http://www.sffworld.com/forums/blog.php?7217-RonPrice en Wed, 22 May 2013 15:22:39 GMT vBulletin 25 http://www.sffworld.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.sffworld.com/forums/blog.php?7217-RonPrice http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?6034-Vocation-and-avocation Thu, 27 Sep 2012 23:57:00 GMT VOCATION AND AVOCATION Part 1: One of the many definitions of happiness is having an aim in life. Having an aim in life can be expressed in many ways, one of which is to have both a vocation and an avocation. An avocation is sometimes defined as a diversion or a hobby. A vocation is sometimes... VOCATION AND AVOCATION

Part 1:

One of the many definitions of happiness is having an aim in life. Having an aim in life can be expressed in many ways, one of which is to have both a vocation and an avocation. An avocation is sometimes defined as a diversion or a hobby. A vocation is sometimes referred to as a calling. Both words can be applied to one’s work or profession. Until I was 23 I did not have a profession, nor did I have a sense of a calling. By my late teens such a sense was a slowly evolving one---from about the age of 18 in 1962 as accurately as I can now recall in retrospect some 50 years later.

After I retired from my work or profession as a teacher-tutor, adult-educator-lecturer in 1999, I reinvented myself. My calling was still expressed, but in a different way. My work or profession, my calling or what might be said to be the central meaning and driving force in my life became, by degrees: a writer and author, a poet and publisher, a researcher and editor, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar and my own research-and-personal office assistant. By 2009, at the age of 65, as I began a life on two old-age pensions, I was fully ensconced in these new roles for more than half my waking hours.

I often felt, since the age of 23, that my work, the employment for which I was paid, was a calling. As a member of the Baha’i Faith, the religion I joined at the age of 15 in 1959; and as a teacher who received his formal qualifications at the age of 23 in 1967, I practiced the art of teaching and I saw myself as a Baha’i teacher. I performed this role of Baha’i teacher, this vocation, this calling, both in educational institutions and in a host of other places: homes and halls and an infinite number of other venues and places both public and private.

After 1999 I gradually came to see my calling in the roles listed above for which, and into which, I gradually reinvented myself. I still saw myself as a Baha’i teacher, but I performed that role by means of my writing, not by the exercise of the role of teacher in classrooms and lecture-halls. This notion of a calling, a vocation, was felt to perhaps an even greater extent as the evening of my life lengthened and the age of 70 approached in 2014.

Part 2:

I have done many things in life, had many activities that were diversions, interests, amusements, entertainments, and pleasures that engaged my mind, my heart and my body. As a child and adolescent from birth to the age of 20, 1944 to 1965, organized sport and many an informal game, just having fun, as well as indulging myself in life’s pleasures, and in its myriad ways and means---these were my major diversions and distractions, occupations and recreations.

My work, an employment for which I was not paid, was as a student. The sense of a calling was not present in those years of pre-primary, primary and secondary education, or in any of those part-time jobs which occupied me while I was a student and which, for the most part, filled the summer vacation period or weekends.

As an adult from the age of 21 to 68, 1965 to 2012, my diversions, the inclinations that occupied my time, have also been many. They have included: having fun and enjoying my leisure-time, playing various sports and going to fitness centres, being engaged in the pleasures and responsibilities of family and social life, of volunteer activity in many organizations and many tasks such as raising funds for charities and service clubs like the Red Cross and the Lions Club. I also took part in many celebrations, commemorations and organized activities in the Baha’i community and in other volunteer organizations.

There were a multitude of tasks and pleasures associated with my places of employment. Watching TV and listening to music on hi-fis and on the radio, daily walks and running, were also among this list of diversions, a list which seems endless as I look back over nearly 70 years of living. Many of these activities, these diversions, contributed either directly or indirectly to my sense of a calling.

Part 3:

Each person who feels they have a calling in life must speak for themselves to define their calling as accurately as they can. I do that here. The calling to which I refer has been, and is, as a member of a global community inspired by the teachings enunciated by Baha’u’llah, that community’s Founder. That global community has also been inspired by ‘Abdul-Baha and Shoghi Effendi, the Founder’s successors, and the Universal House of Justice, the current trustee of the global undertaking initiated by Baha’u’llah in the last four decades of the 19th century.

