The two essays which follow are exploratory pieces of writing and not final drafts in any way; in some ways they are just thoughts made somewhat sequential or orderly in a personal way. I send them to friends and associations from time to time when it seems appropriate. Hopefully that assessment of appropriateness is correct, at least for the most part—for one cannot get one’s hunches, one’s intuitions, always accurately drawn. My use of the telephone and the letter/email and job applications are discussed here. They are both art forms in their own way, although the first is rarely considered in the wide classification of art forms. In 2013 I celebrated 60 years of utilizing the telephone and 50 years of the letter these to communicate, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania

1. Preamble:
The two essays which follow are exploratory pieces of writing and not
final drafts in any way; in some ways they are just thoughts made
somewhat sequential or orderly in a personal way. I send them to friends
and associations from time to time when it seems appropriate. Hopefully
that assessment of appropriateness is correct, at least for the most part—
for one cannot get one’s hunches, one’s intuitions, always accurately
drawn. My use of the telephone and the letter/email is discussed here.
They are both art forms in their own way, although the first is rarely
considered in the wide classification of art forms. In 2013 I celebrate 60
years of utilizing the telephone and 50 years of the letter these to
communicate, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so.-Ron Price,
George Town, Tasmania
_____________________________________
Essay #1:
THE TELEPHONE: SOME THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES
(first written in June 2005 for the internet & revised many times)
One of the most famous poets in western civilization, W.H. Auden,
worked behind doors marked Private far past, as he writes in one of his
poems, "pine-rooms" where "telephones ring/Inviting trouble." He was,
while writing, he said, in a room where his "double sits." In the end he
became one of the literary dramatis personae of the twentieth century in
spite of his conscious efforts not to become so. I like what Auden tries to
do. I feel he is a kindred poet whose aims and sense of craft are similar,
in many ways, to my own. We certainly share similar attitudes to
telephones.
I have become, as you might imagine, on the whole, disinclined to use the
telephone and most of the people whom I write to now are people I never
see, never talk to on the telephone and, in fact, have little desire to visit
them. The reasons I am disinclined to use the telephone, I think, are
many. Human motivation, our reasons for doing things, although often
simple enough, are also and often, as the great historian Edward Gibbon
once noted, hidden in “the awkward and tangled reality of the past below
the surface of things.” So it was, he suggested, that we gaze at history
and not try to scrutinize it too much to unveil the hidden or even the not-
so-hidden springs of action.

2. Many of the jobs I have had since my first one in 1961, if I discount a
range of common but idiosyncratic ways of making money in my
childhood and teens, I was on the phone for hours in a day. That was not
true of all my jobs, not true in, say: the tin mine, the classrooms, several
of those office/clerical jobs, that taxi, my youth worker work, the editor
role, the mine, mill and factory where the phone virtually did not exist
significantly in my day-to-day routine. But it was true of many of the
other jobs I have had--for I have been a bit peripatetic, a wanderer in the
paths of employment, always seeking something better: more money,
different people, new or better relationships with women, with
community and/or with myself in la longue duree, as some French call it,
with life. Jobs were for many years a key index to my personal sense of
worth.
Due to my having used the telephone so much at work and in my
personal life over so many years I felt, by 1999 when I retired from full-
time employment, like retiring from the telephone. The telephone has
been central to my life, as I look back over it, in retrospective
contemplation, in the half century 1949 to 1999. Then in the years 1999
to 2005 I pulled the plug from my relationships by sensible and insensible
degrees: from full-time, part-time, casual and even most volunteer
employment. In the years 1999 to 2001, for it took two years, I stopped
applying for full-time jobs as required by Centrelink. By 2003 I had
finished my last part-time job. I also left the world of volunteer activity
in May of 2005. It has now been nearly three years where and when,
except for work in one international organization, the Baha’i Faith, I am
free at last. As Martin Luther King once said: “Free at last, free at last,
thank God-Almighty, I’m free at last.”
At the age of 63 and 1/2 I am self-employed, an independent scholar, a
writer-poet, a retired teacher-lecturer. At the moment, after expenses, I’m
in the red. But not to worry. My house is paid for; I’m on a pension
which pays the bills. Late-adulthood and old age beckon with their joys
and sorrows, their slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I remember at the end of my first year of university, which ended in early
May of 1964, I had a peculiar relationship with the telephone and its
booming industry. I had a job checking telephone poles for internal
decay. That was but one of my many relationships with the telephone.
The job only lasted for about two months. I have had a range of jobs
which brought me into contact with this now pervasive modern tool of
our world, but I will not dwell on these jobs or my activity with
telephones or this brief essay would lead to prolixity.

