The Letters of Ron Price: 1960-2010

8/14/2019 The Letters of Ron Price: 1960-2010

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This collection of letters, what has become by degrees a voluminous epistolarium,comes from my Bahai life, 1959 to 2009, from my years as an adolescent and then asan adult at the early, middle and late stages of that part of human development asthe psychologists call them. Now, into the early years of the evening of my life,the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), I post this reflection on alifetime of writing letters within the context of my society, my Bahai life andespecially my pioneering life. Although I have not been able to locate any lettersbefore 1962, before my pioneering life began, the first letter I recall writingwas in 1959, some 50 years ago, to a fellow Bahai youth in Japan.

In addition to the 5000 letters, there are 5000 emails and internet posts. I havenot kept the internet posts. They are scattered throughout the world-wide-web and,in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire body of epistolarymaterial was written during the dark heart of an age of transition, an age whichwas my life, perhaps the darkest in history.

This collection of 10,000 items including those hybrid forms of letter, the emailand internet post, which emerged as a new millennium was opening, are written byand to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an international pioneer(1971-2009). Theyare communications written to: a friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or

persons at one of 1000s of sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at thelocal, national or global level; one of a multitude of other organizations, afamily member or some association in an unnumbered set of contexts. Readers willfind here at BLO mainly general commentaries on my letters and the letter as agenre, prose-poems on letters, mine and those of others in history and literature.Except for the occasional letter the body of my correspondence is not includedhere.

Another 10,000 letters and correspondence of many types were written in connectionwith my employment from the early 1960 into the first decade of the new millenium,but virtually none of them were kept. The number of emails received in the firsttwo decades of email correspondence(1989-2009) was beyond counting, but 99% of itwas deleted. The small number of emails that required a detailed response were

kept as were the responses if they were more than a few lines. On my demise someor all of this collected correspondence that can be accessed may be published. Weshall see. I shall not see for I shall have gone to the land of those who speak nomore, as The Bab put it so succinctly. He might have added to the land of thosewho write no more. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence and my executorswill determine what happens to this lifelong collection of attempts to connectwith the minds and hearts of others by means of the traditional letter and itsmodern, its postmodern variants.

Note: Beginning two years ago, in August 2007, I kept all correspondence ofsignificance in computer files; the only hard copies kept were an assortment ofquasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to have a logical placein my computer directory.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Letters of Ron Price: 1959-2009Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Section VII--Lettersby Ron PriceEditor:Bill WashingtonPublished in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study InAutobiographySection VII: Letters----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront andinternational pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent writing letters,emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009, I dedicate to thegreat letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these hours and thesecommunications to the Central Figures of this Faith, Shoghi Effendi and theUniversal House of Justice--individuals and institutions that have produced atreasure house of correspondence.

Then there are the many whose names are on Bahai lists but who have played littleto no part in the Bahai community in their years of membership; as well as thenot-so nameless and traceless, each of whom has their story and their varyingdegrees of writing and who, collectively, have written what I have little doubtare literally billions of letters, emails and written communications of anepistolary nature. To these I also dedicate my collection of letters. If I alsoinclude in my dedication, the massive quantities of correspondence that has beenwritten by the institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of itsadministrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief precursors ofthis Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history of this emergingworld relgion, and those who also wrote letters in responding to the seeds theseprecursors sowed and were involved in different ways in the earliest days of thehistory of this new Faith as far back as the time that Shaykh Ahmad left his home

in N.E. Arabia in 1770 to 1783(circa)---the letters of this multitude to whom Idedicate my own epistolary efforts might just reach to a distant star if they werelaid side by side!

Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of this nearly two and a halfcenturies of Babi-Bahai history are now lost to historians and archivists. Savingletters is not a popular sport and, some would argue, neither is writing them.But, still, the epistolary paper trails of this newest of the worlds greatreligious systems spread back, as is obvious, to well before the French revolutionin 1789 and these trails are significantly more than just a trace. No otherreligion has placed so subtle and significant a value on this method of exchange,writes Bahiyyih Nakhjvani in her book Asking Questions.(George Ronald, Oxford,1990, p.6.

At some future time, when the tempests we are living through in these earlydecades and, perhaps, centuries of the Formative Age of this Faith, an Age whichbegan in Bahai history in 1921, are over and a relative calm has been produced inthe affairs of men, historians, archivists, biographers and analysts of many akind will possess a literary and epistolary base of a magnitude undreamt of in anyprevious age for an analysis of the times, the epochs of the first two centuriesof this Bahai Era(B.E. beginning in 1844) and the century of its precursors, 1744-1844. My focus here is not on this wide and many-genred literary base, however, itis on the letter and, more recently, the email and internet postings of manykinds, kinds resembling the letter in many basic ways. Letters give us a directand spontaneous portrait of the individual and they are also useful in providingan analytical resource for social and institutional analysis. I could include

here, diaries and journals since they are letters, of a sort, letters to oneself,a book of thoughts to and by oneself. But these genres, too, are not my focus inthis review of my letters and this form of communicaton that are part of thehistory of this Cause.

As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to lose the way;not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them better.(Emerson, Manuscripts andPoems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a period going back now fifty years, has oftenfound that one way of doing something for another was: to write a letter, sincethe mid-1990s send an email and, since the late 1990s, post on the internet. Notendowed with mechanical skills and proficencies with wood and metal; not


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particularly interested in so many things in the popular culture like sport,gardening, cooking, heavy doses of much of the content in the print and electronicmedia; indeed, I could list many personal deficencies and areas of disinterest, Ifound the letter was one thing I could do and write and in the process, perhaps,document some of my sensory perceptions of the present age, perceptions that wererelevant to the future of a religion whose very bones spoke of a golden age forhumankind which was scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at thebasis of my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my letterswould evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they would be of value.I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this skill, was in itsapparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a popular sport! Theexercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty volume of paper which, asT.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in the end amount to an immensepile of stuff with absolutely no value or purpose.

There is, too, some doubt, some questionableness, as to whether anyones lettersshould be taken as a reliable guide to biography and still less to history.Letters often tell us more about postures that replace relationships than aboutthe relationships themselves. Sharon Cameron points this out in her analysis ofEmily Dickinsons letters in her book: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits ofGenre(Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1979, p.p.11-12). Some writers of letters

spring to an intimacy in their correspondence that they do not possess in reality,in their day-to-day life. I am one of those now in my sixties, for I am notparticularly keen on intimacy any more, at least outside of cyberspace. Life hasgiven me decades of it and I have grown tired after the many years of conversationand the many degrees of intimacy that went with it. In letters I can spring to anintimacy and then forget it in a moment. Such was the experience and view ofGeorge Bernard Shaw, as voluminous a letter-writer as there ever was. Shaw oncesaid: a full life has to be cleared out every day by the housemaid offorgetfulness or the air would become unbreathable. Shaw went on to add that anempty life is peopled with the absent and the imagined and the full life--well,I'll let you examine the life of Shaw and draw your own conclusions to thissomewhat complex question of what constitutes a full life.(Frank Kermode, The Usesof Error,Collins, London, 1990, p.253. Im sure this quite provocative thought of

Shaws is partly true, especially in our age of radio, television and assortedmedia that did not exist in Shaws time when the letter was, arguably, one of thechief means of civilized discourse.

