992, to a poetic narrative of literally
thousands of poems. -Ron Price with thanks to "The Dedalus Factor:
Einstein's Science and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist," Timothy D. Clark, in
Joyce's Papers on the Internet, 20 December 2002.
Here you will find my life and times,
but my account is flawed and fails,
as life itself fails and is flawed
and, for the most part, apparently
makes nothing happen of consequence.
But the potential is there
for much good, much effect,
if only, if only the reader
can be part of it, and then
the most self-centred poet
becomes the most universal1
and a life, of little apparent
ultimate significance, keeps
a now for then, a music
that all can use and words
that are, strangely, the poet's
last will and testament.
1
From The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26
American Poets, WW Norton & Co., 1995, p. 219.
23

20 December 2002
___________________
A PLUNGE
Since I kept some of Richard Needham's Saturday columns from the
Toronto Globe and Mail in about 1965 it is possible to examine
representative materials that reveal my thoughts and tendencies as far
back as my twenty-first year. It seems to me that, given the existence
now of some one hundred and fifty Notebooks readers and analysts are
given an unusual acquaintance with the inner life of a writer who was a
Baha'i, a fascinating glimpse of his literary workshop and the creative
process that transformed his experience into poetry. Readers will find
here a plunge into Price's psyche. He does not reveal every possible
confessional nook and cranny, but he does provide an encyclopedic
assembly of literary phenomena. We are shown how a Baha'i and a
writer, a poet, equipped himself to execute his craft and cope with the
problems of his time and his religion as it emerged from obscurity in the
years toward and in the fin de siecle and early twenty-first century. Price
belonged to his religion as an arm belongs to its socket. Any separation,
permanent or otherwise, he saw as an amputation. His was a search for
definition, intellectual and experiential clarification and a universe of
language and thought. His goal was to capture in words the multiplicity
and diversity of it all and give it a place, a relevant perspective, in his
writing, his poetry and his life. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy,
editor, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina
Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, pp.xv-xx.
I've tried to probe
to the bottom of it all,
of our dark and twisted age
with the new Light blazing,
with hopes of a high and glorious
fulfillment with a seemingly
infinitessimal progress here and there
one hundred years-and more-
after the summons of the Lord of Hosts.
I've asked for confirmation
for my efforts to advance His purpose
for the redemption and healing1
of humankind--
and me!
24

But am I deserving, am I worthy?
I shall never know here--
only there.
1
Universal House of Justice Message, 24 May 2001.
20 January 2003
___________________
FINDING MY LIMITS
It has been nearly four years since I retired from my professional career
as a teacher. I had already become quite tired of the verbal world in all
its forms, teaching and community activity, in my last several years as a
teacher. Now after four years of relative quiet, with only my wife and
son to talk to, a small Baha'i community of half a dozen and a few others:
family, friends and people I had come to know in the wider community
providing a small base of human interaction, I seem to find anything
beyond about four hours of continuous human interaction and dialogue at
one stretch a cause of some anxiety and fatigue. Only a slight anxiety
exists in anticipation of a long verbal exchange, but my spirit clearly
finds a type of emotional exhaustion setting in after I have engaged in
conversation with others for more than about four hours. I am now only
18 months short of sixty. After forty years of extensive and intensive
talking and listening, 1962-2002, a new set of limits, what you might call
interaction limits, has slowly defined itself in these early years of
retirement from employment. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 3 January 2003.
There's a frontier, too,
of ineffability, like
an invisible wall
that surrounds every
movement of the lips
in love, in anything.
I try to catch some
of its mystery,
embrace and penetrate
some of its universe,
identify it
in my own effort
to unleash the infinite
and express
25

the emotion of an idea,
the desire to create,
and only this work, this labour,
can satisfy it.1
1
Albert Camus in Notebooks: 1942-1951, trans. Justice O'Brien, AA
Knopf, 1965, NY, p.210.
3 January 2003
______________
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-
historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully than
most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life
expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global
pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which
may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the
Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my
lifetime the Baha'i administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a
new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed
to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1
As F. Scott
Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the
1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel
strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new
beginnings.
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the
life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the
crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2
The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes
and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as
Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same
general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1
Matthew
Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace
and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2
George Bull, Michelangelo: A
Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
those birds flying over Akka
26