3. In the introduction to a collection of The Letters of Lewis Carroll:Volume
1: 1837-1885 the editor M.N. Cohen gave a definition of man: "a person
who writes letters." While that may have been true of Carroll, who has
98,721 letters in his letter registry, the definition would not be very useful
today, or even in the nineteenth century for that matter, for the millions of
men and women for whom letter writing is and/or was a non-event.
There is an element of restlessness in the human psyche that will not
leave us in peace and incessantly asks for more, to see and have and
understand, more and more and yet more. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá stresses not the
unease or frustration of this restlessness. These bases of restlessness, He
says, so often are basically unhealthy. But a sense of urgency and
eagerness in alliance with the inner life, the soul, is restlessness of a
different order. It is a spiritual restlessness that urges us toward
transcendence, toward a desire for and an appreciation of that
‘undiscovered country'. Táhirih was "restless and could not be still"(See:
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Wilmette, 1975(1928), pp.190-
203). There are a host of others in this same book with the same quality.
We meet such souls all over the Baha’i world as we travel from place to
place: always on the go, can’t sit still. When you recognize them, at first,
on the telephone, you often think ‘not them again!’ Then there are the
quiet ones, another sector of that slowly evolving revolutionary force that
has been moving out of obscurity in recent decades. It takes all kinds, all
types, to build a new world. For that is what people in community is
about, among other things, at this climacteric of history. Some people are
social, love telephones and love talking. Some don’t. To each their own
and to each, too, at different times in their lives, different needs and
wants.
My wife has always been the type of person who has had, as they say, too
many irons in the fire to write often—at least that is how I might put it
and do put it quite often over the years. She has preferred the telephone
as a means of communication to letters. But, she has always had more of
a respect for punctuation and spelling than I have had, even though she is
essentially a non-letter writer. Indeed, she has more of a respect for many
things in life than I, for I was always a “this will do” person in so many
areas. Almost always, even in difficult times, she was able to rise to the
occasion, to find the energy and enthusiasm to converse and get on with
life. This was a quality I did not possess; I was much more of a fair-
weather creature and difficult times wore me down quickly. I am
frequently amazed at peoples’ stamina and stick-to-it-iveness. This
attitude is also part of the Baha’i teachings, part of that “preferring the