No matter how carefully crafted and arranged a letter is, of course, it isharmless and valueless until it is activated by the decoding reader. This was aremark by one Robert McClure in another analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters(TheSeductions of Emily Dickinson, p.61). I leave this introduction at BARL, thefollowing commentary and whatever letters I have written that may be bequeathed toposterity to these future decoding readers. I wish them well and I wish them aperceptiveness in order to win, to attain, from the often grey, familiar and

accustomed elements of the quotidian in these letters, any glow, flare and lightin these 5000 pieces of writing, written at a time which may well prove to be thedarkest hours in the history of civilization when a new Faith expanded slowly,imperceptibly in some ways and emerged from an obscurity in which it had longlanguished since its inception in the 19th century and its earliest historicalprecedents in the mid-to-late 18th century. Over these four epochs in which my ownlife and letters found their place in history(1944-2021), as the first streaks ofa Promised Dawn gradually were chasing away that darkness; and as this Causeslowly became a more familiar and respected feature on the internationallandscape, these letters became, for me, an example of my attempt, howeverinadequate, to proclaim the name and the message of Bahaullah.


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These letters illustrate, and are part of, the struggle, the setbacks, thediscouragements over these same epochs and especially the years after the uniquevictory that the Cause won in 1963 which has consolidated itself(Century of Light,p.92) in further victories over more than four decades(1963-2007), the period whenvirtually all these letters were written. These various communications are also,from my point of view anyway, part of the succession of triumphs that the Causehas witnessed from its very inception. However exhausting and discouraging theprocess has often been--and it has often been--I can not fail to take deepsatisfaction on a number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and themysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not for others,are revealed therein.

My letters surprise me. If earnestness and sincerity could give them immortalitythey would be immortal; sadly in letter-writing as in life earnestness andsincerity, however dogged and plodding, are rarely enough. If thirst for contactand intimacy could give them immortality they would be immortal. Sadly, again,

thirst is not always present and intimacy is not always desired and even when theyare present in letters, these qualities are never enough as a basis for thelongevity or the popularity of a corpus of letters mixed as letters always arewith a quotidian reality that is enough to bore most human beings to death. Theboredom is sufficient to prevent nearly all readers from ever getting past a briefexamination of the cover of a book of such letters on library shelves. If immortalthey be, it will be due to their association with a Cause that is, I believe,immortal. These letters will possess a conferred immortality, conferred byassociation, as the Hebraic and the Greek traditions would have expressed it eachin their own historic and cultural contexts.

The American poet, Theodore Roethke, once said that an incoherent yet sincerepiece of writing often outlives the polished product. I'm not sure how much thistruth, if truth it be, applies to letters. Letters have enough of a problemsurviving and even more of a problem ever being read in some fine collectionusually made after a writer's death and, if one adds inarticulateness to therecipe, the salt may just lose all of its savour.

The letters will float unread on some literary bath-water, back-water. Letters, insome ways, possess the shapeless urges of the unconscious and try to catch themovement of the mind of the writer amidst a practically practical and a humanlyhuman everydayness. They often remain, for most readers, just that: shapeless andbeyond the mind and the interest of the general, the ordinary, reader. If these

letters do come to appeal it will not be for their literariness or wit but fortheir ordinariness, their witness to a time, a period, in Bahai history, in thesecond half of the first century of the Formative Age. Often neither the recipientnor posterity take any interest in the individual product or the entire epistolarycollection, as the case may be. Even when given a fine shape, as the letters ofQueen Victoria have been given, they come over time to catch fewer and fewerpeoples eyes. Still, her letters give ample testimony to her character, hereveryday life and the times. One does not write a letter to increase onespopularity and if, as Eliot implies, one writes with one eye on the future, whenthat future arrives one will be pulling up the proverbial daisies.


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Inventivess and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are possessed by aletter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the poet Roger Whitepossessed these qualities and they had a narrative momentum without which hisletters would have grown static and repetitive. Sadly, I have often felt that myletters expose the limits of my literary, my epistolary and certainly my humoroussensibility. My letters often grow limp, or so it seems to me, perhaps because Ihave often felt limp; or they become crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual, abstractions as I have tried to deal with concepts that I only halfunderstand and ideas far beyond my philosphical and literary capacity to put intowords. In some of my earliest letters, letters to my first wife which we used tocall my love-letters, written in the early months of 1967, I fell back into anemulation of the Guardian's writings, hardly appropriate Judy and I often feltlater, when we read them on a quiet Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings forher. Of course, the feelings they expressed were ideological and intellectual andnot aesthetic and romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.

Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say, 1959to 1989, a letter will contain a certain inwardness and at other times I gamblewith an intensity of emotional expression. And so, by the 1990s and the turn of

the millennium, I had gradually, insensibly, found a voice, a balance, to put myemotions and thoughts into a form I was comfortable with. Although I had beensocialized in a literary milieux in my childhood and adolescence (1944-1963) andemerged from that milieux in the first years of my young adulthood(1965-1974),confidence in my literary ability was slow in developing and did not really takeon any solid form and shape until I was 28(1972) and living in Whyalla SouthAustralia as an international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community.Confidence, though, is no guarantee of the ability to connect with a reader orreaders. I am sure some found my emails and letters far too long for their tastesand interests. One advantage of a long letter I found was that I was able toexpress an idea, even mention the Cause in some tangential fashion. In a shorterletter this would not have been possible given the social and cultural climate inwhich I was writing. Occasionally, someone shocked me with their feedback,

especially on the internet and I slowly learned to package my words in small doseson most of the sites on the WWW. Shock is often a useful antidote for some policyone is pursuing or some behaviour one is exhibiting in letter writing or in otherareas of life.

I would like to think that this collection of letters possesses some narrativeforce and thrust and readers may indeed detect some story-line surprising in acollection of letters. My metamorphosis from my first letters in the 1960s tothose I wrote when I was 65 in 2009 and on two old-age pensions is not without itsdrama and that drama can be seen through the letters if they are followedchronologically and if they are appropriately selected.

Another engaging aspect of the collection is its depiction of cataclysmic changein the world during the hald centory from, say, 1960 to 2010. The lettersresolutely ignore most political events--events that are the flesh and bone ofpolitical and social analysis in the wider culture, in media culture--but perhapsprecisely because of this they serve to remind readers of the ordinary lives thatwere led in the midst of extraordinary events. So much of these times wereextraordinary that the senses were dulled to their impact, their surprise, theirevnetfulness. The collection's chronicle of movement from place to place, of theexperience of job, family and Bahai community life as it changed over these fiftyyears will, perhaps, be of interest one day, if not to readers in the world I now


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occupy.

Is it too much to see in this collection something of an author in the twilight ofhis life putting his literary affairs in order through the auspices of hisletters, in the desire to help insure their relevance and readership? Perhaps thisis what I am doing. If all these letters possess any relevance that will bedecided by others than I: by archives departments in Australia and in Haifa, by myexecutors.

Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have no ideawhether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships and in life:one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to our acts, to ourlives--or anyone elses--in terms of whether they will result in justice, harm orbenefit--since their frution, ultimately, is destined for another plane ofexistence. But, still, we do judge and we do evaluate, as I do here in thislengthy analsysis at the Bahai Academic Resources Library Site.

MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS

The outline below of the categories for the collection of my letters began to take

form in the first decade of my retirement from FT employment(1999-2009),especially after the official opening of the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel in 2001.This collection tends to get altered from time to time due to the changing natureof what is still a live body of work. Only the occasional letter is found here atthe Bahai Academics Resource Library or on the internet in various places sincethese letters are either personal, professional or private. I prefer to keep thisbody of writing confidential until at least my passing. At the present time thereare some 50 volumes under ten major Sections delineated below by roman numerals.Section III below contains my contacts with sites on the internet and there aresome 25 volumes of site contacts at: site homepages, forums, discussion boards,postings, replies, inter alia. The headings, the categories, of the letters are asfollows:

I. Personal Correspondence:

1. Volume 1: 1959-19842. Volume 2: 1985-19883. Volume 3: 1989-19944. Volume 4: 1995-19965. Volume 5: 1997-19996. Volume 6: 1999-20017. Volume 7: 2002-20038. Volume 8: 2003-20049. Volume 9: 2004-200510.Volume 10: 2005-200611.Volume 11: 2006-2007

12.Volume 12: 2007-2009

II. Writing to/from Bahai Institutions

1. Bah World Centre2. Universal House of Justice3. International Teaching Centre4. NSA of the Bahais of Australia5. Hands of the Cause6. Continental Board of Counsellors7. BROs, RTCs and Bahai Councils


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8.1 LSAs; 8.2 Auxiliary Board Membersand 8.3 Assistants9. National Committees of the NSA of the Bahais of Australia10. NSA and National Committees of the Bahais of the United States

III. Contacts with Publishers, Magazines and Journals

Vol 3.1 to 3.11Vol 3.12.1 to 3.12.16Vol 3.13 to 3.17

IV. Communications with Canada:

Vol 4.1Vol 4.2Vol 4.3

V. Roger White:1981-1992

Vols. 1 to 4

VI.1 Association of Bahai Studies: Vols. 1-3

VI.2 Individuals

1. Bill Washington2. Judy Hassall3. Gary Olson4. Toni Edmonds5. Graham Hassall

VII. 1. Bah History in WA and the NT

Vol. 1 to Vol.4

-Letters, Essays and Notes

VIII Magazines, Newspapers, Journals, Media

1. Dialogue2. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1-Newspapers3. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1 Radio Stations4. See Media Studies Vol. 2.1 Magazines

IX. Correspondence For Writing Novels/Essays

1. From 1987 to 1991

X Correspondence For Job Hunting

1. 1960 to 20012. 2001 to 2008

XI. On-The-Job Correspondence

1. 1960 to 2005

Some 10,000(circa)letters were written in connection with job applications, jobinquiries and on the job responsibilities: 1960-2008. An uncountable number of


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emails were received and sent in the years 1988-2008 but, as I say above, 99% ofthem were deleted. Virtually none of the communications from the job world werekept, except for a few in two two-ring binders. Very few letters or items ofliterary memorabilia remain from the years 1953 to 1967. Even if ninety-nine-hundredths of the emails I received were sent to oblivion since 1989, a small butsignificant body of this hybrid type of letter was kept in the two decades, 1989-2009. One day all of the introductions I wrote to each of the many volumes of myletters and emails, internet posts and replies and the several general statementsconcerning my letters may be included in a collected letters since half a centuryhas been spent in my Bahai life and in the pioneering process writing letters. Forthis first edition of The Letters of Ron Price: 1959-2009 on BARL the aboveoutline and comment on the overall layout and organization of my letters andemails that I have written and received and thrown away and deleted will suffice.

There are three categories of my letters that one day may be found in the event ofmy demise and in the event that such a search is desired:

1. extant letters or fragments of letters that I have written or received, inpublic repositories or private collections including my own collection, that havebeen examined in the original manuscript or typescript, in photocopy or email;2. published letters written or received for which no extant originals have yet

been located; and3. unlocated letters for which varying types of evidence--photocopies,emails andcomplete or partial typed transcriptions have been located.

The database of information for these three categories of letters, at this stagefar from complete, aims to contain the following fields or information bases foreach written and received item:(a ) year and date, (b) addressee, (c)place and (d)original.

It is hoped that the terms: manuscript, typescript, postcard, photocopy,typedcopy, handwritten script,email or some combination of these terms (for instancetyped copy of handwritten script) will accompany each item. Minimal descriptiveinformationfragment or mutilatedis provided parenthetically where relevant.

The technicalities of presentation when complete are those of convention; namely,(a) intrusions into the text are marked by square brackets; (b) spelling and andpunctuation is to be silently corrected; (c) some mannerisms are to be maintained;(d) dates are to be made uniform and (e) et cetera.

I have provided below some analysis and some illustration, some context forwhatever creativity is to be found by readers when and if this collection is everpublished. Letters are always, it seems to me, exemplary illustrations of awriters creative capacity and the significance of his epistolary skills. I do notclaim that my letters are masterpieces of the letter-writing art. If they disclosea personality that is well and good, but the world has millions of personalitiesnow disclosed for the public eye, stories of individuals overcoming tribulation

and achieving success. Another such story is not required. And I have no intentionnor do I wish to make any claim to my life being a representative of that of anideal Bahai or a Bahai pioneer. This is not an account of an exemplum. Claims torepresentativeness, it seems to me, are at best partial and at worst highlymisleading to those who might glean some context for mentorship. I find there issomething basically unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in evenstronger terms, in the words of Bahaullah, there is something about experiencethat bears only the mere semblance of reality. There is something about it thatis elusive, even vain and empty, like a vapour in the desert.

There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany efforts to


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tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a relationship. There issomething divided, duplicitous, something that has happened but has yet to bedefined and described or, as is usually the case, never described, at least not inwriting, depending of course on the experience of the person and their literaryskills. There are innumerable and indispensable points of reference in a life andyet so many of them take on the feeling of a mirage, as if they are not reallythere, like a dream, particularly as the years lengthen into later adulthood andold age. Some of the disclosure that takes place in a selection of letters canmake the world better off, but this is not always the case and I certainly couldnot guarantee a positive result for my disclosures here. For most people, ofcourse, the exercise, my disclosures, are totally irrelevant. If these lettersdisclose something of the Bahai Faith, some new perspective over these fourepochs, I will feel that this amassing of correspondence has been worthwhile.

These letters of mine are not so much examples of carefully crafted writing asthey are of unstudied informality, spontaneous indiscretions and a certaincultivated civility. I like to think these letters possess a wonderful chameleon-like quality for it is necessary that I reshape myself for each correspondent.Each letter is a performance and an impersonation. These letters contain manyvoices. On the occasions when I send out form letters, at Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha, this diversity and variety is not achieved. For some respondents to my letters

my reshaping is not appreciated or enjoyed, indeed, no response was forthcoming atall to many of my letters. As in the world of interpersonal interaction, of verbalexchange, so in the world of letters: not every communication is meaningful toboth parties and, as in the world of the teacher that I was for years, not everycomment of mine was returned.

