RonPrice

PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE In the several years before the Beatles first gained popularity, in the months of late 1962 when "Love Me Do" began to sell well in the British market, they practiced and played a great deal. A chart showing their 'cumulative performances' indicates how they began to practice and play more and more in late 1959 and until 1963 they practiced and practiced, played and played. Their success, R.W. Weisberg argues, from 1962 onwards was partly due to this extensive practicing. While all of this practicing was going on, from late 1959 to late 1962, I joined the Baha'i Faith and finished high school. These foundation years for the Beatles, their rise to fame in this earliest stage of their career, 1959 to 1962, was a note in popular culture played in the background to the most significant development in my personal life from the age of 15 to 18, the first three years of my commitment to the Baha'i teachings and to satisfying my erotic life. Both exercises have been very demanding, involved much loss and gain. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Sternberg, Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge UP, 1999, p.238. The Beatles did not exist for me, back then, in my adolescence when I was going to school, getting depressed for the first time, and sorting out who I was: Erikson's identity. And I did, partly. The Beatles were entirely on the periphery, so far from centre that they nearly slipped into non-existence, remote from the magnetic attraction of the sun of my interest, flying into irretrievable remoteness where they have remained all mylife. This most famous of music groups in the last half of the century, rising from anonymity while other things began to occupy my soul and the edges of my world, vulnerable. Something like the Beatles could easily slip into remoteness like so many things and be quite irretrievable.

PEOPLE AT THE CENTRE Clive James and Peter Porter today discussed 'books of the forties and fifties.' In that discussion they talked about music, classical and other, taking over from literature in the last half of the twentieth century in providing that sense of certitude, although irrational, that people felt a need for in their lives. They also talked about the decline of ideology after WW2 and into the 1950s. The role of Alexander Solzenitsyn's books in the fifties, sixties and seventies played an important part in this process, insofar as the Left was concerned, as fascism had done insofar as the Right was concerned in the two previous decades. A reservoire of skepticism in the west, and especially in England, returned the centre of poetry to the individual in those same years. -Ron Price with thanks to "Clive James and Peter Porter," Sunday Special, ABC Radio, 5:30-6:00 pm, 2 December, 2001. As ideology wound down in the fifties, the sixties and seventies, we began to grow and grow all over,1 slowly, unobtrusively. So it is that I've spent my adult life with people who have no ideology, plenty of convictions, all too many of them, but no ideological centre-- liked reading novels, listening to music, watching TV, working in the garden, but absolutely no interest in going to meetings-- except to learn macrame, lead lighting and the inevitable work-associated special planning session at 8 pm, or a new course, or something at uni, or a movie, or a volunteer job where no ideology was desired. For ideology did not grab anyone anymore. And religious ideology became the no-no among no-nos--amidst endless subjectivity, Superficial and not-so-superficial pragmatism had made everyone practical realists, enjoying as far as they were able the disenchantment of the world. And slowly, yes slowly, this new ideology, new dogma grew until it came to manifest an attractive form, a gentle beauty all around the world with holy dust at the centre--and people from that desolate garden of disenchantment. 1 The Baha'i Faith spread around the world. Ron Price 2 December 2001