4. other chap to yourself.” It is not always manifest, of course, but it comes
into play for each of us in different ways.
Henry Miller, the first writer to use the “F” word in the 20th century in
his novels and get away with it, said that in his old age the telephone and
the doorbell were his phobias. D.H. Lawrence, another successful 20th
century novelist, used to hide in the kitchen when the doorbell rang.
Miller used to say “Tell them I’m not home.” I don’t feel quite as
strongly as that but, then, I am far from the celebrity world they came to
inhabit. ‘Phobia’ is a bit strong a term for my attitude to telephones, but
certainly the tendency is there to avoid social contact through these
means. The need for strong friendships and a high need for interpersonal
interaction which I once had, even into my forties, has gone. I need some
social contact, but not much. My big desire is to be at it constantly, at
writing that is, every day. The thinking process is a drawing together, a
drawing out, but on paper not in the oral-verbal sense. The world of
importance for me now is there at my finger tips in the world of paper
and words, enmeshed in the print I am reading and writing, the
experiences I am having and the imagination that comes my way. It
comes tingling off my fingers, at least much of the time, onto the page.
My attitude to my poetry is not unlike that of that famous poet Sylvia
Plath. She saw herself as an artisan. She was an artisan with an idea. All
of her poems began with an idea, a concept. Her ending was bleak back
when I was completing high school in 1963. Writing, like most things
and however successful one may be from time to time, is no guarantee of
anything, nor are many other things in life. Heraclitus built a whole
philosophy on this view back in pre-Socratic days. At worst the
beginning of a poem has been for me, what Roger White called a poor
connection on a telephone line. I often have the feeling, now, in the first
seconds when I talk to someone on the phone, even someone I know well,
that I have no idea who it is, so immersed am I often in the writing. I
remember reading an account by one of the children of Charles Dickens
and how they would often go into Dickens’ study. Dickens would look at
them. The child would say something and Dickens would look right at
and through the child as if he did not even see them at all. This is how I
recall reading this account of his life over a decade ago now. I’m not in
his league, but there is definitely an immersion process I find when
writing. I please myself mostly in my writing; I publish literally millions
of words on the internet. Fame and wealth will elude me and, for the most
part, the problems and successes, the words of encomium and opprobrium
that are the experience of the famous and rich writers like Dickens,
among many others, remain far distant from my experience.

5. After a weekend recently involving 20 hours of socializing, I was
engaged in a 90 minute telephone call on Sunday evening and then, on
Monday, in a 90 minute conversation with a friend. Although neither of
these experiences were unpleasant, I felt as if they were part of the slow
sucking of my life forces. I handle as much as three or four hours of the
social, but 20++ in a two or three days period is something I now avoid if
at all possible. The psyche has lost its social flavour and the pleasures
that used to come from hour after hour of listening and talking.
I do not have to face the various degrees of trauma, the varying severity
of calamities and the diverse social entanglements that have been part of
the long march in my life from six to fifty six: ill-health, student
pressures, marital tensions, employment problems, perplexities in my sex
life, frustrations in Baha’i community life, worries in my affinal and
consanguineal families, worries in raising children and in financial
matters, among a list as long as your proverbial arm. Most of these
problematic aspects of life have now been removed from my shoulders by
the mysterious dispensations of fate and time, circumstance, planning
and, I like to think, a Watchful Providence. In their place of these
complexities of life I have been given the joys of creative writing. There
is still a creative tension that comes from living, from the inevitable
conversations and social activity, from what seems unavoidable anxieties
of daily life and a residue of bi-polar problems. But, I really feel I have
no reason to complain. Of course, like others, I do complain on occasion
as does my wife. One of the many reasons for being married which I
have always liked—a sharing of solitude—also allows for a sharing of the
complaints against, and along the final turns in the road of, life.
Essay #2:
LETTER WRITING:
2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS--JOB
HUNTING 1961-2003
The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer use in the
job-hunting world, should help anyone wanting to know something about
my professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might
be useful for the few who want to assess my suitability for some
advertised/unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize
again, I never apply for anymore. I stopped applying for full-time jobs
six years ago in 2001 and part-time ones four years ago in 2003. I also
left the world of volunteer activity, except for work in one international

