THE BIRD BATH

11 posts / 0 new
Last post
RonPrice
RonPrice's picture
THE BIRD BATH

This morning I saw two birds in the bird bath in the garden splashing and whisking their wings with apparent delight while I read a book in my study which looks out over the garden.-Ron Price, Belmont, Western Australia, one year before taking a sea-change and an early retirement.

I have bought two new books from a local bookshop
and am reading them in my study
looking out over the garden
on a warm summer morning, in a suburb of Perth.

My West Australian weeping peppermint tree weeps
and the Lilly Pilly stamens blow everywhere like snow.
Birds dance in the bird bath at the rear of the garden
keeping cool and clean as summer heads to its centre.

Our new washing machine zings along, round-and-round
and my wife bustles. She always bustles in her morning round.

I read on wondering how yet another book
in this massive congregation will dance and fly,
twisting its wings in the sun as it heads to unknown
heights far beyond this blue garden of light; wondering
too whether there will be much more weeping as
there has been with former books which have flown
into my life like snow, blowing cold, seering Arctic winds.
Perhaps at last now I will fly, soon, wing my flight and
dance the dance on the leaves and fruits of consecrated joy.

Ron Price

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

A TYPE OF NATURAL HISTORY

Part 1:

If J.D. Salinger is right in his claim that “there’s a marvellous peace in not being published”(1), it looks like much peace lies in waiting for me. Some readers find my writing a little too subjective or should I say introspective.  Like Henry David Thoreau I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania, in the Antipodes, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western-Pacific-rim route.

I read recently that Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path and my horizon from month to month now, and from year to year since my childhood in the 1940s.  But what I lack, what interest is deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life Downunder in the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social sciences. 

Part 2:

In the three decades of my teaching career, 1967 to 1999, I acquired, if I acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study.  My study, the place where I read and write, is littered, or, I like to think ordered by files on: philosophy, psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history, literature, poetry, religion, inter alia.  I move from one field to another from day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas, of enthusiasm, interest.  Thus, I occupy my time. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) J.D. Salinger in "A Review of the Book ' The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.

Part 3:

Like Samuel Johnson’s dictionary published over 250 years ago, my memoir of 2600 pages is an ambitious work.  But whether it will influence future generations, as Johnson’s work did, I can only hope.  Johnson wrote, among other reasons, to escape the pain of life. I wrote, too, for many reasons among which was to escape society’s endless chatter because I seemed to have run out of social synergy to keep up the chatter beyond a modicum of it every month.  This depletion of my social energy took place by sensible and insensible degrees during my 50s, from 1994 to 2004.  Some may see my insensible and sensible exit from the social domain into solitude during the years 1999 to 2005, the last years of my middle age, an exit from the extensive social activity that had characterized my life from 1949 to 1999, as an “inability to make the social adjustment expected of mature members of society.”

Such was the way literary critic Warren French described J.D. Salinger’s withdrawal from public life back in the 1960s.[1]  Still others, among the few who would concern themselves at all with my raison d’etre for writing as I do, might find my insistence on personal privacy difficult to understand; I experience a certain estrangement which inevitably results from withdrawal; the sympathy and empathy of others are sometimes experienced in smaller apportionments than once they were.  Still others may hypothesize that I possess a hyperactive cortex, or that I have achieved the same privacy, peace and quiet that they too want in life but, for various reasons, have been unable to attain. 

Part 4:

There are several dozen people in my life now at the age of 70 whom I interact with physically, in person, but this interaction is rarely in excess of about two hours maximum at any one time and most of the interaction with any one person is for less than one hour.  I rarely use the phone unless I am taking messages for my more socially connected and involved wife.   I use emails extensively for the vast majority of people in my life who don’t enjoy the advantages of propinquity in relation to where I live in northern Tasmania, the island state of Australia. 

We all have to work out our modus operandi and modus vivendi. Salinger worked out his for the last half of his life, say 45 to 90. And it was quintessentially a solitary one.  I, too, have freed myself, as I say, from most of that endless chat which for forty to fifty years, and with other factors of wear and tear, wore down the sinews of my soul and strained my nerves or, more likely, the chemicals, in my brain, making me desire a life above syllables and sounds if not words and letters, a life in which much is merged into nothingness before the Revelation of a splendour the threads of Whose gold caught my eye and my ear over fifty years ago.