and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.
I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
1
their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began 23
years before I was born.
2
F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the
wars: 1919-1939.
_______________________
ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH
Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake
of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . .
and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the
morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown
neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long
seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .;
to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas,
to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough.
-The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington
Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.
Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,
many people, places and things,
am not so good on gestures of flowers
at any time of day or season.
Well, Rainer, I go back often
to unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters,
partings seen and unseen,
in the paintings of my mind.
27

Well, Rainer, I also go back
to my days of childhood,
to mornings by the sea, the bay,
the river, the town, the city,
the island and the meadow
where mention of God
hath been made
and His praise glorified.
And Rainer, you are right;
it’s never enough,
but it’s all I have
when I travel at night
to those childhood sicknesses
and to so many things
unexplained in this world
of the mystic, of mystery
that will never be explained.
December 3 2004
__________________
1817: A BIG YEAR
FOR NOTEBOOKS
I have come to see my own notebooks as a genre of my writing which
began in 1953 when I was in grade four. The selection of this date is
partly due to its significance in the Baha’i timeline of significances and
partly due to grade four being the half-way point in my primary
education. I had had four years of schooling by then and I’m sure I had
notebooks in those first years 1949 to 1952. The first notes that I kept
and which I still possess came from 1961/2, but the vast array of
notebooks I have now collected comes from the period 1974/5 to 2004/5.
The conscious collection of notes into notebooks was an even more recent
phenomenon. Looking back I see the years 1980 to 1995 as a time for
their early development, an insensible process that is difficult to define in
any clear way. But by the late eighties the process of gathering
notebooks was a quite conscious one with an increasing articulation of
their role in my writing in the years 1995 to 2005.
Reading about the origins and development of Pushkin’s(1799-1837)
notebooks which he collected in the last two decades of his life, in the
years 1817 to 1837, made me reflect on my own. Pushkin carried his
notebooks around with him while he was in exile in the 1820s. Mine
28

have simply been relocated by moving companies from Katherine in the
NT to South Hedland and then to Perth in Western Australia and finally
to George Town Tasmania. Mine now occupy space in an orderly
fashion in my study to draw on in my writings and be updated from time
to time from (a) my writing, (b) photocopied material and (c) internet
information on a host of topics.
Pushkin’s notebooks came to occupy 8 volumes and were first published
in 1994, 157 years after his passing. I have no idea whether mine will
ever see some published form; I leave that to those mysterious
dispensations of a watchful Providence. At this stage, after only 10 years
of conscious, formal, organized notebook collecting, I have trouble seeing
their long range significance.5
Each page of Pushkin’s notebooks is reproduced in colour and are now
seen as an important part of Russia’s heritage. Many pages of the
originals are deteriorating. Who knows what significance will be seen in
the pages of my manuscripts coming as they do from the 3rd
to 5th
decades(1983-2013) of the tenth and final stage of history, the fourth and
fifth epochs of the Formative Age(1986-2021), the second half(1987-
2037) of the first century(1937-2037) of the formal implementation of the
Tablets of the Divine Plan? It is possible than nothing will come of them
but, circling around some of the great writers of modern history as I do, it
gives me pleasure to make comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price,
Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 11th
, 2005.
Your first notebook began
in the year that the most precious
Being to have ever lived
drew His first breaths in Tihran
near the Shimran Gate where
He lived in the house of Mirza
Buzurg where He never cried,
was never restless-so they say.6
5
This brief outline of the origin and development of my notebooks is an outline I
write occasionally and each time I write the account, the outline differently. If there is
ever anyone concerned about these variations, I would like to lay their minds to rest
by saying simply that: one perceives the past differently each time one writes about it.
What I write here is to an extent impressionistic and makes an attempt at an accurate
account. But it is not a painstaking and meticulous historical analysis of the story of
my notebooks.
6
H.M. Balyuzi, Baha’u’llah: The Glory of God, George Ronald, Oxford, 1980,
p.19.
29