The next section of this somewhat long posting here at BARL comes from chapter 3of my memoirs. Not all of chapter 3 is included here, but enough to give a tasteand a critique of the letter-writing process from the point of view of this Bahaiwho began his pioneering life 46 years ago in 1962 and who wrote his first letterto a Japanese Bahai youth in 1959--or so I recall with some doubt as I write thesewords more than 50 years later. It seems to me that those who read these lettersone day, if they ever do, will have difficulty grasping the nature of my

personality inspite of, or perhaps because of, the extensive literary base I haveprovided. The only impeccable writers and the only personalities we feel weunderstand, William Hazlitt noted nearly two centuries ago, are those who neverwrite and people we have only briefly met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis herethat we often feel we understand a personality, but it is always in part. Gettingto know people is a bit of a mystery at the best of times whether they are besideyou on a bus, a train, a kitchen table or a bed. One is always adjusting ones maskfor correspondents and, in the process, one creates a series of self-portraits, amosaic of true and false, real and unreal. The quality and maturity of myrelationship with others is, as William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the bestmeasure of spiritual progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such maturerelationships depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-development.And the measure of ones spirituality depends on much else, too much else to

venture an analysis of in this brief statement. The letter is a reflection of thisinner life but, in the end, it is but a reflection of a spirituality which lies atthe centre of ones heart and soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of Spirituality,Bahai Studies, Vol.11, 1982, p.25.)

I asssume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is therevelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This isnot to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed throughletters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with fragmentary,often ambiguous and decidedly opague material over which they will be unable towield any kind of imperial authority and comprehension. Whatever insights they


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gain in readings, they will be inevitably partial and will have a distincttendency to crumble in a epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull andvulnerable from or within the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of lettersare not the most favorite fare in the popular periodical press, journalisticstudies and at book launches except perghaps in the form of letters to the editor.They exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced off area of privacy, anisland of subjectivity, where even the external world is experienced as an innerworld. This, the sociologist Georg Simmel once said, is the essence of modernity.

Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of action,there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never privy. Oftentimesneither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix, for mystery abounds in ourworlds. The writer, namely myself in this case, turns his letter like a historicalmicroscope with some sensitivity and with some attention to minute causality, butit is a causality he never fully grasps and a sensitivity he only attains topartially. The road these letters describe Im not sure I would ever have entered(either the road of the letters or the road of the analysis) if I had known of itslength when I wrote that first letter fifty years ago.

Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives. That is thename of the game. My choice and my command of language, to whatever degree of

imperfection and perfection I attained, were the fruit of exercise and with thearrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that exercise was able to find muchfuller expression. Some of the facts of my past, my religion and my society arepresented in these letters in a language that is rich in a type of coherence and atype of embedded comment. I like to think that the cumulative effect of thiscomment is to predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation ofreality and the world. But my more skeptical self is more inclined to the viewthat a collection of letters is not likely to change the world view of readers nomatter how open and receptive they may be. The stubborn testimony ofunexceptionable facts, the facts of my life, gradually bring me to the bar ofhistory and the sober discretion that I trust these same facts embody are astatement about my present age and hour. At the bar there is no final verdict onlya series of temporary assessments and at the bar where individuals read these

letters there will be combinations of the non-event, the boring, the occasionalbright spark or low flame, perhaps a burning sensation or two, a littleindigestion, a wishing and a willing that is beyond my pen to even attempt adescriptionor a discretionary comment. But no final judgement.

These letters present a divergent and unfocused, an unconnected and bewilderingmass of material. The collection is just too immense, the expression too forcible,the factual matter too inescapable for my intellect or the readers to close downany questions with definitiveness, decisiveness and precision--with answers.Rather, it seems to me, these letters open questions up and enlarge what is andwas a narrow circle in which nature has confined me. If complete answers are foundthey simply carry the seeds of more questions. As the years went on, too, mythoughts became more complicated and, although my perspective could be said to

remain the same, it was within such a different context that my letters came to bewritten. From the late fifties and early 1960s, to the years as they passed overthe decades, my letters might as well have been written by a different person. Thequestions I dealt with changed from decade to decade, person to person and myinclusion of the responses to my letters provides a thorough contextualization notso much to my influence, an entity which is difficult to measure at best and atworst quite irrelevant to my reasons for including them, but to the lettersthemselves and the backdrop they provide to a period over several epochs ofvarious urgent and interlocking challenges, painstaking and frustrating individualand community work when the Bahai Faith increased by 30 times, from 200 thousandin 1953 to six million in 2008.


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Writing often draws attention to itself. This is especially true of letters whereattention often does not pass through to the subject but gets stuck on thepersonality of the writer. For ours is an age, par excellence, of the celebrity.The awkward and tangled reality of the past, though, is displayed for all to seefrom my perspective in these letters. The surface of my past gazes out uponhistory, from my letters with all their quotidian dryness, everydayness, tediumand boredom. The past seems to elude the net of language as that language getscaught up in minutae, in the tedious and the toilsome. And anything calledcertainty is endlessly deferred, although there are pockets of certainty enough togo on and give us a feeling that the sky will not fall down. At least not in mytime.

I think there is little doubt that these four epochs are the scene for thegreatest and most aweful period in the history of humankind. Gibbon once said thisof Rome in the 2nd century AD. My account here of the immensity and wonder of this

period is an account from a quite personal and limited perspective. It is anaccount, too, which renders my version of a vision and my interpretation of a plotand script that derives from two god-men in the 19th century. My letters arepregnant with delightful observations that are as deep and as shallow as theperson I am and they are pregnant as well with the most trivial images andthoughts as watery and limpid as amniotic fluid. For my letters, like the lettersof most others, contain what is often called telephone talk, talk which nullifiesserious artistic or psychological exchange, talk about lifes simplicities, talkabout lifes conventionalities like the weather and the events of daily life.

Readers may find my letters something like the way that Carlyle found Scottsletters. They are never without interest, he pointed out, yet they are seldom ornever very interesting. Id like to think that my letters might impart something ofmy soul, my joys and anxieties, and something that may engage the sympathies andpleasures of those who happen upon them in their journey. In an age in whichcommunication has become more audible, with animated and electronic emails andsound systems improving in quality decade by decade, it seems that communicationhas also become more, or at least often, ephemeral; with billions of emails bitingthe electronic dust each week, if not each day, I offer this collection of lettersas one mans record of his age.