Continuing to speak here from my personal experience, I must emphasize that this calling is centred on a vision—dim and partial but true to reality as I have come to see and believe it—of God revealing Himself in action to souls that sincerely seek Him. This vision has been centred for more than half a century on the social force that is the Baha’i Faith with its special contribution to make to humankind. The Baha’i Cause has a centre of authority in its own Prophet, its own laws, and its voluminous sacred scriptures.

As I gaze at God’s ‘inconceivably mighty works,’(1) I have come to understand this vision through the eyes of the many roles I have had in life, roles associated with my calling, my vocation. I have had many vocations within this calling; they are each narrow and feeble but, together, they have made and are making a distinctive contribution to my piecemeal vision of reality in Life-Time-Space-and-Spirit and their several dimensions in the world of existence.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Goethe, Faust, I, p. 249, and 2 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume 10, OUP, 1963(1954), pp.1-2.

Time’s ever rolling stream1
has been in full swing all my
life and an undying fire of a
curiosity was slowly kindled
by so many books and ideas,
sources and influences: the
intimate companionship of
a mother opened a world, a
plunge, of receptivity & that
irresistibly beckoning curiosity
which urged me to press forward
with time’s hurrying chariot luring
on my intellectual eagerness and
a slowly acquired poetic sensibility.

Now, I have fashioned my poem,
God’s poem, from the things of
this earthly life giving forms and
permanence to the ephemeral,
however imprecise and allusive
with a fitful tracing of a portal
allowing me a fleeting glimpse
of an eternal country of reality.2

1 Isaac Watts quoted in Toynbee, op. cit., p. 3.
2 John Hatcher, The Arc of Ascent, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.25.

Ron Price
27 September 2012
(final draft) ]]> RonPrice http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?6034-Vocation-and-avocation http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?2037-Essay-on-Autobiography Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:35:00 GMT LATEST THOUGHTS ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY I have written several essays exploring the nature of autobiography. These essays introduce the existing five volumes of my Journal or Diary. Other essays explore the nature of journals, diaries and letters as genres that play different roles in my autobiography.... LATEST THOUGHTS ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I have written several essays exploring the nature of autobiography. These essays introduce the existing five volumes of my Journal or Diary. Other essays explore the nature of journals, diaries and letters as genres that play different roles in my autobiography.
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There are endless ways of telling one’s story. For this reason poets and writers like Roger White, one poet whom I knew personally, and Bernard Shaw, one writer whose letter-writing capacity impressed me, may be wrong to think that the passive nature of their lives disqualifies them from even attempting to write their autobiography. Roger used to say that he did not think it was possible for a biographer to make anything at all interesting out of his life. I think time will prove him wrong. He, like Shaw, thought his life was in his writing, or as he once put it, quoting Rabindranath Tagore: “the poem not the poet.”

If one does write autobiography, as I do, one can not tell one’s whole story no matter how one tells it. While one tells one’s story, as the first essayist Michel Montaigne said, one’s story makes oneself and there is so much of tedium, chowder and trivia in life which one simply has to edit out, out of pure necessity and out of sheer kindness to one’s readers. If an autobiographer or memoirist put it all in he’d have a mountain of detritus, literary garbage, that even the most assiduous reader could not plough through. The autobiographer takes form as he writes and it is fascinating to watch. That’s how I have come to find the process after more than 25 years of written efforts in the direction of the examination of my life. It feels to me a little like sculpting or painting must feel like to the artists in these fields. There is a certain magic of writing autobiography.

As William Spengemann emphasizes, autobiography is synonymous with symbolic action. Writing is symbolic action. The implications of this idea revolutionizes the experience of writing autobiography. One sees the whole exercise in metaphorical terms. While not possessing the freedom of the novelist or the facticity of the writer of history, the autobiographer does enjoy enough freedom and enough truth to give him the best of both worlds. “Autobiographers”, Brian Finney notes in his introductory words to The Inner I:British Literary Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1985, p.21), “appear to have as many different conceptions of what constitutes the truth about themselves as readers have different expectations of them.”

