Borges: Some ideas For My Memoirs

[RonPrice]

"A book is not an isolated being," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, "it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships." And so is this the case here and the axis this chapter of my memoirs opens with goes back to 1956. In 1956 in September I entered grade seven. I was twelve years old. In 1959, in October, at the age of fifteen I joined the Baha'i Faith. These three years were busy ones playing baseball in the spring and summer, hockey in the winter and football in the autumn. Between games I managed to fit in the last two years of primary school and the first year of high school. At the start of the winter season, in November of 1957, the Guardian died. It was an event, then, on the edges of my life. I recall, vaguely now, a sense of sadness and loss in the small Baha'i community of Burlington. Canada only had a few hundred Baha'is at the time. Shoghi Effendi died in the sixtieth year of the Canadian Baha'i experience and in his own sixtieth year of life. He was as old when he died as I am as I write these words. By the same year, 1957, at least according to no less an authority than Rolling Stone, the "rock 'n' roll era had begun" or, as some received wisdom might have it, the first wave of rock 'n' roll ended.
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Frances Bacon makes an interesting observation in his Essays, published in the 1590s at the same time Shakespeare was writing his Sonnets. Bacon says, writing about his friends, that it is his hope that they will "draw a veil" over the "frequently unsavoury career" which he had struggled through. My mother writing, or perhaps it was talking, about my father a decade or so after his passing, expressed her appreciation for him. Was this love? I think it was; in the long run, now that they have both passed away and for many years, I see them as loving people, loving each other and loving me. Like the Australian playright David Williamson, I worried about my mother and, in good times, felt warm toward my father. And now, thirty-five years after his passing, I understand him, at least more than I did in 1965 when he died. It's difficult, perhaps impossible, for sons to write about their fathers without revealing a good deal of themselves. Even though my life is unlike my father's in so many ways, so full of academic, of bookish, life, the power of his portrait gives to me a very rich and simple link. If Jorge Louis Borges is right when he says that "to an extent, the death of the father is a natural prerequisite to attainment of Selfhood," that natural prerequisite began to come into play in 1965.-Ron Price

[RonPrice]

After two years it seemed like a good idea to give this first post some company and develop the thread and the concept of memoirs a little. -Ron in Tasmania
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POETRY AND SCIENCE

The language of both science and poetry is a language under stress. Words are being made by their respective authors to describe things that often seem indescribable in words: equations, chemical and physical structures in the case of science, and an inner life of thoughts and emotions, among other things in the case of poetry. Words don’t and cannot mean all that they stand for. Yet words are arguably the best means people have to describe experience. By being a natural language under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter and, more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul. This is why one can say that science is poetic. One thing is certainly not true: that scientists have some greater insight into the workings of nature than poets, or vice versa. Some people feel that, deep down, scientists have some inner knowledge that is barred to others. The expertise of a scientist is an expertise acquired by learning and, unless others acquire the required learning, that particular piece of the universe of knowledge is, indeed, barred to those others.

Poetry soars in the world of science.1 It soars all around the tangible, in deep dark, through a world the scientist reveals and makes his own. Poetry in the hands of a lover of life and words, a person with great knowledge and wisdom, can soar in the worlds of intellect and understanding the two most luminous lights in the world of creation.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Roald Hoffman, “Science, Language and Poetry,” The Pantaneto Forum, Issue 6, April 2002; and 2Abdul-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.

What can I say of today?
Slept late and also had a
sleep after lunch: hardly
productive one could say.
But how can one measure
the success of a single day?
Got a handle on Homer more
than I’ve ever had: The Iliad
and The Odyssey as well as
Simone Weil.1 She was a delight,
especially her essay on The Iliad
and its closing words about the idea
of rediscovering: “the epic genius…
no refuge from fate…learning not to
hate the enemy….…how soon will this
happen?” she asks.2 It has happened; it
has already happened, Simone: it was born
in the Siyah-Chal in Tehran and its light is
spreading around the world to every corner.

1 Simone Weil(1909-1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.
2 Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” Chicago Review, 18.2, 1965.

Ron Price
12 September 2010

[Viva June]

Thank you, Ron, for demonstrating that the problem recently discussed here is in fact a real issue. Your service is greatly appreciated.

[RonPrice]

belated thanks for your comment, Viva June Mystic.-Ron in Australia

[RonPrice]

What Borges wrote about a book, namely, that it "is not an isolated being, but a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," is also true about a poem. It is certainly true of this poem I wrote while sitting under a tree the other day.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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I HARDLY KNEW HIM

He1 died 53 years ago this week in London England when I was only thirteen. I hardly knew him; he was just a name on the immense periphery that was my young, my early, years of adolescence. I had eight more months remaining of primary school life in Ontario; I had one more summer left of playing midget baseball, mostly on the mound, in the Burlington league and I had at least one more year of my young love with Susan Gregory, little did she know. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 November 2010.

I had no idea what this new Faith
was all about with its birds that
dropped dead, they told me then,
as they flew over that pestilential
city of Akka. Someone told me
they named their cat after him &
still others said that such a thing
was far too irreverent to mention.
I saw a strange crowd, on average,
once every nineteen days in our so
little house or someone’s little house.

Everyone I knew back then had little
houses in this little town by a very big
lake next to two big cities at the centre
of the Golden Horseshoe as it known
in the 2nd biggest country in the world.2
Little did I know that this man who had
died, as winter was just entering Canada’s
landscape, was solid gold and with fire his
gold had been tested, so very very little did
I know him--or this new Faith--back then!3

1 Shoghi Effendi, the leader of the Baha’i international community from 1921 to 1957.

2 Toronto and Hamilton were the two big cities. The Golden Horseshoe is a densely populated region centred around the greater Toronto area at the western end of Lake Ontario in Southern Ontario, Canada, with outer boundaries stretching south to Lake Erie and north to Georgian Bay. Most of this Golden Horseshoe is also part of the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. With a population of 6.5 million people, it makes up slightly over 20% of the population of Canada and contains approximately 53% of Ontario's population. Canada is the 2nd largest country in the world. Russia is the largest.

3 This prose-poem was written on a fresh and sunny Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 p.m. while sitting on a park bench under a large elm tree outside the Launceston General Hospital’s maternity wing. My wife was getting X-rays for her neck at the time due to the whip-lash she had received from a car-accident on the previous day. A slight wind was blowing the few white clouds in the sky with summer three weeks and three days away in Australasia.

Ron Price
6 November 2010