I should say something about self-deception, since there is in letter-writing an

inherent straying away from what actually happens, however slightly or innocently,a quiet but discernable progression from fact to fiction. Self-deception, lieing,secrecy, forgetfulness, confusion, gaps: they are all part of the story and ourprocessing of the story. Everything we communicate, some analysts argue, is anorientation towards what is secret without ever telling the secret. As HenryMiller puts it: I am I and I have thought unspeakable thoughts and doneunthinkable things. One aim in writing letters is toaim for artistic coherenceand ethical satisfaction as we attempt to integrate, analyse and identify one ofthe countless versions, todays, this moments and hours part of our story and itsinevitable secrets. This is unending work-poetic work-and it is central to self-creation. In other ways the self-deception is accidental, incidental. As Yeats put


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it: I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it must be that I havechanged many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many years andhave consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor old newspaper.

-Source Unknown

Our ultimate aloneness in the universe is a truth which some find frightening.This aloneness is a part of the core experience in writing letters, autobiographyor anything else. It is part of our very raison detre. It may just be that one ofthe best routes to self-forgetfulness, which Abdul-Baha says is at the heart ofself-realization, is through self-understanding on the road travelled by means ofwriting letters among other forms of activity. I have drawn on the following threesources for some of the above.

(1) Henry Miller in Confessions and Autobiography Autobiography: EssaysTheoretical and Critical, editor, James Olney, Princeton, 1980, p.122.

(2) James Olney, Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology ofAutobiography, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, editor, James

Olney, Princeton UP, 1980, p.262.

(3) Quoted in The Stories We are: An Essay on Self-Creation, William LowellRandall, University of Toronto, 1995, p.345.

--17/1/96

It was Charles Darwin's custom to file all his letters received and when hisslender stock of files ("spits" as he called them was exhausted, he would burn the

letters of several years, in order that he might make use of the liberated"spits." This process, carried on for years, destroyed nearly all letters receivedbefore 1862 at the age of 53. After that date he was persuaded to keep the moreinteresting letters, and these are preserved in an accessible form.

For different reasons my letters before 1979, in other words the first 20 years ofmy correspondence, are few in number. The concept of saving letters grew on meslowly over more than two decades.

SERENDIPITOUS LETTER WRITING AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions andcommunities. These are part of the core substance of the letter, although even the

student of the epistolary genre can be guilty of serious omissions and patterneddistortions when he or she writes his or her letter. The introspector andretrospector in letter writing can give us rare access to inner experience fromtheir position of aloof detachment and passionate engagement. Monopolistic accessto my own inner life has found many grooves and at least one or two of thosepatterned distortions away from letter writing and toward religion. I hope thetime has not yet come, as Virginia Woolf said can come, when I may have forgottenfar more of significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the positionHeinrich Boll was in when he wrote that not one title, not one author, not onebook that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.


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The letter is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in applyingscientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of sequences ofstatus-sets, roll-sets and intellectual development. What results is not so much acondensed description than a step toward elucidation.1 I feel as if I have justmade a start in the first two decades of my attempt at an analytical discussion ofthe letter and my letters in particular. After five decades of dipping in and outof letter writing I dont think I was at all conscious of letter writingshermeneutic influence until atleast the late 1980s when the Arc Project had beenofficially announced. If the letter appeared in my life it was accidentally,serendipitously and hardly worth any analysis, but that began to change as thisCause I have now been associated with for more than half a century was finallyemerging from the obscurity in which it had languished for a century and a half.--Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course,Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications, London, 1988.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life.1 It is chronological; thefactual material is ordered, sequential. But, clearly, sharpness of detail,revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of motivation are given withinsight and style much more effectively in my poetry. There is so much poetry now,some 4000 poems spread over at least 2000 pages. This collected and compendious

mass of material, if it is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future,must be shaped, interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view. Thenarrative first edition possesses much but has no life. It is like so many PhDtheses which transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another but lackindividuality and vitality.

Such a biographer, if he or she is ever to exist, must provide the creative, the

fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a referentialdimension. Such an analyst must enact a character, a place, a time in history. Hewill do this through language, through imposing a formal coherency on my material,although inevitably there will be present the incurable illogicalities of life, asRobert Louis Stevenson called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life.He will give the reader a portrait not an inventory. This is what any biographermust do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry. I provide many pictures, manymoods, many sides. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I discoverthings about my life, but I do not invent them. I have done little discovery inwriting this autobiography thusfar.


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As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers, demonstrated:"anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the subject."2 I see mynarrative as the home of history and my poetry as a source of rich anecdote. Itwas for this reason I turned to poetry as a reservoire of autobiography; it seemedto teach, to convey, much more than narrative. Claude Levi-Strauss helps us tounderstand why several poems about one object, or person, provide moresignificance or meaning than a narrative when he writes:

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts.

The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being smaller, the objectas a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us qualitatively simplified.3

One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain of detailthat one does know would sink a ship and would not enlighten anyone. The task ofachieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible, it is irrelevant. But thereare intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is these dimensions that my

poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in writing biography. Some writerssee invention more important than knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element ofinvention, of moving beyond the factual, but my own preference is to useimagination in a framework of factual experience, as far as possible. To read mypoetry should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Bah'experience in what the Bah's see as 'the tenth stage of history' and,especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt. Carmelreceived its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition. There areseveral unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition to the above. Ihave drawn them to the reader's attention from time to time in the introductionsto some of my poems.

From a Bah' perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral appealassociated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized most nineteenthcentury biography. But the moral framework, while retaining a certain simplicity,is expressed in a portait of complexity, refinement, mystery, a slumbering world,my own idle fancies and vain imaginings and the streaming utterance of a newRevelation.


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Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal reasons oftheir own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more, true ofautobiograhers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international pioneer andteaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in Canada-all of this overthirty-six years, I have watched this emerging world religion grow perhaps fifteentimes. I have taught in schools for nearly thirty years and feel a certainfatigue. I must write this poetry for the same reason a foetus must gestate fornine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner solitude and that my life andhistory is itself a beginning, for me, for my religion and for the world. I wantto suck the sweetness out of everything and tell the story.

I sigh a deep-dark melancholy but keep it in as far as I am able. I am lonely andattentive in this sadness. My poetry gives expression to this process and to mydestiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. Forthe most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly inevitabilityof it all, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quitecomplex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely slowly. Mypoetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a fruit that has beenripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After years it now comes out in acontinuous preoccupation as if I have, at last, found some hidden springs. It isas if I have been playing around the edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally

something real, true, is around me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence,a patience, a distance from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record adeep record of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible,something fundamental. This part of it is called autobiography.FOOTNOTES

1 When this essay was written, the 2nd edition of my autobiography was flounderingin such a state that I was just about to give up writing it. An 80 page firstedition was completed five years before this essay was written and it felt highlyunsatisfactory.

2 Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984,

p.60.

3 idem

4 ibid., p.122.

16/3/97-28/9/98

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

The discourse, the impulse, of autobiography and that of ethnography is combined


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in autoethnography. Autoethnography is an alternative to a tendentiously-characterized and conventional autobiography, on the one hand, and to aexoticizing, native-silencing brand of anthropology, on the other. Autoethnographyis simply a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context.As an autobiographical revision of ethnography it may aim at giving a personalaccounting of the location of the self by making the ethnographer the subject-object of observation. It involves the ethnographic presentation of oneself as thesubject which is usually considered the object of the ethnographers interview.The standard model of the personal memoir, the autobiography, supports an liberal-individualist ideology and tends to isolate the author-subject from community.

