I dedicate what follows to my father who watched boxing matches with me in the 1950s, never boxed, but fought battles I never knew until I fought them myself in later life.-Ron Price, Tasmania:boxing:
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A BIG FIGHT

At the start of the Baha’i community’s Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) three of the most famous boxing matches in history took place. One was on June 19th 1936, just three weeks after Shoghi Effendi had asked the American believers to design a “systematic, carefully conceived plan” in the year ahead. A second fight was on June 22nd 1938. Each of these two fights was between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, the first an American and the second a German. Louis lost the first fight and won the second. A third fight, on June 22nd 1937, was between Joe Louis and James Braddock and Louis, a negro, won the heavyweight championship on that occasion. This third fight took place nine weeks after the start of the Seven Year Plan on April 21st 1937. –Ron Price with thanks to Joyce Carol Oates, “Beyond Glory: The Good Fight,” The New York Times, October 2nd 2005.

There were 100 million1
listeners to that epic fight
while the smallest handful
mustered all its force,
concentrated all its resources,
for the greatest drama
in the world’s spiritual history--
as humanity entered outer fringes
of the most perilous stage of its existence.

The largest audience ever seen,
70 thousand at Yankee Stadium,
saw this dazzlingly theatrical event
of undreamed of proportions;
while a little further West in Chicago
a manifest Standard was being readied
to wave, a most wonderful and thrilling
motion had begun to appear in the world.
It would permeate all of existence
and we would see the inception
of the Kingdom of God on earth.2

That would indeed be a fight
with powerful and insidious enemies,
the cruellest of torture-mongers3
and the most fanatical clerics
in the convulsions of a dieing age.

1 This information is obtained from The New York Times, October 2nd 2005. The fight mentioned here with 100,000 listeners by radio was in 1938.
2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi, p.351.
3 Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u’llah, 1974(1938), p.17.

Ron Price
October 2nd 2005
WAR POET

Cicero wrote in his the Orator in 46 BC: "nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis accidrit, id est semper esse puerum:” to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."1 In memory and its landscapes, its buildings, its multitude, its cornucopia of things and its people lie the foundations of dreams and imaginary cities, antidote to any incipient psychic impoverishment. All of this is my real heritage, my tangible history. Forgetting--results in a type of destruction of the architecture of my memory, of history, of identity. There is a loss down and in some temporary, perhaps permanent, memory hole. There is, too, a spiritual obliteration that is contingent upon the destruction of memory. Threads of memory are snapt and cut and my soul shrivels unobtrusively and its shell goes rattling like an empty nut. There is a connection between materialism, nationalism, indeed any ism, memory loss, and spiritual vacuity. With the destruction of memory comes the destruction of thought, feeling, tradition, identity, spirit: in short, the destruction of whatever humanity is in my mind’s eye. –Ron Price with thanks to 1D.M. R. Bentley, “Forgetful of Former Care: Notes on the Past and Present State of Canadian Memory,” in Mnemographia Canadensis, Vol.1: Muse and Recall.

I tried during those years
all those years after and before
to write poems: in order to speak,
to orient myself, to find out where I was,
where I was going, to chart my reality.1

Memory, like love, gains strength
through restatement, reaffirmation;
in a culture, through stories, art.
Memory courts our better selves;
it helps us recognize the importance
of deed; we learn from pleasure
just as we learn from pain.
And when memory evokes
what might have been prevented,
memory becomes redemptive.
It becomes a kind of hope.2

The memory of war: theirs, mine,
has turned even this ordinary man
into a poet3 in these 9th and 10th stages
of history.4 It’s been war right back
to stage one, the start of Adam’s cycle?

1Paul Celan, "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (1958),” Collected Prose, 1986, p.34.
2 Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai wrote these last words.
3 D.M. R. Bentley, “Emigrant Remembering and Forgetting,” Mnemographia Canadensis,
Vol.1 in Canadian Poetry Web Links, Internet Site.
4 Baha’i historical paradigm
--Ron Price September 15th 2005
Photography's ambiguity already above…