Publishing On the Internet: Part 2

[RonPrice]

TOTAL INTERNET SITE/ENTRIES

On July 13th 2006 the Google.com search engine disclosed 100’s and, indeed, 1000s of entries for Ron Price Bahai, Ron Price poetry, Ron Price history, Ron Price literature and Ron Price followed by literally dozens of other subjects, topics and words like: media, popular culture, Baha’u’llah, the Bab, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Shoghi Effendi, religion, Christianity, philosophy, et cetera. There is no question that my sites and entries at search engines constitute a major web site presence. Of course, ‘major’ is a relative term. My entries get mixed in with (a) other Ron Prices, I've counter 15 of the fellows, (b) sites with the word Price in them, a myriad of them in a commercial world like ours, and (c) many other sites having similar subject matter like: Baha’i, poetry, psychology, sociology, inter alia.

This makes the ennumeration, the collection, the addition, of all my entries a complex, tedious and undesireable exercise after the first few hundred that I find and list. This intermixing of my entries/sites with those of others has the effect of masking my presence somewhat. Some words inserted into search engines, though, words like Launceston Baha’i or Tasmanian Baha’i, among others, has the opposite effect, the effect of giving my presence domination. My guesstimation, though, of total entries on the internet is: 15,000. After 20 years of trying to get my writing published by traditional publishers, I'm prepared to live with the internet's complexities and enigmas.-Ron Price, July 13th 2006.

[RonPrice]

Anyone who has actually read the first two volumes(1800 pages) of my memoirs deserves a prize for having come this far to volune three. If it is any comfort, you persistent few have got through more than half of the conceptual space where identity and meaning meet around three themes: my life, my society and my religion. If you have read this far, I’m confident that you have gained some pleasure in the read and I am happy for you. Indeed, my very raison d’etre for this autobiography can be found in the pleasure and the understandings you have found thusfar. De te fabula narratur -this is your story--at least in part and an important part, or so I like to think. I like to think that those entering into the world of their memoirs or autobiography can see here some images of that literary future. The images I have offered, though, were not planned in a sequence, a tidy narrative line from cradle to grave, so to speak; but on the best of anarchist principles—that is with no planning, somewhat like the way Michael Ondaatje writes his novels-with no sense of what is going to happen next. It just growed!

I’m not sure how much of a psychological necessity it was for me to seek relief by setting down this story. This work was no opiate, as Alexander Herzon’s autobiography was to him, “against the appaulling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers.” I was far from lonely and was surrounded by students and Baha’is who were far from “uninterested strangers.” Like this greatest of Russian autobiographers, though, much time was needed for the events in my life to settle into “a perspicuous thought,” a thought I could convey in both a meaningful and written form. Like Herzen, too, some of my thoughts were uncomfortable and melancholy, but in writing I was able to reconcile them, after several unsatisfactory attempts, with my rational faculty.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri
of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography, an autobiography with several formal principles underpinning it, one principle of which is the necessity for digressions, parentheses, with wanderings from the point. To this multidisciplinary work I have added a medley of variegated products from a poetic inclination, an inclination that has led to a certan prolixity. Some may see this work as just another word for creative disorder.

Readers will find here in the following part of this work an epilogue and some thoughts on letter writing, on history, poetry and essays--some of the genres I have used in this work. What I want to find here, and what I pray for daily, are evidences of “spirits possessed of such power” that they can can act as a leavening force on the arts and sciences as expressed in my life and specifically my writing. “All the worlds which the Almighty hath created can benefit through them,” Baha’u’llah says. Herzen said that he could hear spirits knocking beneath his lines, not literally of course, but metaphorically.

These spirits inspired Herzen’s autobiography and so too did his view that, as he put it, “every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating ... he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification ...”

This leavening spirit that Baha’u’llah refers to, then, I like to think has helped me replace the endless flow of people through my life, people and employment tasks, community engagements and family responsibilities with literary opportunities. Formerly the motivating, leavening forces turned my life toward other activities demanding most of my time. In the process there were fiery tests which, in retrospect, I now see as phases in a life process, a life process that I am now, it seems, only beginning to understand. My life I now see as resolving itself into a series of crises of varying intensity and severity. Although devastating at the time, they released a divine power quite mysteriously; further calamities were engendered along the way with liberal effusions of grace enabling me to win even greater victories in the service of this Cause and in my own life. I have been carried in this age of transition through my own transition further and further on a path of service and that service is now found primarily in my writing.

The decades succeeding each other gradually and insensibly wore me down: work, ill health, disappointments and discouragements in love, in failed or unrealistic aspirations and expectations in my relationships with the Baha’i community, in my professional occupation, in striving to be happy and confident in the midst of difficulties and anxieties, in recognizing time and again my own limitations; in the various forms of dissention, conflict and disputes that led to bitter loss along the way---this world of honey and poison and its severe trials and hardships made my spirit, my nature, recoil and I often desired that life should end. But gradually, sometimes like an irruption from within, and not infrequently, a new and luminous light and life stirred in my frame. I could never have any certitude of its source.

Perhaps it was simply getting older and wiser; perhaps it was new medications and medical treatments; perhaps it was new jobs, new places of residence, new relationships, new successes in the material world. But whatever the source, new, pulsating and wonderful configurations, a fresh vitality, deriving perhaps from the power of thought, perhaps from the armies of the Company on high, perhaps from Will or from the world within this world, perhaps from the emanations of the spirit in a process that was, if not completely mysterious to me, it was one that I have come to believe--if I cannot prove--will have its fruitage in the world beyond.

Who knows what achievements and struggles lie in store for me in this the evening of my life that is ahead of me as I continue trying to transmit the precious heritage with which I have been entrusted to those among my contemporaries? I will say no more in this introduction to the epilogue other than to leave you with a prose-poem I wrote at the age of 56, a year after I arrived in Tasmania to begin my retirement and a daily-life devoted to writing. I had spent years as a talker, after a youthful and quiet beginning. The excessive speech, however spontaneous and irrespressible it may have been, had been a factor in wearing out my edges and driving me into a solitude from which I did not often want to escape. It was in this new found solitude that I developed a predilection for a recurring rhythm, the repetition of a motif, a motif that allowed me to write, to serve this Cause at another stage in its gradual evolution and to serve it in the teaching work more than I ever had before. Retirement in 1999 set me on a new course in life and a tremendously productive one.


A MIND LIVELY AND AT EASE

It is said that an artist’s work is the sum total of his experience. The artist does not create from a tabula rasa, but from a rich menu of specific and unspecific experience, grey and vague but also highly and variously coloured. The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.

A mind lively and at ease
is a gift of fortune
and gives meaning and value
to perceived experience,1
to the deep and rich satisfaction
of my own writing and to the slow
charting of the progress toward our
destiny, our meaning and our fate.

The unperturbed mind is quickest
and can deal with the vanity of vanities:
life, which we must both accept and reject,
which pierces us with its nonsense and its
strange relations, its unending moments
until that last syllable of our recorded time.

1 Jane Austen, Emma.

Ron Price
8 August 2000 :cool: