A Quasi-Eulogy In Memory of Kurt Vonnegut

In 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith, the year I turned 15, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel The Sirens of Titan. By the late 1960s this novel had become a cult-book of the counter-culture. The genre is novel, sci-fi, space-opera, black humour, satire and fabulation. The story-line, the narrative is based on a world where machines have taken over. The story is told by a future historian. Faith in science, technology and progress is undermined as is humankind’s ability to shape its future. Vonnegut questions the very nature of reality and argues that individuals have the ineluctable responsibility to make meaning out of their lives by looking within not without at organized religions. Looking back after more than forty years, I would place Vonnegut among the first of a "New Wave" of science fiction writers who appeared in the 1960s and who have inhabited one of the many backdrops of my life.-Ron Price with thanks to Herbert G. Klein, "Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and the Question of Genre," EESE 5/98.

I had heard those enchanting sirens1

back in the fifties; little did I know
about their sharp rocks, the perils
of chronic and committed rapture,
growing dedication, deeper belief--
that would be later.

I’ve seen many draw near
to those voices and, yes,
I’ve seen them shipwrecked.
For these sirens were daughters
(so the myth goes)2 of the sea
and river gods, Nymphs partly
bird and partly human.


Yes, their voices enchant,
but be warned: this journey
to their island home is not
for the timid & overwrought,
not for the vainly pious,
the pusillanimous of spirit,
not for those who think this
is some kind of vacation,
who seem somehow to have
missed the point that:
this ardent, often tiring, voyage
on this unvariable storm-lashed brig
with the unseasonable rains,
the sweet song of the dove,
the bird, the clear beauty
of the siren’s notes is mostly distant,
on some far-off island, faintly heard,
but they sweep me out to sea
and in full consent I drown,
though I do not like all the journey.3

I wish you well, Kurt, in your journey
which, as Shelley called it, now goes
to that undiscovered country.
____________________________

1 I first heard the Baha’i Writings in the years 1953 to 1959. These are the sirens, for me.
2 This poem also draws on the Greek myth of the Sirens, part bird and part human.
3 I thank Roger White and his poems "Parable for the Wrong People" and "Sightseeing"(Pebbles, pp.69-75) for some of his phraseology.

Ron Price
December 20th 2004
Updated: 13/4/07.

TWO MEN BEYOND THE KEN

In June 1826 Shaykh Ahmad, the leader of the Shaykhis, passed away at the age of about 75 near Medina. Leadership of this community passed to Siyyid Kazim. At the same time, in the same year, the "first successful recording of nature"1 took place in France using a modified lithographic technique. Was this just a coincidence? -Ron Price with thanks to Gisele Freund, Photography and Society, David Godine, Boston, 1980, p. 22.

I see them through the eye of time
So distant is their story;
Yet in memory's warming lens
They're cherished for their glory.
Viewed through yet another glass
The focus is quite clouded;
For these men of so long ago
On history's line they're shrouded.
Bathed in the few details we've got
Attraction and repulsion,
The image is not distortion-free
But eternal is the emulsion.
The first glimmerings
Of the dawn of a new day,
In their midst were born Two Men
Who would say and write
Words beyond the ken
Of men and of angels.

Ron Price
29 October 2003

NARRATIVE THOUGHT TO THE RESCUE

The visual imagery of the mind appears to be both more complex and less systematic than the visual imagery of cinema. Images viewed through conscious effort are more often indistinct and elusive. Even the faces of loved ones are often difficult to recall. They sidestep the mind’s gaze if their images are actively pursued. Long familiarity renders such objects too complex and heterogeneous for a single image to suffice. Such faces become, in our mind, multidimensional, ambiguous and possessed of a breadth and complexity that photography and film condense and strip away. This is also true of sensory experience in general.