Works by women and/or members of historically marginal or oppressed groups oftenresist the hegemony of the individualist account and give more weight to thesocial formation or inscription of selfhood and to the ways in which the author-subject negotiates the terms of his or her insertion into the identity-categories

their culture imposes on them. Where the representation of cultures is concerned,critics commend autoethnographys intricate interplay of the introspectivepersonal engagement expected of an autobiography and the self-effacement expectedof ethnographys cultural descriptions. The impulse for self-documentation and thereproduction of images of the self pervade our everyday practice. The commonbusiness of social existence is the occasion for endlessly resourceful andenlightened dramatizations of self. We are each in our own way articulate exegetesof the politics of selfhood.-Ron Price with thanks to James Buzard, On Auto-Ethnographic Authority, The Yale Journal of Criticism,Volume 16, Number 1, Spring2003.

______________________________________________________

unstable selves battle it out.

The above essays contain just some of the ideas that I came across in theliterature on autobiography. I have drawn on just some of the array of writingwhich has appeared in autobiographical literature especially since the decade 1950to 1960. This literature has transformed our understanding of autobiography. --5/5/05

___________________________

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

VOLUME ONE:


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CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS

The very texture of history.....

Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the manypsychologically diverse contexts in which the word self appears in our everydaydiscourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration of this self andthis autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its home in all of thesecontexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought and what endures, afterlife has completed its course, is the soul, it is hardly surprising that there isa curious intangibility,2 an inherently spiritual abstraction, associated withdefining, with expressing, who we are. And it is hardly surprising that this work

of mine, this autobiography, contains a great deal that is better described asthought and not so much that one could describe as action. -Ron Price with thanksto 1Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh, editors, Narrative and Identity: Studiesin Autobiography: Self and Culture, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001; and2Hannah Arendt in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, AdrianaCavarero, Routledge, NY,2000, p.ix.

Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to describewho we are, mens beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are part of their

conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of the world. Boththese beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed again and again in myletters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin quoted by Robert Matuozzi, WhenBad Things Happen to Other People, Philosophy & Literature, Vol.25,No.1, 2001,pp. 173-177.

On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903 thepublishers, Doubleday and Company, have written letters are the strongestindicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of autobiography. We look at

them as a means of knowing the author as a human being, of gaining perspectives onhis life and work and, perhaps, divining the secret foundation of his creativity.I think there is some truth in this remark. There is also, from my own experience,some truth in the sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell inher introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe a writer writes a letterin order to forget it. Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or experienceloses its compulsive force and can be stored away and forgotten. I have storedaway some 5000 letters in over fifty volumes. Since beginning to collect theseletters in 1967(with some retrospective findings and recollections going back to1957) I have come to see them as an autobiographical tool. I leave it to readersto assess just where this autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest,


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where it is useful and where it is irrelevant. This is difficult for me to assess.

If this autobiography works for readers, it will not be because I have filled itwith facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with greatenthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of institutions.Success in this life narrative that has been going down on paper over many a yearwill be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas, the quality of the writingand this narratives connection with an emerging world Faith. If it becomes asuccess,at least in the short terms, at least in the next, say, several decades,as I have indicated before, in all likelihood that success will still be one thatresonates with only a few people. But whether it resonates with many or a few, Ibelieve, as Gilroy and Verhoeven argue, these letters are marked by and sent tothe world. They counter, too, tendencies to flatten out the uniqueness of theindividual in some falsely understood egalitarianism or sense of human equality.The Bahai teachings make clear that equality is a chimera. Our uniqueness asindividuals derives from our constitutive relation with others, from our living incommunity, indeed, a number of factors.

The epistolary form was long associated in the western tradition with the feminineand the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in the first centuryBC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this autobiography my lettersfunction as a crucial form of communication in the teaching and consolidation workof a pioneer. Indeed, one could say that my story, the narratability of my life,my very uniqueness, arises within the context of an interaction process that theletter goes along way to illustrate. The following Latin expression contains sometruth: vox audita perit littera scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the

letter written remains.

The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years.Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more than simpledocuments of a particular time and place. They, or at least some, see the lettersas text that are only partly susceptible to explication or decipherability. Suchdocuments bear a different relation to the world for a future reader than for thewriter at the point when the letter was originally written. In some ways this isonly stating the obvious. The act of reading a collection of published letters is

inevitably shaped by a series of decisions made by both the letter-writersthemselves and the readers. Letters are often exchanged, perhaps for years,usually without either participant considering them as an exercise leading topublication. There are at least two people I wrote to over more than ten years anda sub-collection of these letters would fill a sizeable book but, when they werewritten it was for the imediate purpose at hand not with the view to being read atsome future time. T.S. Eliot puts this process well:

The desire to write a letter, to put down what you dont want anybody else to see


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but the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be destroyed, butperhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable.(T.S. Eliot, English Poets As Letters Writers, From a lecture given in 1933 atYale University) Certainly the extensive collection of my letters sent andreceived to these two individuals might take a future reader into the hearts andminds of three people at a unique, a significant, time in history and shed lighton the period in question in ways that other genres of writing cannot and will notdo. This sub-collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of theappreciation of one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochsunder review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two interlocutors arenot so much possessed of a literary caliber superior to others I wrote to,although in most cases that was true, but the correspondence went on for manyyears, more years than that of others.

Eliot goes on:We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we donot always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we havewritten. There are several components in what we could call this selective andpersonal epistolary machine: the act of writing, the act of reading and the worldof interpretation. To focus on reading is to bring to light the complexity of thecommunication process, to recall that not all of a readers questions are going tobe answered by reading the said letters. Readers may only have partiallyformulated questions in their minds or, perhaps, they may not even understandtheir own questions. Any message, including a letter, encounters a scramblingprocess upon entering the readers zone of associations and responses. I wishreaders well dealing with the inevitabilities of scrambling which they will haveto deal with in my letters. There is a conceptual intersection in each letterbetween reader, writer and world. And it is a busy intersection. And the discourse

that takes place at these intersections possesses a paradoxical entwinement ofminds and words. This is true of snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like theview at a busy intersection, much of what is seen is predictable while at the sametime the specific details are to a large extent unknown or seen so differently byeach spectator.

A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the firstyears of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things Id like to sayabout this overall collection of letters. They were letters written just before

and just after the completion of the Arc Project in 2001. I think, as Emersonwrote, that letters often put things better than verbal communication and provideperspectives that are timely here in this ongoing autobiographical statement. Theletters of James Boswell, to chose for comparison one historical example fromcollections of letters, open a window onto the real man, a man hidden behind hisgreat biography, his biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must besensitive, too, to epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to thesocial presentation of self, concern for appearances, standardization of responsesand what might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in life, there are manyselves which write letters, many social conventions, courtesies, honesties, etcetera. and there are many worlds about which a writer writes.