Descended from Abraham
and a Sasanian monarch,
the son of Khadijih Khanum
and Mirza Buzurg this Man,
this great God-Man
of the 19th
century
began an undertaking
that has captured the imagination
of several million people
and is associated with those
climactic changes in direction
in the collective history of man.
August 11th
2005
______________________
INCIDENTS OF A VOLATILE/EVANESCENT KIND
My attitude to books and notebooks is not unlike that of Samuel
Johnson(1709-1784) an important literary figure who produced an
English dictionary in 1755, the most significant and useful one until the
Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1911. Books, to Johnson, were
for use not for adornment, not for sacred and reverential treatment. His
sanctum sanctorum, his library, his biographer Boswell wrote, “was
strewn with manuscript leaves, with books in great confusion” when he
chanced by for a visit. And so is this the case with my books and
notebooks should a casual observer catch me in the middle of my
research and writing. My notebooks and books are full of handwriting,
underlining, notes in the margins, indeed, notes in many places in the
books. My files and notebooks often lay all over the floor and the
furniture. This is not true all of the time and of all my books, but it would
take too long to provide a detailed description of this heterogeneous, this
varied and complex process. Needless to say, I share some of the features
of Johnson’s attitude and policy with respect to books and notebooks.
This disorderliness, this apparent clutter and chaos, which Boswell
observed in Johnson’s library, is sometimes observable in mine when I
am caught in the midst of my work, my writing and research. At most
times, indeed all the time when I am not writing, I keep everything in its
place in this small study here at Port Dalrymple on the south side of
George Town the oldest town in Australia and located as it is in northeast
Tasmania. My notebooks, my books, my manuscripts and papers, my
files, my stationary and various items of writing and reading equipment
all have their place: labelled, ordered, tidy, dusted and ready for use. –
30

Ron Price with thanks to Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson, Princeton UP,
1987.
Such a grand composition,
mingled as it was with
all the shades, peculiarities
and blemishes that flesh
is ere to, all the fertility
and readiness, dexterity,
wit, vigour and vivacity,
the extraordinary endowments
and particulars of his own mind--
such was the person who laid out
all those notes on the lives of others1
sometimes on the floor and disarray.
1
Ron Price with thanks to Boswell's Life of Johnson, Front Matter,
Editor, Jack Lynch, Oxford, 1904.
"The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those
performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the
thoughts into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily
life. Here exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other
only by prudence and by virtue.……These narratives are often written by
those who are not likely to give much instruction or delight. Most
biographical accounts of particular persons are barren and useless……
The incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and
evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely
transmitted by tradition.”1
"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's
virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small
note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character
more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles." Plutarch,
Life of Alexander, Langhornes's Translation. -8/24/ ’05.
_____________________________
NOT TOO DISTRESSINGLY INSIGNIFICANT
Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist. She has become an
Australian icon in the last quarter century. In 2004, fifty years after her
death, her diaries were published. There are few diaries to rival Franklin’s
for entertainment. She kept a pocket diary from 1909 to her death in
1954. The materials in her diary make up a million words. They are
composed of: literary notebooks, journals, letters, pocket diaries, helpful
annotation and linking narrative to enhance the reading experience. This
31