Part 5:

Unlike Salinger whose social and publishing history ceased at the height of his career, I now publish extensively on the internet in the evening of my life.  I have never achieved the heights of literary prominence neither Salinger’s heights nor anyone else’s—and I probably never will.  In the last 15 years I have published several million words on the internet.  I engage in an extensive correspondence with the wider world via the internet, mainly emails and internet posts now in 2014.  I have a more limited social involvement as I have indicated above, not as limited as Salinger’s became, but certainly more limited than the interaction I enjoyed in the years of my life up to the age of 55 when I took an early retirement.  My quiet withdrawal is somewhat like the pattern of withdrawal and return Toynbee writes about in his A Study of History.  It is a conscious intellectual and spiritual stance based on sober critical reflection and attention.

Part 6:

It is a withdrawal partly based on a fatigue, as I said above, with the social domain; it is partly based on the great religious event in my time--the growing influence of the prophetic figure of Baha’u’llah, an influence which is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history--and my personal need to translate this development into some personal intellectual and creative response, a different response than the one that occupied me in varying degrees in the half century to the year 2000 and that engaged my life’s energies as a student, a teacher, a husband, a parent and as a member of community. 

The psychic event that has given rise to this new, this literary, response in the latter years of my middle age and the early years of my late adulthood had developed sensibly and insensibly over decades.  My watchful muse wanted to seize the fleeting opportunities of the hour and gain access to my mind and what seemed like divine or, perhaps, just obsessive promptings.  Such promptings, divine or otherwise, have always been difficult to define and assess.  They were promptings that occurred more extensively at first in my fifties, promptings to what had been my usually inhibited and fatigued, literary and mental state, occupied as it had been for so long with so many of life’s other demands and activities.  But during the 1990s, as I began to psychologically wind-down from many of these activities,  I experienced a release of energy, perhaps a ripeness of intellect, that was new and very refreshing.  But this release of energy required of me a new form, a new modus operandi and vivendi in which to work. 

Part 7:

I have felt capable of apprehending no more than a fragment of the mental wealth that has poured into my lap as a result of the energies that have been progressively released in these last twenty years.  Perhaps these energies have been created as a result of pouring over many questions in the long years of generativity that Erik Erikson says characterize middle adulthood, the years 35 to 55 or 65. Erikson says these are the years in which the ego development outcome is generativity.  If generativity is not achieved the ego stagnates in self-absorption.  The basic strengths of this second-to-last stage of life are productivity and care.[2]

The last stage in Erikson’s model of psycho-social development is late adulthood, the years from 55 or 65 to death, the years I have just entered.  The ego development outcome is integrity. If this is not achieved the ego despairs. The basic strength of this stage is wisdom says Erikson. Erikson felt that much of life before the age of 40 is preparing for the middle adulthood stage(40-55/60), and the last stage is recovering from the middle stage. Perhaps that is because as older adults we can often look back on our lives with happiness and are content, feeling fulfilled with a deep sense that life has meaning and we've made a contribution to life, a feeling Erikson calls integrity. Our strength comes from a wisdom that the world is very large and we now have a detached concern for the whole of life, accepting death as the completion of life.

On the other hand, some adults may reach this stage and despair at their experiences and perceived failures. They may fear death as they struggle to find a purpose to their lives, wondering "Was the trip worth it?" Alternatively, they may feel they have all the answers, a feeling not unlike going back to their adolescence.  This results in the experience of a strong dogmatism that only their view has been correct. The significant relationship is with all of mankind, "my-kind," says Erikson.  It is interesting to reflect on J.D. Salinger using Erikson’s model of psycho-social development and I leave this further reflection to readers here.

(1600 words)

 

[1] Warren French, J.D. Salinger, Twayne, New York, 1963..

[2] J. D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction, Penguin Books Ltd.,  Middlesex, England, 1976, pp.82-84.