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A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts mightsingly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be done, eachmust be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion only which itbears to the whole; nor can it be expected, that the stones which form the dome ofa temple, should be squared and polished like the diamond of a ring. Those whohave much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and everyincrease of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, orcombinations of words. When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will rangeafter convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it willshift opinions. If any custom is disused, especially the literary, the words thatexpress that custom often perish with inactivity. As any opinion grows popular, itwill innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice. Since I retiredfrom full time work in 1999 my mind has been unchained but, as yet, my opinionsare not popular. They are, though, growing in the public place at a faster pacethan ever. I leave it to readers to assess the junction, the intersection, betweenmy letters and the pace of change in society on the subjects that occupy both meand that wider milieux. By 1999 my life had become more speculative than active,

more literary, than people centered with its endless listening and talking. Thisshift in my literary and daily avocation is strongly reflected in the quantity andcontent of my letters and coalesced in my first extensive publications on theinternet.

In the hope of giving longevity to that which my own nature repells me, forbidsme, to desire, namely, the fame of my letters and my immortality through them, Ihave devoted this collection of letters, the labour of years, to the honour of myreligion and as a testimony to one of my lifes achievements. There is a glory to

life from its arts and its letters. Whether I shall add anything of my ownwritings to these arts and letters, to English literature, must be left to time.Much of my life has been lost under the pressures of illness, lack of direction, acertain frivolity, jobs that were fill-ins, conversations that seemed to gonowhere, activities that functioned largely to fill in time, the desire to beentertained regularly and daily, inter alia. Much of my days have been trifledaway.

Much time each day has been spent in provision, in functioning, for the tasks of

the day that was passing over me, doing what was in front of my nose. I have notthought my daily labour wasted; I have not thought my employment useless orignoble. If, by my assistance, foreign nations and distant ages might gain accessto the propagators of knowledge and understand the teachers of truth, or if mylabours might afford light to some of the multitude of the repositories oflearning, then my employment will be more worthwhile than any contemporaryachievement. For vision and a sense of the future inspires so much that I do. WhenI have been animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my collection, howeverdefective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of a man that hasendeavoured well. Useful diligence in the microcosm of letter writing may in theend prevail.-Ron Price with thanks to Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary


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From Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, London, 1755, Edited byJack Lynch.

I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of thisautobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003. It was oneof my essays that was, in that process of ten years in the evolution of thisautobiography, simply gathered into an appendix and not integrated into the bodyof that edition. In the third edition I achieved a better integration of material,of my autobiographical resources. My imaginative function became more fertile inthe third edition. As the poet Wallace Stevens writes, referring to imagination: Iam the necessary angel of earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again, I amseeing the world again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, aprolific letter writer, saw his letters as a sort of spontaneous autobiography andhis poems as his spiritual autobiography. I like the distinction. Perhaps, oneday, a selection of letters from my spontaneous autobiography will becomeavailable.

Here, then, is some of that essay.....As the 38th, 39th and 40th years ofpioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to 2002, Iwrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience....

Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of this

letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first letter Ireceived from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St. Helena in 1967.Cliffs wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five. Cliff is still in St.Helena thirty-five years later. He has remarried. He never wrote again. I repliedbut I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed I kept few of my personal lettersuntil about 1982, twenty years into the pioneering venture.

As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters goingback as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began; before this back to

the age of 13 in 1957 as a Bahai youth and junior-youth as the period before 15 isnow called a few letters were written. But I have not kept the letters from theearlier period before 1967, except a rare item of the species. There were manyletters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which were destroyed. Some of thesemay be in private hands but, since I have no fame, no significance in the generalpublic eye, it is unlikely that many, if any, letters are being kept privately bytheir recipients. The most assiduous search will, in all likelihood, not come upwith the discovery of any epistolary manuscripts. I find it interesting and morethan coincidental that virtually the entire corpus of my letters comes from aperiod that began with what the Universal House of Justice in 1967 called thedark heart of the age of transition. Even the letters before 1967 which were not


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kept come from a period that the Guardian described in 1957 as one hovering on thebrink of self-destruction. Such was the widest context for that first letter toHiroshi Kamatu in Japan in 1957.

By those dates, from 1957 to 1967, a mood of cultural crisis: a sense thatsomething had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we couldneither assimilate nor put right, had entered our psyches. One writer called oursociety a post-traumatic culture. Indeed there have been, since the fifties andsixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the crisis, of these days. Itwas in many ways an insensible process without a beginning date, but it was like atempest which blew and blew decade after decade, a tempest that had already begunin the lives of my parents and, arguably, my grandparents.

If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it wouldbe in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of Tasmania, andthen in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in the early years ofthe new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new lease on letter-writinglife in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in going through thiscollection of letters that I wrote north of Capricorn or, indeed, from the fullperiod 1957 to 2002, now in over 50 2-ring binders and arch-lever files. Perhaps afuture day will see me making some minute analysis of the extent and the contentof these letters. Perhaps, should their potential value become more evident to me,I shall take a more serious interest in them. Thusfar I have made only theoccasional annotation to these letters. As the first editor of this collection, I

have given them order and shape; I have set them in context, but I have made noattempt to correct their errors, to improve their expression or comment on theirindividuality: whom I wrote to, why I wrote and under what circumstances.

I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters ofother writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I haveopened a file of introductions to collections of letters obtained from books ofthe letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the genre becauseI think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on letters, mine and

those of other Bahs in the world during these four epochs. The analysis of theletters of other writers also helps me enrich and understand the context of my ownpieces. These letters are like arrows from the same quiver. I send them just ashigh and far as I can. In my journal it is the same. Perhaps these letters andmy journal are simply the product of a peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal Imsure will not be due to my wit, my humour, the adventureousness or the romance ofthis narrative, but rather( if there is to be any appeal at all) to theordinariness of the content and, most importantly and as I have indicated before,their assoication with this new global Cause. Their appeal for me, for me as thewriter, is the sense of surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his nobelprize lecture given in 2001.


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Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that writesis not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self isessentially superficial and, if not superficial, it is at least domestic andpractical and must deal with the minutae of life just to get from one day toanother in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. Im not so sureabout this characterization of the double self, but that sense of surprise I findon every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses an appeal. It helps tokeep me going, keep me writing. The secretion of ones innermost life, written insolitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public, writes Naipaul.What one bestows on private lifein conversation, however refined it may beisthe product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one canonly recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.While Im not sure this is entirely true, it certainly is in part.

Maugham puts this idea a little differently. I had an impression,this is Maughamssumming up of the writer Thomas Hardy, that the real man, to his death unknown andlonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his booksand the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the twopuppets. Somewhere in all of this lies the real writer, the real me. Is this realme to be found in the id, the unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in asocialization process, the roles of a protean man, in feeling good? This complexquestion really requires a book on its own, but I think from a Bahai perspectivethe real me is best found in thought and action guided by the behaviouralprinciples of this Cause to put the case as succinctly as I can.