linking work is done by the editor Paul Brunton. The publishing of these
diaries, The Franklin Diaries, will not be in the form of, say, Virginia
Woolf’s diaries which came out in five volumes in the years 1977 to
1984. It appears that Franklin’s will be episodic: this collection is but
the first episode.
I find the interlinking, interlocking, of Baha’i history and Franklin’s
history of personal interest. In the month, the year, for example, that the
Seven Year Plan began for the American Baha’i community, April 1937,
Franklin rejected the OBE. When the full Franklin Diary is published
readers will be able to follow diary entries, should they so desire, from
the year the Bab’s dust was entombed on Mt. Carmel in 1909 to the
beginning of the Ten Year Crusade when the Kingdom of God on earth
began in 1953/4. There is, for me anyway, an interesting juxtaposition
here of Baha’i history, Australian secular history and the life of one of
Australia’s paradoxical writers.-Ron Price with thanks to Jill Doe, “the
Diaries of Miles Franklin,” The Age.com Book Reviews, March 13th
2004.
So far, my story is better told
in the form of other genres,
although you’ll find something
of value in my journals which
are part of my universe and which
I bequeath to posterity as a personal
backdrop to the 4th
and 5th
epochs
of Baha’i history. There is love here
and addiction; flesh is made word
while time’s winged chariot hurries
near in the midst of a lawless enterprise,
a sort of chronicle of everything, well—
something: effervescence, hopefully
not too distressingly insignificant.1
1
Andre Gide in Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and
Their Diaries, Ticknor and Fields, NY, 1984, p.286.
November 18th
2005
______________________________
UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS
Anyone who has studied history to a significant extent knows the extent
to which poetry, art and history are intertwined. The examples, the
historians, the poets and the artists who have pointed out this intimate
32

association are many. In a comment the historian Arnold Toynbee made
in 1955 in the Journal of the History of Ideas, after he had completed
his epic 10 volume work A Study of History, he said he regarded himself
as much a poet as a historian. Theodore Mommsen the great, perhaps, the
greatest Roman historian, said in the fifth volume of his History of Rome
that imagination was the mother of both poetry, history and he might
have added art.
England buried its historian Thomas Macauley in the poet’s corner of
Westminster Abbey. Edward Gibbon wrote in sentences pregnant with
the deepest observations and the most lively images which drew attention
to his words as art form as much as, if not more than, content. This is
often the function, the way, of the poet and the artist, in the process,
readers often have to work a little harder to read what they say.-Ron Price
with thanks to my “Section IX: Notebooks,” Pioneering Over Four
Epochs, 1/6/06.
The state, you said, in the 19th
century’s
finest work in history, was built on sand
unless a common morality pervaded the
rulers and the ruled, you who poet-like,
artist-like, had a genius for passionate,
subjective judgements in that monumental
work, that poetic work, your opus, oeuvre
that helped keep you young, helped give
you the fire of youth1
as you headed for
middle age2
in those first years after the
Most Great Spirit, personated by a Maiden,
had descended on the agonized soul of That
God-man in the Siyih-Chal---Baha’u’llah....
You revolutionized the study of ancient Rome:2
was it that sudden eruption of forces released
by an overpowering Revelation? Was it the first
wind, rain, the tempest of His slowly crystallizing
words and their unsuspected benefits across
the entire range of human culture in our time?
Was it a new intellectual anchorage in which the
world was deriving continuous, unobstructed
inspiration penetrating to the very core of life?
June 1 2006.
33

1
On reading the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1902 to
Theodore Mommsen in Nobel Lectures Literature: 1901-1967, editor,
Horst Frenz, the Nobel Foundation, NY, 1969, pp. 7-11. 2
Mommsen
wrote a three volume History of Rome(1854-56) published when he was
39 or 40. V. 5 appeared in 1885. V4-lost in a fire.
________________________
THEY WERE EARLY DAYS
In April 1937, when the Baha’i community of North America opened its
first teaching Plan, Winston Churchill was putting the finishing touches
to his book Great Contemporaries which was first published in
September 1937. As one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding
promoters of democracy he was also conscious of its precarious nature.
This is obvious in these essays written between 1932 and 1937 at the
same time as the American Baha’i community had evolved to the point
where it could turn its energies toward worldwide expansion.
Churchill saw the two great wars as part of one process, one great war,
not part of one great Lesser Peace, as the Baha’is were coming to view
most of the 20th
century. It was a war, he thought, we began in 1896.
Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the year that
the Kingdom of God on Earth was initiated, again from a Baha’i
perspective. His History of the English Speaking Peoples in 4 volumes
came out half was through the Ten Year Crusade in 1956-58. Churchill
blends the personal and the historical; indeed in many ways he disguises
autobiography as history. This was partly due to his view that the world
had become one that dwarfed the individual personality.
-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Churchill: History
Notebooks,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 7th
2006.
I’m sure you had absolutely no idea
what they1
were on about in those
entre des guerres years, although
you had a pretty good idea what
Hitler was on about back in 1937.
All those statesmen you wrote about
as you went about defining the precise
nature of leadership in a modern liberal
democratic context--as an activity of peace;
and those monarchical leaders whose light
was fading fast on the horizon, really should
34