If parts of our nature are unknowable, if our degree of confessionalism is in our own hands, if others see us quite differently than we see ourselves, there is going to be only a certain aspect of the truth and only a certain degree of it that opens up for the autobiographer. Even if autobiographies are lies, as Shaw said; if they are not to be trusted unless they reveal something disgraceful, as Orwell hypothesized; if they reveal one’s mendacity as Freud emphasized; if they focus on one’s personal myths as Jung would have put it--they at least pursue the human, the personal, story from within. Even if autobiography is a caricature of sorts, it cannot deny the tyrannical power of basic facts, however interpretive or subjective. There is an inevitable and, to some extent, naive trusting in memory even if memory is a mine-field which, if one steps in the wrong place, can make a mess of your familiar body-parts.

There is both historical veracity and artistic creativity, then, in autobiography. The self-portraiture, the process of writing, transmutes one’s life into a verbal artifact. It is difficult to reveal one’s private self to the world; some aspects of that self are better left unrevealed and an ambivalence regarding the revelation of some of that inner life is, it would seem to me, unavoidable. Evasion, euphuistic language and diversionary tactics are all part of a process of saying what one wants to say and not saying it all.

George Orwell talks about a certain amount of exaggeration in the process of selection and narration and a type of meaning that emerges by the way one retrospectively chooses to order events. In the process of his own analysis Orwell attempts to come to grips with his buried and not-so-buried motives for writing his autobiography. Subjective self-discovery and the capacity for objective reportage are related; factuality and self-awareness seem to walk hand-in-hand. The reader, too, can often correct the unperceived distortions of the writer when the autobiography embraces fully this subjective element. For the reader and writer become more intimate through this style, this tone, of writing.

Memory, as I imply above, is notoriously unreliable. It is also a primary source behind the great artist, as the French-Canadian novelist Andre Marois, once put it. Some see memory as a pandering to the ego; some point out that being told by others what happened is not the same as one’s own account: so that all one really has is memory. “There have been episodes in my life” says A.E. Coppard “which not even the prospect of an eternity in hellfire would induce me to reveal. But even then it is very difficult for the writer to hide his true nature. I see all of my own effort as quite a transparent, honest exercise, an exercise which is conscious of a good degree of probing, conscious of style, language and form. I am conscious that my own life has nothing of the great adventures and incredible stories that are at the heart of many autobiographies. Hopefully it has an interesting yarn at its center and material that will be useful to the Baha’i community as it unfolds its contribution to the globe in the decades ahead. I hope, in aiming to achieve something useful, that I have not poured out a pile of dirty laundry, that I have at least kept the pile tactfully small.

Vanity is as common as air and I trust this ubiquitous folly is at least kept to a minimum in the process of all my navel-gazing. The desire to give the reader pleasure and contribute something original and probing lies in the matrix of my motivations to write. Moliere(1622-1673), the French playwright and actor who is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature, said that what he tried to do was correct men by amusing them. I would like to be able to achieve this, but I am not conscious of much success. I do not possess that wit and charm of some modern essayists like Clive James and Joseph Epstein. Perhaps I will get better at producing that particular charm and style of writing, a style that would make for a more comic—and therefore pleasing-autobiography.

“Reading books,” as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once emphasized, “is not the same as the appropriation of their contents.” The extent to which memory and understanding combine is the extent to which one gains the benefit of a lifetime of reading. Most of us can remember only so much. As Schopenhauer also emphasized: “the limits of one’s own field of vision are, for the most part, the limits of our world,” Vision, like understanding and memory, has for each of us its limits. And finally, to draw on another aphorism of this pessimistic philosopher: “Happiness for most people, consists in the frequent repetition of pleasure.” While I find pleasure makes for a part of happiness, happiness is much more.

At this stage of my life, the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) writing an autobiography seemed to be something I could do, something I would enjoy doing from among the options I have available to me in the evening of my life, something for which there was a place, a niche, in the burgeoning Baha’i literature of this third millennium. I felt, too, that there would probably be a place in the literary landscape of the expanding Bahá'í community in the decades to come-when and if, of course, this work ever got published.

