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LEGACY
All my adult life I have lived with a sense of urgency, a sense of the crisis facing humanity, the anarchous nature of society since the Great War of 1914 and since WW2---the two wars that my father and grandfather lived through. This anarchy has been increasingly characterizing western and global society in the last half of the twentieth century and now into this third millennium. Writing poetry during my early, middle and late adulthood, in the half century from 1965 to 2010, has helped me articulate a response to this tempest, this gloom and doom, this war and bloodshed.
Back in 1962 about the time of the Cuban missile crisis when society came about as close to nuclear war as it has done thusfar, just after I started travelling and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community, I began to ‘run’, psychologically. Perhaps it was because I was a child of the cold war with the threat of the A-bomb always hanging over my head.
Perhaps I was just temperamentally wired, configured, constituted, to run. My dad always said so as he watched me bolt-down my food yet again. In the late 1960s I came across Paul Ehrlich, American biologist and educator, and then in the following decades David Suzuki. Their writings and talks reinforced my sense of urgency, what had become a sort of sixth sense fertilized by my study of the Baha’i teachings. It would also seem, in retrospect as I now gaze back over seven decades of living, my body- chemistry was a crucial factor in all of this seriousness, pressure and sense of criticality.
I’ve just finished reading, or more accurately browsing through, Vietnam We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers.1 I have felt like a war-veteran for years: not in the sense that I’ve seen it on TV or that I’ve been there as one of the troops, but in a wider sense of fighting a far different war on the home front and overseas. All the battles of life are ultimately within the individual. More than 50 years of various battles in my personal and professional life as well as pioneering the Baha’i teachings has frankly warn-me-down in the sense that Roger White describes it in his poem Lines from a Battlefield:2
......I tire of this old-born war.
..........
I am alienated from angels and celestial concerns,
..........
Locked in a grief so ancient as to have no name,
in this dimming light,
..........
Ah well, not every day can witness an anabasis*
and I, a sorry soldier, camp in ruins,
speak from weariness of battle far prolonged.
* a large scale military advance.
Still it is joy that is also experienced and remembered; happiness and a vision of the future must be at the centre of one’s life and inspire that life, if one is to resume the battle on a daily basis---at least for me. More of this essential juice, this joie de vivre, has been present in the early years of this 3rd millennium as I moved into late adulthood---the years after 60 as some human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan before old age sets in at 80!
Last night I heard Suzuki, now 74, give his “Legacy” lecture at the Perth Convention Centre.3 This 90 minute talk provided me with a much more detailed ecological, environmental, biological, and generally scientific basis for the vision of the future I have had for more than half a century. There is, again at least for me, an inevitable and necessary institutional political and religious unification of the planet in the decades and centuries ahead. It’s utopia or oblivion as Buckminster Fuller put it in 1969 in his book by the same name. He had the very first science programme on BBC2 which was broadcast in April 1964.4 –Ron Price with thanks to 1 Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Praeger Pub., Westport, Conn., 1992); 2Roger White, Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, 1979, pp.111-112; 3David Suzuki, Big Ideas, ABC24, 22 November 2010; and 4 Buckminster Fuller, Wikipedia, 24/11/’10
Ron Price
22 November 2010
All my adult life I have lived with a sense of urgency, a sense of the crisis facing humanity, the anarchous nature of society since the Great War of 1914 and since WW2---the two wars that my father and grandfather lived through. This anarchy has been increasingly characterizing western and global society in the last half of the twentieth century and now into this third millennium. Writing poetry during my early, middle and late adulthood, in the half century from 1965 to 2010, has helped me articulate a response to this tempest, this gloom and doom, this war and bloodshed.
Back in 1962 about the time of the Cuban missile crisis when society came about as close to nuclear war as it has done thusfar, just after I started travelling and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community, I began to ‘run’, psychologically. Perhaps it was because I was a child of the cold war with the threat of the A-bomb always hanging over my head.
Perhaps I was just temperamentally wired, configured, constituted, to run. My dad always said so as he watched me bolt-down my food yet again. In the late 1960s I came across Paul Ehrlich, American biologist and educator, and then in the following decades David Suzuki. Their writings and talks reinforced my sense of urgency, what had become a sort of sixth sense fertilized by my study of the Baha’i teachings. It would also seem, in retrospect as I now gaze back over seven decades of living, my body- chemistry was a crucial factor in all of this seriousness, pressure and sense of criticality.
I’ve just finished reading, or more accurately browsing through, Vietnam We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers.1 I have felt like a war-veteran for years: not in the sense that I’ve seen it on TV or that I’ve been there as one of the troops, but in a wider sense of fighting a far different war on the home front and overseas. All the battles of life are ultimately within the individual. More than 50 years of various battles in my personal and professional life as well as pioneering the Baha’i teachings has frankly warn-me-down in the sense that Roger White describes it in his poem Lines from a Battlefield:2
......I tire of this old-born war.
..........
I am alienated from angels and celestial concerns,
..........
Locked in a grief so ancient as to have no name,
in this dimming light,
..........
Ah well, not every day can witness an anabasis*
and I, a sorry soldier, camp in ruins,
speak from weariness of battle far prolonged.
* a large scale military advance.
Still it is joy that is also experienced and remembered; happiness and a vision of the future must be at the centre of one’s life and inspire that life, if one is to resume the battle on a daily basis---at least for me. More of this essential juice, this joie de vivre, has been present in the early years of this 3rd millennium as I moved into late adulthood---the years after 60 as some human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan before old age sets in at 80!
Last night I heard Suzuki, now 74, give his “Legacy” lecture at the Perth Convention Centre.3 This 90 minute talk provided me with a much more detailed ecological, environmental, biological, and generally scientific basis for the vision of the future I have had for more than half a century. There is, again at least for me, an inevitable and necessary institutional political and religious unification of the planet in the decades and centuries ahead. It’s utopia or oblivion as Buckminster Fuller put it in 1969 in his book by the same name. He had the very first science programme on BBC2 which was broadcast in April 1964.4 –Ron Price with thanks to 1 Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Praeger Pub., Westport, Conn., 1992); 2Roger White, Another Song Another Season, George Ronald, 1979, pp.111-112; 3David Suzuki, Big Ideas, ABC24, 22 November 2010; and 4 Buckminster Fuller, Wikipedia, 24/11/’10
Ron Price
22 November 2010
