RIDING AND DRIVING


Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger, went onto celluloid in 1937. Trigger died in 1957. In that twenty year period the Baha'i community went through the first two decades of its international teaching Plan. When Roy Rogers died in 1998 the Baha'i community had completed six decades of international teaching in the greatest drama in the world's spiritual history. Roy Rogers and a host of other western heroes, like Gary Cooper and John Wayne, were part of that myth of the frontier as described by Frederick Turner. The international teaching Plan, which promulgated 'Abdu'l-Baha's divine Plan(Tablets, 1917), could be seen as an extension of that myth into the Baha'i teaching ethos, a myth that had been part of American civilization since its birth.
-Ron Price with appreciation to Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W.W. Norton & Co. NY, 1991, pp.91-100; and in commemoration of the passing of Roy Rogers, 7 July 1998 as reported on the evening news, ABC, TV, 7:00-7:30 pm. He was 86.


About the same time as we1 started riding
they2 started riding across the screen and
driving. Riding and driving, on the move,
a whole culture on the move. It became
part of our breeding for our new age,
new possibilities, always some change
and our absorption in getting and spending.3
They've been riding and driving across our
screens now for six decades or more, since
the movies began, since we began to spread
across this continent, this world. Technology
taking us and everything else, everywhere---
the great burgeoning. Proteus is rising from
the sea and old Triton is blowing his wreathed
horn: as pioneers, drive and fly to the farthest
corners of the earth, exploring the new Order.

Ron Price
8 July 1998

1 The international teaching Plan began in 1937 and the Baha'is started moving around the world with greater frequency.
2 Heroes in Westerns
3 William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us.

HE CLOTHED OUR MYTHS IN MEANING

Our literature is the richest source of the presentation of human beings' self-interpretation down through history. So often the reader finds an author who admits to being in selva oscura, in the dark world of sin and ignorance. Dante is such an author in The Divine Comedy. We each have our private hell that must be confronted. We must face our own selves, our responsibilities and accept our limitations, our guilt, our weakness. The western intellectual tradition offers a deep and profound source of insight for our understanding. Part of that source are the new revelations of the Bab and Baha'u'llah.
-Ron Price with thanks to Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W.W. Norton & Co. NY, 1991.


We'd finished discovering our land
by the time you1 came on the scene:
hunters and trappers and pioneers
and you gave us visions and frontiers
and myths for many generations of
Lone Rangers and Clint Eastwoods,
Buffalo Bills and Daniel Boones to
soar to the apex of uncharted heavens
with our restless energy and exuberance
to double and redouble our magnanimity.

We could, then, minister to our transient moods,
pluck from our memory lifting joy and rooted
sorrows, the written troubles of our brain and
clear our breasts of all those perilous appendages
which weigh, too, upon our heart and soul.2

You clothed our myths in meaning, enough for
us to find invisible choirs of the immortal dead,
our heroes, our myths of action, our community
where we belong, so that we could take our journey
into hell and, in despair, find out who we were on
this long, tortuous and stoney path to peace and glory.


Ron Price
8 July 1998

1 Shoghi Effendi in 1921
2 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3

FAIR MANSIONS--BUT NOT YET

In 1973 Clint Eastwood starred in a film called Magnum Force. The film presents a picture of urban life consistent with the Baha'i view that society is in "the dark heart of an age of transition." When the film was released in 1973 I had just finished five years of teaching primary and secondary school. I was more than a little conscious of the moral vacuum and the social and behavioural disorders within the society I had grown up in and now lived as a young adult-a rapidly westernizing, rapidly globalizing, rapidly populating one. Magnum Force graphically underlined some of the disorder in urban life through a narrative with Clint Eastwood as a cop in Los Angeles. -Ron Price with thanks to WIN TV, 9:30-11:55 pm, 14 February 2002, "Magnum Force(1973)."

Clint, there was an alternative
To all that violence and confusion,
All that corruption and absurdity.
It was just then spreading around
The world, embryonic, first steps,
Just stuck its head above the ground
And the apex of this new System
Was about to have a new building
That would serve as its Seat, the Seat
Of the Universal House of Justice.1
But this wasn't much use to you
Back then, the cop that you were in LA. :cool:

Clint, we had begun to raise
The fair mansions
Of God's Own Kingdom
Wherein all the chaos and ruin
Would cease. And I was moving,
Or so I thought, to a safer place
And plane free of these disorders.

Sadly I found, as you found, Clint,
Another form of disorder
In my own house, under my own roof.
For there was no escape for all of us
In this dark heart, except to sink deeper
Into the firm earth of the Teachings:2
Sacred and resplendent tokens
From the planes of glory.3

1 The Universal House of Justice, Messages: 1968-1973, Wilmette, 1976, 1p. 119: the first steps were taken in 1973
2 ibid. p.79.
3 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.3. :eek:

Ron Price
14 February 2002

THE BALLAST OF SUCCESS

I've enjoyed Clint Eastwood movies. A superhero with the answers, double cool, self-sufficient, existing without society, without anyone's help, quiet, a man of few words, few ideas, but lots of action: this was the Eastwood persona. It was partly the real person too. Such was the character of Dirty Harry in the 1973 movie Magnum Force. With this movie Eastwood had become "the undisputed top movie star in the world."1 As I read the book1 I came to appreciate a man with some fine qualities and a man with his own particular weaknesses. He certainly did not enjoy his celebrity status. It made him uncomfortable.

In 1973 I had moved into a type of celebrity status in my own little world as a high school teacher in South Australia. It was a status I enjoyed as a teacher, off and on, until 1999. If a biography was ever to be written about my life it would reveal, as it did of Eastwood, a man of strengths and weaknesses. I found the celebrity status, the endless talking and listening both in schools and in my private life, wore me out by century's end. My persona, my personality, my road to success, was the opposite to Eastwood's: people in community, ideas and words, wall to wall for years. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, Robson Books, London, 1992, p.142.

You made your millions, Clint,
While I got through my career
After a somewhat shakey start.

Your quiet self, superhero persona,
Man of action par excellence
Took you to the top of the movie tree,
While this man of ideas and words,
Endless words, produced poetry
And print with millions of phrases
And sentences on pages
And in relationships
Enough to sink a ship.

My ship's ballast,
The ballast of my creativity,
Was not the great Hollywood engine,
But an emerging world religion,
The centre of a psych-intellectual life
Which drove me, eventually, it seems,
To find poetry everywhere.

Ron Price
16 November 2001