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

THE RAVEN

Section 1:

The now famous Bahá'í hanging gardens with their terraces, their expanse of trees and flowers, lawns and verdure in the hot dry land of Israel, as well as the classically styled buildings and the Shrine of the Báb which harmonizes eastern and western proportions and style----are often called by Israelis "The Eighth Wonder of the World."1  When I was at the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa Israel five years ago, in April-May 2009, where these hanging gardens are situated the most common bird on these terraces and in these gardens was the raven.  At least that was the tentative conclusion of my son who has taken more than a little interest in birds during his adult life. 

My son also lived just a five minute walk from these hanging gardens for more than a year and worked in its environs. So it was that he became more than a little familiar with the bird-life of Haifa and Israel in general. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia which lists many sites which have been given the terminological distinction “8th wonder of the world.”

Section 2:

Some consider the poem, The Raven, to be the most famous poem ever written.  The poem, written by Edgar Allen Poe, quickly became a cultural phenomenon after it was completed by its author some time in 1844, and published in January 1845.  It is not my intention to summarize the content of this poem as it develops through its many stanzas; nor is it my intention to focus on the poem’s style, rhyme, rhythm, phrasing or what led to the writing of the poem.  I do draw, though, on some of the meanings given to it by readers in the last 164 years.  Readers can read of the many meanings given to the poem with a little investigation on the internet in these days of the world-wide-web.  Initially, I found the poem difficult to understand. This is a common experience many have in reading poetry in general and this poem in particular.

My intention in writing this prose-poem is to give a special focus to this work of Poe’s, a focus of meaning giving to it a relationship with the Babi-Bahá'í Revelations.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 June 2009.

Something happened in 1844, when

Poe was finishing his The Raven,

which revolutionized the planet and

signalized the start of a spectacular, a

tragic and the most eventful period in

the first Bahá'í century,  unique in the

whole range of humanity’s religious

experience.  Edgar Poe wrote a poem

The Raven and, for my money, this

bird-the raven-is symbolic of the Báb.

In the poem The Raven is perched

on the bust of Pallas, a symbol of

wisdom and a symbol of the poem’s

narrator. The setting is December, a

month in which are afoot the forces

of darkness.  The Raven, said Poe,

symbolized mournful, never-ending

remembrance.1  The poem’s theme

is undying devotion.2  The bird’s role

can be said to be as a messenger;3 an

angel seems to have entered the room—

the poem4 refers to the death of a most

beauteous creature, a most poetical topic

in the world-in this case the coming death

of the most wondrous creation the world

had yet seen; the Báb and, soon, to be---

Bahá'u'lláh—whose intimations were of a

maiden as if in His prison-Siyah-Chal dream.

1 See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, Harper Perennial, N.Y., 1991.

2  Kay Cornelius, “Biography of Edgar Allen Poe,” in Bloom’s BioCritiques: Edgar Allen Poe, Harold Bloom, ed., Philadelphia, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, p.21.

3 John F. Adams, “Classical Raven Lore and Poe’s Raven,” in Poe Studies, Vol.V, No.2, December 1972, p.53.

4 Abraham Lincoln memerized Poe’s poem, The Raven.

Ron Price

4/6/'09 to 27/5/'14.

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

Woko
Woko's picture

And do you find with your relative isolation that you devote more time to watching birds & contemplating on their lives & activities, Ron?

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

Thanks, Woko, for your question. In the last decade, 2004 to 2014, I have created an extensive audience or readership, but I still have time to look at birds. I would not call myself a bird watcher in the sense that I make of it an importnat part of my day. I try to make of my interactions in cyberspace more than the typical ones found at sites like Facebook and twitter.  The interactions or connections at such popular social networking sites often reduce friendship to a feeling or an image, a sense of connection to faraway or nearby friends about everyday things based, for the most part, on very short, pithy posts.  Such connections involve posts that often contain little about one’s true difficulties in life. A world of privacy and an image is created. There is nothing wrong with that, with this type of site and networking style, but it is not my style, not my approach, not my MO, modus operandi, to use a who-dun-it term. 