This is not a collection of letters of a famous person or to famous people, likethe collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the collectionof Jane Austens letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents, Prime Ministersor other prominent members of the community. My collection has no curiosity valuelike the letters to Santa Claus or to lovers or to mothers or from children,suicide victims or entertainers to an assortment of people. Whatever significancethis collection has is tied-up with the emergence of a new world Order and a newreligion and whatever future that religion may have. These letters bear the tracesof contemporary historical practices, literary styles and tastes and they are

surrounded by what could be called the envelope of contingency. In this sense theyare communications to and with the world, with society, however personal andprivate they may appear to the casual observer. There are few communications withfamous people either in the Bahai world or out. Outstanding thinkers, artists,political figures, scientists or significant Bahais on the elected or appointedside of the Cause will not be found here. The pivotal figures of these epochs arevirtually absent.


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That is not to say that fascinating personalities are not present, thatindividuals with great charm are not found among the pages, that devotion andfaith, patience and understanding are not here. There is a storehouse of humanity,a kalaidescope of personalities, here that I met on my journey. There was acertain excitement which I found pleasant but transitory and, as I look back overit, not something I would want to repeat or make permanent. There is somethingtumultuous about existence and these letters reflect that quality. This tumultuousquality is due to many causes that are not my purpose to describe here. Even themost intimate of relationships contains a trace of strangeness and, inevitably,this is reflected in letters.

These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolarycollection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, a national andan international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation whenI got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteen-volume series on globaldiasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of Studies ofMigration, will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Bah diaspora when

they are completed. The former is or will be made up of original works, while thelatter is a collection of previously published articles on selected themes.International migration and diasporas have come to constitute distinctive fieldsof inquiry and there is considerable overlap between them.

The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially subsumesdiaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration. Constantinteraction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign states and withvarious homelands is one of the defining features of this international migration.

After nearly seven decades of international pioneering as part of an internationalteaching Plan, this interaction and these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways,to have just been initiated and only briefly been given any academic study. Themajor events of this pioneering venture, the various processes concerning itsgrowth and development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Bahs fromNorth America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of peopleat this stage of that groups history. Indeed, at this early stage, however massivethe exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a massive one,the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as yet; indeed, Iwould think for most people including the pioneers themselves there would be veryfew collections of letters extant.

What are termed Bah studies or international Bah pioneering studies will oneday, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the great Bahinternational diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(1937-2004), a full two-thirdsof the first century of the Formative Age. So I am inclined to think, anyway.These letters are part of what is,in fact,a grand narrative.


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Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the NorthernTerritory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resourcematerial to help me write the Bah history of that region. I have now given themto the Regional Bah Council for the Northern Territory. Much more collecting ofletters written by Bahs in the NT could be done by history writers andarchivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I hope some day such anexercise will be accomplished. In the disintegration of society that is part ofthe essential backdrop to these letters and the contrasting integration, thegeneration that took part in the pioneering venture of the years 1962 to 1987,marks the first years of the tenth and final stage of history. It is a stagecoextensive with a crucial stage in the institutionalization of the charismaticForce, the routinization of that charisma to use Webers term, in the UniversalHouse of Justice.

If these letters appear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of the

day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the newspapers andthe images and sounds from the electronic media; if they refrain year after yearfrom any association by word or deed with the political pursuits of the variousnations of the world, with the policies of their governments and the schemes andprogrammes of parties and factions, it is because this is the advice, theposition, taken by the leaders of my Faith following principles and practices laiddown by the Founders and leaders of this Faith beginning in the 1840s. I, too,following these considered views, have tried to further the aims of what is to mea beloved Cause and to steer a course amid the snares and pitfalls of a troubledage by steering clear of partisan-political subjects. Many writers do the same.They steer clear of politics and go in for sex, religion, humour, theology, interalia, in their writing. They belong to no lit crit school, have no followers andsimply cannot be easily labelled politically.

What does occupy the Bah often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I havefrequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas Henry Huxley, thenineteenth century biologist and educator, I find encouraging. He opened hisautobiography with a quotation from a letter from a Bishop Butler, a bishop of theepiscopal seat of Aukland, to the Duchess of Somerset. The bishop wrote: And whenI consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feelthe burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in anotherview, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may

appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do.As archaic, as anachronistic, as the style of the good bishops words may be, thepoint for me is important, namely, that Huxley saw his autobiography, even thehumble letter, as something put on him to do, by the interpositions of a watchfulProvidence, the eye of a necessary Fate or the simple needs of circumstance,however trifling it appeared to be.


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I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden Music.White says that the highest service a Bah can often render is to simply do thething under his nose that needed doing. For me, writing letters was often thisthing. And so it was, that over time, as the years went on, what was once seen asa trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle significance, perhaps even thesense of letters being a small example of what the Universal House of Justicecalled nobler, ampler manifestations of human achievement in their discussion ofthe subject of freedom of thought. If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, agood mechanic, a good painter, indeed, if I did not operate successfully in somany areas of life, as indeed most of us can say about so many domains ofactivity, I could at least write a letter and do it well, at least such was mypersonal view. Perhaps, like one of the greatest letter writers of all time,Voltaire, I would do most of my best and significant work in the years ahead. Hedid his best writing from the age of 64 to 84.

Ive always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this particularcapacity to write letters. Beware of writing to me, he once said, I always

answer. He referred to his letter writing habit as an inherited weakness, partof his great boringness. It was partly due, he said, to never going out ortelephoning. Like Thoreau my life showed a devotion to principle,but by the timeI was sixty I was only too conscious of just how far my life had been from thepractical application of that principle. I have little doubt that were many moreindividuals, more sincere and more genuine in their devotion to that sameprinciple or principles, than I have or would be. As Clausewitz notes in hisseries of essays On War to be faithful in action to the principles laid down forourselves this is our entire difficulty.

The many things to which the Duchesss correspondent here refers are the repairsand improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if Huxley, the firstgreat apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-educated man, one ofEnglands founders of primary schools for all, this father of eight children, thiscoiner of the term agnostic, saw himself as an instrument of the deity. But, likethe good Bishop Butler, Im sure he felt he had things of great importance to doand that they had been put upon him. Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrotethat it was not until the nineteenth century that self-consciousness had developedso far that it was the habit of men to describe their minds when they wrote theirletters and their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I amconscious, as Woolf puts it plainly, of the worlds notorious indifference. And itmay be many years, if ever, before this collection of letters has any interest to

even a coterie of people.

Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise;occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job orcommunity responsibility. Letters were the very texture wrote Henry James ofEmersons history. There is certainly a texture here that is not present in theother genres of my wide-ranging autobiography. Some letter-writers are janus-faced


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and some, like Truman Capote, the author of Capotes letters in Too Brief a Treat:The Letters of Truman Capote are three-faced. There was the face for gay friends,the face for non-gay friends, and the face for the friends he made in Kansas whilewriting In Cold Blood. I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing persona:onefor Bahais of a conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one forthose who are Bahai in name only, one for youthful types, one for old people andone for...and on goes the list, the persona. Letter writing partly overcomes,together with my writing in other genres, the ancient enmity between life and thegreat work. And it was apparent that, if I was to achieve any great work, itwould be in bits and pieces spread out over many years, many decades. Like thegreat work of inner life and private character, achievements in my life seem tohave been small steps backward and forward.

The Letters of Ron Price: 1960-2010

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