Among The Ruins

[Ron Price]

In the opening lines of Lady Chatterly’s Lover(1928) D.H. Lawrence writes “the cataclysm has happened; we are among the ruins; we start to build up new little habitats and to have new little hopes.” -Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, John Murray Publications Ltd., London, 1991, p.173.

We did start to build
so unostentatiously
the world did not even know.
For the building of
new little habitats,
which he tended
so lovingly
from so far away,
(as They had tended
that Force of enormous power
as best They could, back then)
seemed, by then,
by those years between the wars
was canalized
into an Administrative System,
through an Instrument
expressed in points of light,
spreading slowly,
so slowly,
in new little hopes,
during a hiatus period*
among the ruins**
with the Zeal of the Lord
leading us,
tender, green and verdant.

Ron Price
12 September1999

* the period 1921 to 1936 is often referred to as a hiatus period, a waiting period, during which the Guardian was laying the foundation for the Administrative system, a system which would canalize the international teaching program in the years after 1937.
** the ruins, of course, are the ruins after WWI.

[Ron Price]

Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
-Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis, quoted in Margaret Drabble: A Reader's Guide.

Sexual activity began
In 1962
Between the beginning of my pioneering
And the complete institutionalization
Of charisma in the conveyance
Of authority in an emerging world religion.
-Ron Price, Untitled Poem, written only here to convey a perspective.

The year I became a Baha'i
Lady Chatterly's Lover1 went
on trial, four-letter words
became okay, sex was opened
to public discussion endlessly,
the unsayable became sayable
and pornography began to
travel in rivers to the sea of
our lives. The permissive
society was well on its way,
Betty Friedan published her
Feminine Mystique and the
tenth stage of history made
its entrance2 in the greatest
drama in the world's spiritual
history---as I tasted my first
experience of depression,3
hungered for sex and was
initiated into the mysteries
and secrets of pioneering.4

Ron Price
1 August 1998

1 The first year of my experience as a Baha'i was October 1959 to October 1960.
2 The tenth stage of history is part of a Baha'i paradigm of history. It began in 1963.
3 This outline of the early 1960s is found in many places. I drew on Margaret Drabble: A Reader's Guide, Valerie Myer, Vision Press, NY, 1991, pp.13-14.
4 this poem is another example of the vahid(Farsi word for unity), a poem of 19 lines.