have included that princeling at the side
of the old king, that pearl from the twin
surging Seas and the Ocean Itself.2
But they were early days, Winston;
They had just stuck their head above
the ground; the grand design would
grow unobtrusively for many a year;
even they were unable to estimate
the grandeur of that offspring
of Their interpretive Minds,
that co-sharer, unequaled figure
in the genius of divine interpretation.
1
The Baha’i community
2
Shoghi Effendi and ‘Abdu’l-Baha
January 7th
2006
_____________________
THE THRILLING MOTION
At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic
interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is
based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning;
(ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive
process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their
environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the
social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate
quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this
sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and
George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey
in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic
Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.
While the Kingdom of God on Earth
was getting its kick-start in Chicago
with a wonderful and thrilling motion
from a point of light and a spirit slowly
or quickly permeating to the entire world,
you1
were pointing your finger at meaning,
interpretation, the power of understanding,
the advent of entirely new prophets: only
these would bring the promised hope of escape
from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,
inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2
35

For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,
hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour,
He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning,
would be heard far and near in intimately
where we sat quietly with our steak and pie.
Then, then, the knights would come, knights
assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst
of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3
1
Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of
symbolic interactionism. 2
Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for
‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes,
1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press,
Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3
‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order
of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17.
-March 22nd, 2005
________________________
SELF-FASHIONING
Plato in the Phaedrus has the character Ammon make the point that
writing allows people to appear to know more than they do by means of
repeating the discourses of others or quoting others. Real knowledge,
Plato argued, results from an active engagement in discussion not
reading. Plato’s precursor, Socrates, on the other hand, saw the practice
of writing as an essential personal tool. The 20th
century philosopher
Michel Foucault agreed with Plato not Socrates, but Foucault still
advocated the keeping of notebooks, not as a substitute for memory, but
as a form of practice, a technology to aid the self. Writing is a way of
rendering an absent party present. Such was the Roman philosopher
Seneca’s view.
The fragmentary parts of life are part of our memory. This memory can
be transmitted to us or to others by teaching, listening or reading.
Memory is a means of establishing a relation with oneself. We should try
to make this relation as adequate and as perfect as possible. No sensible
man will venture to express his deepest thoughts, ones he would like to
put on record, verbally. Oral accounts tend to be subject to change. Our
deepest thoughts should be expressed in some unchangeable form, some
written form. For many people the knowledge of real objects, processes
and activities is not arrived at through direct sense perception, nor
through the memorization of discrete formulas, but through the process of
approximation, refutation, and reformulation, a process that is
characteristic of writing. -Ron Price with thanks to Paul Allen Miller,
36

“The Art of Self-Fashioning or Foucault on Plato and Derrida,” Foucault
Studies, May 2005, No 2, pp. 54-74.
There’s a self-fashioning here
in all this writing, a defining,
some memorialization but not
much memorization. Putting
stuff on record, appropximating,
refuting, reformulating, refining,
rendering myself present long
after I am gone into eternity.
There’s a bringing of meaning
to all the random assaults of life,
a conceptual entry point, reflecting
on the deepest thoughts of who I am,
interweaving of personal constructs,
all through the act of writing, poetizing.
November 6th
2005
___________________________
37

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