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The Memoir of Ron Price
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The process by which a memoir or a poem emerges is partly the way Robert Frost puts it succinctly and which I quote approvingly here: “Sight, excite, insight.” Like all good aphorisms this is only partly true. There is so much more to the process. I write about this process here, indeed, at many places in this work. “By the time you start to compose, more than half the work has been done," wrote Irish Poet Seamus Heaney. "The crucial part of the business is what happens before you face the empty page," he continued, "before the moment of first connection, when an image or a memory comes suddenly to mind and you feel the lure of the poem-life in it.” Most of the writing in this memoir took place in my late fifties and early sixties. Much of the work had, indeed, been done: half, three-quarters, nine-tenths? The living, the thinking, two decades of preliminary writing, imagining, sometimes dry, sometimes fertile literary experience--all of this set the stage. My hope is that not too many readers find the work unapproachable due to its length, its vocabulary, its overly analytical nature, the absense of a simple and interesting story. Hope, though, is never quite enough to determine an outcome even if it helps you travel along the way.
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Memoir: Part 2 of The Epilogue of My Epilogue
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My poetry and prose is founded, as it was in the case of Walt Whitman, on the principle of language as ‘‘a source of renewable creative energy.’’ My works are best read in light of late-20th century and early 21st theories from the social sciences and humanities, theories I have alluded to in the text but will not attempt to summarize here. My broad aim has been, not merely to describe the objects of nature in the spectatorial fashion of a travel writer or scientic essayist, not merely to analsyse my society as a sociologist or social scientist, but rather to encourage engagement with this new and emerging world religion which came into the life of my family right at the beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth. My writing has been, for me, a form of therapy to help me recover from the devastating series of physical and emotional difficulties I faced as far back as my late teens, right at the start of the 10th and final stage of history and continuing periodically throughout my life. I had to overcome the philosophical and formal problems of writing about a process, a time, a movement, a religion, that I considered, not so much beyond the limits of language, as so complex to deal with that I could only solve the problem with a special technique. The technique I employed involved, not rhetoric, but an appeal to spontaneity, intimacy and immediacy. I also structured the text of my memoir around a series of discontinuous fragments and slices of analyses that emphasized an ongoing, organic process. I have also helped future biographers with whatever intrusions and manipulations they may need to make to deal with those months and years in which there has been an unavoidable absent presence. I have no intention in this work to impose a narrative clarity. I do not wants to keep my story neat. That is why whatever narrative is found here it should be embellished with my letters, diary and poetry. Literature--my essays and poetry--is literary, but my letters are domestic, straightforward, hermeneutically unproblematic sources of evidence about the world I inhabit beyond the page.
Were a dossier of my sins of omission and commission put together, many pages of my faults, weaknesses, errors of judgement, crimes and follies could be itemized. Like the dossier compiled on Jeffrey Wigand, the whistle blower on the tobacco industry in the film The Insiders(1999), a document could be gathered together and used as the basis of a smear campaign so orchestrated as to make my word seem suspect, my memoir scandalized in the eyes of the moral majority and my name tarnished for posterity. Thankfully such a dossier will never be put together and this memoir is not a centre for the kind of detailed confessionalism that would result in such a comprehensive statement of the negative side of my life. Like the "dossier" to outline my "full life" it will remain uncomposed. Hopefully, though, some may find here a powerful voice and readers, who won't ever know me personally, may find this poet's voice compelling, unique. One can dream. One can hope.
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Memoir: Part 3 of The Epilogue of My Epilogue
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My memoir deploys an intimate, personal tone; it is alternately dispassionate and passionate, peaceful and troubled, certain and doubtful. The first-person narrative has a directness and immediacy that transports my readers(or such is my hope) into the private realm of the immediate social relations of what some writers call 'the urban quotidian.' Its main project takes as its subject the psycho-emotional work of being a Bahá’í. I stage, I describe, the initial coming-to-consciousness of my life, my difference, that is my being a Baha’i, in a scene of private and public space—in the Bahá’í community of Burlington Ontario in the 1950s.
Bertrand Russell's three volume autobiography, published in the years 1967 to 1970, at the start of the letter writing section of this work, has in its prologue words that lend credence to its characterization as an epic. "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair." So much of the despair and the pity was for my own dear self and my health, my relationships and and assortment of life's problems. Much of it was in the context of my Bahá’í experience.
There was an epic quality to my work, a quality I have discussed above. There were governing passions in my life as well. I could characterize them as: knowing, loving and doing. This autobiography is, in a way, a testimony to this trilogy. There was sufficient passion, deriving from these three forces, to drive a lifetime of engagement in relationships, in issues and in the mundane. There was also sufficient detachment to allow me to modify my views and change my positions; without an element of intellectual flexibility I would have been in trouble in these changing times.
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Tribune
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military and civil officials in ancient Rome. Military tribunes (tribuni militum) were originally infantry commanders. Under the early republic there were six to a legion; some were appointed by the consuls (chief executives) or military commanders, and others were elected by the people.
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Transylvania
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A historic eastern European region; after forming part of Hungary (11th— 16th centuries), it was an autonomous principality within the Ottoman Empire (l6th—l7th centuries), and then was returned to Hungary at the end of the 17th century; later, it was incorporated into Romania (1918).
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Polis
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This was the ancient Greek city - state. The small state in Greece originated probably from the natural divisions of the country by mountains and the sea and from the original local tribal (ethnic) and cult divisions. There were several hundred poleis, the history and constitutions of most of which are known only sketchily if at all. Thus most ancient Greek history is recounted in terms of the histories of Athens, Sparta, and a few others.
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History of Poland
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History of Poland, a highly cultured, powerful, Roman Catholic empire in east central Europe in the late Middle Ages, Poland was partitioned by its neighbours in the late 18th century but re-emerged as an independent state at the end of World War I.
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