I trust, too, that my writing is not characterized by that romantic flavor that Frank Harris writes with in his My Life and Loves published in England in the 1920s in all its 1100 odd pages. There is romance in my life: a sexual aesthetic, a sensitivity to the beauty of the feminine, of nature and of the intellect; but I trust that it is not removed from the real world, that it is simply part of my experience and not over-emphasized in my narrative, just a part of the intentional and unintentional revelations that add complexity and fascination to the text. The theatrical, the dramaturgical, is present in my work, but hopefully not unduly so. The mock-heroic, the lofty sentiments, the literary and thematic exaggerations and postures I hope are not overly done, stretched too far with too much religiosity as George Moore tended to do in his Hail and Farewell(1911).

“The truth is”, J.D. Bereford, an English writer(1873-1947) remembered for his sci-fi and short stories, tells us that “my single pleasure is in the continual retelling of the story of my own intellectual and spiritual life.” Beresford’s creative energy goes into interpretations of what is going on and that is the case with me as far as I am able. Frankly, I do not have that singleness of pleasure that Bereford seems to get. This autobiography has occupied a good deal of my time since the mid-1980s, but it is only one part of a multifaceted life. It is clearly not ‘my single pleasure,’ as it was for Beresford. ]]> RonPrice http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?2037-Essay-on-Autobiography http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?2036-Description-1-of-My-Blog-at-sffworld-com Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:32:50 GMT My literary activity on the world-wide-web is a personal and quite industrious enterprize. When I can find the time, I am engaged in creating across this global internet a tapestry or a jig-saw puzzle of poetry and prose. At this site, readers will find one of my many internet blogs. Site... My literary activity on the world-wide-web is a personal and quite industrious enterprize. When I can find the time, I am engaged in creating across this global internet a tapestry or a jig-saw puzzle of poetry and prose. At this site, readers will find one of my many internet blogs. Site administrators and moderators have different ways in which they allow writers like myself to place their series of posts. Often, at least at some sites, a writer or author, an editor or publisher, a journalist or independent scholar---roles which I have taken on in the evening of my life---engages with others and the responses to his or her posts by others are included, responses that these site organizers have decided are worthy of being included among the threads of discourse. There is no mechanism for others to reply directly on my website, at least not yet, but should anyone want to do so, they can reply to what I have written on my website within the context of literally 1000s of internet sites.

My series of posts at any one site, posts in addition to my website, are just one of the many parts of my internet tapestry, my immense jig-saw puzzle, of prose and poetry which I refer to above. Sometimes the series of posts at some site becomes lengthy and sometimes it remains brief. Like pieces of cloth or pieces of that jig-saw puzzle, the size, the shape and the length remain a bit of a mystery until some of my story and its interaction with others is told, until time takes its course across life’s path and across the threads that are part of the particular internet site in question.

My website has 42 sub-sections of prose and poetry on topics of personal interest, with nothing for sale and with no aggressive proselytism for one or more of the umpteen causes now proliferating across the planet. There are now some 450,000 words, the equivalent of six books, which readers can get ‘into’ if they so desire.

This literary creation, this literary industry, has been created in the early evening of my life, in the last years of my middle age(56-59) and the first years of my late adulthood(60-66), by this retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, now journalist and independent scholar, who became 66 in July 2010. He attempts to endow many a theme from the social sciences and humanities, from spiritual and secular subjects, with many layers of meaning. He tries to combine a high seriousness with a light and humorous style when appropriate and when he is able—for there is more to life than interaction in cyberspace. This literary goal, though, is difficult to achieve. It has been a slowly evolving literary ambition since: (a) settling into Australian society in the 1970s after moving from Canada where I was born in 1944, (b) marrying for a second time in 1975 and (c) raising three children who in 2010 were: 43, 40 and 33 years old.:cool: ]]> RonPrice http://www.sffworld.com/forums/entry.php?2036-Description-1-of-My-Blog-at-sffworld-com