I post a great deal about what I think in the form of prose and poetry, generally more extended pieces of writing than the posts found in the Facebook and twitter world. My posts are far beyond the one-liners, the jokes, what I did today, what I ate for dinner, I poke you, I like this and I don’t like that, the ‘here are some photos of this’ and ‘here are some pictures of that’, ‘here is a video of this’ and ‘here is a piece of music,’ etc. I spend many hours each day writing and editing, poetizing and publishing.-Ron

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

Woko
Woko's picture

I'll certainly be interested in any bird observations or musings you might like to make, Ron.

Night Parrot
Night Parrot's picture

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming. I like that line.

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

Yes, Night Parrot, there are some wonderful lines and a wonderful music in Poe's poem.-Ron

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

                                                  BIRDSONG

This poem was inspired by the uplifting birdsong outside the home of Wayne and Ann Williams in Box Hill South and in Wattle Park in Victoria Australia.  My Tasmanian wife and I stayed with the Williams, a New Zealand couple, and their two teen-age children for six days in August 1999 on our way from Perth Western Australia to Launceston Tasmania.  I was taking an early retirement at the age of 55 after 50 years as a student and teacher, among many other roles in life, 1949 to 1999. 

The evolution of the bird and its song and of the embryonic planetary civilization I had been living in since the end of WW2, seemed to me to possess interesting comparisons and contrasts.  This idea came, as Emerson put it, “unlooked for like a bird in the trees.”-Ron Price with appreciation to Ralph Waldo Emerson in  Ross Posnock’s book of literary criticism entitled: The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity, Oxford University Press, 1991, p.158.

 

How long did evolution’s process take

to produce this wondrous birdsong?

A million or a billion years?

How long will it take humanity

to sing this new song in this day?

 

 

However long and tortured

the process appears,

the timetable could be called

God’s Plan.

 

That sea-gull flying gracefully

through the air, those birds

with their cacophony of sound,

tell of the beginning of another flying,

another song, another season,

finding its beginning with Adam,

watered by the blood of martyrs,

the sweet-scented streams of eternity

and the fruits of the tree of a Being

bright with promise as I head into

a future, a time in my life, also bright

with promise after years of what is often

called having one’s nose to the grindstone.

                              

Ron Price

2/8/'99 to 4/2/'15.

 

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

<p>It&#39;s been more than 3 months since my last post and, while here thanking annagrande0 for her brief comment, I&#39;ll add an item about birds.-Ron Price, Australia</p><p>-----------------------------------------</p><p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<strong>NO BIRDS DYING OVER BURLINGTON</strong></p><p><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms,trebuchet,verdana,sans-serif">Part 1:</span></p><p><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms,trebuchet,verdana,sans-serif">Akká - Ptolemais of the ancient world, St Jean d&#39;Acre of the Crusaders and their last stronghold, which refused to bow to the might of Napoleon, a city that gathered renown throughout the centuries - had indeed fallen into disrepute in the 19th century, a sorry period of its chequered history. Its air and water were foul and pestilential. Proverb had it that<u>&nbsp;<strong>a bird flying over &#39;Akká would fall dead.&nbsp;</strong></u>To its forbidding barracks were consigned the rebels, the desperadoes, the unredeemable criminals of the Ottoman domains - sent there to perish. For more about Akka go to:&nbsp;</span>http://the-prisoner-of-akka.blogspot.com.au/</p><p>Part 2:</p><p>I have not perfected my literary method as much as I have tried to define its nature, but I had certainly zeroed-in on a great deal of subject matter.&nbsp; My poetry portrays the origins of Baha&rsquo;i community life in parts of both Canada and Australia, and the experience of one traveller-pioneer in that community, during a critical four epochs of its experience.(1943-2015).&nbsp; The ambition and the work of my co-religionists has been to build the unassailable foundation for a new Order in human society.&nbsp; However exhausting &nbsp;&amp; discouraging the process, however much the work seemed fraught with failure, my belief in the ultimate success &amp; victory of the exercise, in spite of the battle and the tests involved, was not dimmed. &nbsp;From time to time one had to admit that discouragement did set in.</p><p>My own self-destructive impulses, part of my bipolar disorder and part, too, of a certain Celtic melancholy which from time to time isolated me from the mainstream of Baha&rsquo;i community life and left me an outsider.&nbsp; These same impulses also and unavoidably arose in my poetry, a testimony to the tragic vein of some of my pioneering experience in my lifespan.&nbsp; But there were many streaks of gold as well.&nbsp; Honey and poison seemed to be an inevitable mixture in life, like that of most other humans, part of human destiny it seems.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 14/3/&#39;99 to 6/5/&#39;15.</p><p>Part 3:</p><p>I inherited, perhaps, six generations</p><p>of experience, over there, where blood</p><p>flowed, candles gushed and <strong><u>birds died</u></strong></p><p><strong><u>over Akka</u></strong> in far-away Israel which is</p><p>in the news a great deal, and has been</p><p>all my life since before the creation of</p><p>the state of Israel in &#39;48 when I was 4.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>But here, in my home, my country,</p><p>it was all pretty new, fresh stuff;</p><p><u><strong>no one dying </strong></u>for the Cause, no birds</p><p>over Burlington or any other town in</p><p>which I lived in my 70 years of life.....</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Here it was about meetings,</p><p>wall-to-wall meetings for just</p><p>about any and every purpose</p><p>under heaven and purposes I</p><p>imagine as well up-in-heaven.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>It was about pioneering, and</p><p>spreading the word, the words</p><p>as far as humanly possible</p><p>under the blue and grey sky.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>And now, me, a literary pioneer,</p><p>giving words to it all, to those</p><p>many strange manners of these</p><p>years, inside my life, my days</p><p>before the roll is, yes, called up</p><p>yonder in a place no one has seen.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Ron Price</p><p>14/3/&#39;99 to 6/5/&#39;15.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