Because of the elusiveness of sensory experience a mode of thinking comes into acton, into play, called narrative thought.1 Narrative governs the disposal of objects and actions in time without which memory and language would be impossible. Most of our experience can be assigned a place in our narrative history or at least its potential, although some of our life is clearly and inevitably incoherent. -Ron Price with thanks to David MacDougall, "Films of Memory", Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review:1990-1994, editor, Lucien Taylor, Routledge, NY, 1994, p.266.

Just as film and documentary makers
are often uneasy about their narratives,
so are the autobiographers among us
as we try and reconstruct our lives, our
narratives, our stories. Some, of course,
seem less troubled. Often a celebratory
stance is adopted towards one’s memory,
masking uncertainty, an emptiness at the
heart of such authorship, a fundamental lack
of conviction; reminiscence is usually treated
as fragmentary, rarely as omniscience which
is presumed arrogance. The richness inside
people’s memories is often unattainable and
is supplanted with endless illustrative material,
with physical experience, primary stimuli and
photographic iconography. These usually
do not serve to integrate society,
encapsulate ideology or create social order;
rather they give us the unalterable record
of appearance and place
and a more profound place in our memory.
I would like to think that this story will
allow more than the record of appearance
and place and will contribute in a rich way
to that ultimate integration of society.

Ron Price
11 April 2000

TELLING THE STORY: IMAGES

Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al. -Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, "High Noon", a review of The New Encyclopedia of the Amercan West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19.

The enterprise began, perhaps as early as 1894 when the first Baha’is landed in America from the Middle East, or even when the Letters of the Living travelled throughout Iran in 1844 and thereafter. The twenty-five years from 1894 to 1919 was a precursor to the year 1919 when the Tablets of the Divine Plan were read and a pioneering program began that is now eighty years old. It is a program that is immensely diverse and operates at local, regional, national and international levels. It is important, as the Baha’i community comes to describe this vast and complex story, that it avoids a tendency to an affinity with the reverential writers of medieval England, to endless edification and to what is called hagiography. There is a need to emotionally individualize stories so that readers will not have to piously wade through hundreds of pages of lifeless prose.-Ron Price with thanks to Edward Morrison,"When the Saints Come Marching In: The Art of Baha’i Biography", Dialogue, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1986, pp.32-35.

Defining character,
determining worth,
touching on the personal,
bringing people out of
verbal concrete,
through understanding.
Needing an eye
for telling detail,
a certain dramatic power,
analysis and interpretation,
with incisiveness and conviction,
with no doubt about its being true,
a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,
for we need more than a glimpse.
We need the story of the saintliness
in all its unsaintliness.
It is as difficult to write
a good life as to live one.
We want to know we are not alone:
for the community is its own ritual,
the greatest drama in the world of existence,
something forever new and unforeseen,
devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,
a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,
conveying to the reading public
insight and a knowing who they are
into their lives.

Ron Price
1 February 1999

A DOCUMENT, A RECORD, A PHOTOGRAPH

A DOCUMENT, A RECORD
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is holding a retrospective this month, in April 2000, on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work.
-Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.

Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days,
not so plain and simple,
clear and visually straight from the shoulder
as Evan’s work. But, with Keats,
an almost instant transmutation of impressions,
thoughts, reading and ideas into poetry,
well, what some might call poetry, what
I might see as a study for poetry.1

1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.
Ron Price
7 April 2000

Pioneering Over Four Epochs

This tapestry of statements/reviews/comments about various themes in the social sciences and humanities, about movies, directors, cinema, television, a list of subjects/topics too long to list---attempts to endow these themes with many layers of meaning and tries to evoke a complex range of responses in readers.

The author, a Canadian living in Australia, has evolved a style which is highly individual yet, by fusing together much from the humanities and the social and physical sciences, from his own life and his religion, appeals to both the novitiate, the veteran and people on a multitude of spiritual and secular paths.

There is, too, a certain and an inevitable autobiographical aspect to these bits of prose. In some ways they can be seen as one long diary, journal and commentary on life, my life, the life of my society and the ongoing narrative of the emergence from obscurity of the religion I have been associated with for over 50 years.