RonPrice
RonPrice's picture

NO BIRDS DYING OVER BURLINGTON

Akká - Ptolemais of the ancient world, St Jean d'Acre of the Crusaders and their last stronghold, which refused to bow to the might of Napoleon, a city that gathered renown throughout the centuries - had indeed fallen into disrepute at this period of its chequered history. Its air and water were foul and pestilential. Proverb had it that a bird flying over 'Akká would fall dead. To its forbidding barracks were consigned the rebels, the desperadoes, the unredeemable criminals of the Ottoman domains - sent there to perish.

I have not perfected my literary method as much as I have tried to define its nature, but I had certainly zeroed-in on a great deal of subject matter. My poetry portrays the origins of Baha’i community life in parts of both Canada and Australia, and the experience of one traveller-pioneer in that community, during a critical four epochs of its experience.(1943-2015). The ambition and the work of my co-religionists has been to build the unassailable foundation for a new Order in human society. However exhausting and discouraging the process, however much the work seemed fraught with failure, my belief in the ultimate success and victory of the exercise, in spite of the battle and the tests involved, was not dimmed. From time to time one had to admit that discouragement did set in.

My own self-destructive impulses, part of my bipolar disorder and part, too, of a certain Celtic melancholy which from time to time isolated me from the mainstream of Baha’i community life and left me an outsider. These same impulses also and unavoidably arose in my poetry, a testimony to the tragic vein of some of my pioneering experience in my lifespan. But there were many streaks of gold as well. Honey and poison seemed to be an inevitable mixture in life, like that of most other humans, part of human destiny it seems.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 14/3/'99 to 6/5/'15.

I inherited, perhaps, six generations
of experience, over there, where blood
flowed, candles gushed and birds died
over Akka in far-away Israel which is
in the news a great deal, and has been
all my life since before the creation of
the state of Israel in 1948 when I was 4.

But here, in my home, my country,
it was all pretty new, fresh stuff;
no one dying for the Cause, no birds
over Burlington or any other town in
which I lived in my 70 years of life.....

Here it was about meetings,
wall-to-wall meetings for just
about any and every purpose
under heaven and purposes I
imagine as well up-in-heaven.

It was about pioneering,
spreading the word
as far as humanly possible
under the blue sky.

And now, me, a literary pioneer,
giving words to it all, to the strange
manner of these years, inside my life,
my days before the roll is called up
yonder in a place no one has seen.

Ron Price
14/3/'99 to 4/2/'15.

married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

 and   @birdsinbackyards
                 Subscribe to me on YouTube