6. organization, a world religion, the Baha’i Faith, two years ago in May
2005. Pension age of 65, which I will be in eighteen months time, sees
me self-employed as a writer-poet. I gradually came to this role in the
years by degrees after I left full-time employment in 1999, nearly nine
years ago this month.
Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 50, 60 or
sometimes 70 and 80 hours a week in a job---and many other hours
devoted to community activity in many of its forms marked a turning
point for me. I could devote my time, at last, to a much more extensive
involvement in writing. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary and
hopefully stimulating leisure-time-parttime-fulltime pursuit. In my case
in these early years of my late adulthood, writing is full-time about 60
hours a week.1 I have replaced paid employment and activity with
people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure,
namely, writing and reading.
Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of
the person, their experience and their philosophy. For many years I set
out this experience in an attachment which followed this introduction.2
If, as Carl Jung writes, we are what we do; and if, as Abdu’l-Baha writes,
we are what we think, then some of what I was and am can be found in
that attachment. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these
days since it goes on for nearly 30 pages, but more than forty years in the
professional and non-professional job-world produces a great pile of
stuff. This attachment was the last resume I used when I was in the job
hunting game in 2003. I sometimes make it available, when appropriate;
I occasionally update it, of course, to include many of the writing projects
I have taken on during these first years of my retirement from full-time,
part-time, casual and volunteer activity. I up-date it for the internet which
is virtually the only place it as a purpose any more. I place segments of it,
as suited to the situation, to the site, to the person, and hope it ultimately
attracts—along with other writings—the recipient to a Cause that has
dominated my life since at least the early 1960s.
The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the
document, the entry ticket which, over the years, has opened up the
possibilities of another adventure, another pioneering move to another
town, another state or country, another location, work in another
organization, another portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the
case in the years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should,
for some reason, movement from place to place be necessary or desired
again. For one never knows in this world of change, just ask Heraclitus.

7. Look him and his ideas up in the Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. But,
at the moment, such movement seems unlikely as I go through these early
years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life. In the
quiet comfort of my study, with my wife’s lovely garden at my window
and the most fruitful lemon tree at centre-stage to remind me of the bitter-
sweet aspects of life, moving, indeed going, anywhere is the last thing on
my mind.
In the last four years, age 60 to 64, then, which are the first of my late
adulthood as developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80,
and in what are these years of early retirement(1999 to 2008), I have been
able to write to a much greater extent than I had been able in my early
and middle adulthood(1964 to 2004) when student, job, family and the
demands of various aspects of community life kept my nose to the
grindstone as they say colloquially. And now, with the unloading of much
of the volunteer work I had had for years and which I also took on from
1999-2005, with my last child having left home in 2005 and a more
settled home environment than I’ve ever had, the years of late
adulthood(age 60 to 80) beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects
this shift in my activity-base and it is available on request should this
brief essay tempt you.
The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern
for forty years is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi.
Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and
their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines
of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime.
Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth,
nor is a long list of jobs, although some degree of inner change, some
inner shifting is just about inevitable, or so it seems to me, especially in
these recent decades. For many millions of people during the years
1961-2001, my years of being jobbed and applying for same, the world
was my and their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although
there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came
to be seen increasingly in a global context. But, in the only French
quotation you will find in this essay: Plus c’est change, plus ca la meme
chose. This is the balance to old Heraclitus’ philosophy. For it is based on
a polar-opposite view to his. Stasis, it seems, is as much a part of life as
change—probably more so.
During those years when I was looking for amusement, education and
experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment
security and comfort, my adventurous years of pioneering, my applying-

8. for-job days, the forty year period 1961-2001, so much happened. I will
not even attempt a cursory summary here. My resume was altered many
times, of course, during the more than forty years that I used such a
document. It is now, for the most part, as I indicated above, not used in
these years of my retirement, except as an information, bio-data base, a
vehicle for interested readers.
This document is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing,
especially my poetry, although some poets regard their CV, resume, bio-
data, lifeline, life-story, personal background as irrelevant to their work.
I frequently use this resume at various website locations on the internet
when I want to provide some introductory background on myself or
engage in a dialogue for some purpose or other. I could list many new
uses after forty years of only one use--to help me get a job, make more
money, experience some enrichment to my life, etcetera. The use of the
resume saves one from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. I don't
have to tell the story again and again in resume after resume to the point
of utter tedium as I did so frequently when applying for jobs, especially
in the days before the email and the internet in the late 1980s and early
1990s when my job application process was beginning to fade anyway.
A few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some
aspect of life’s game goes on or comes to a quick end at the other end of
the electronic set of wires.
During those job-hunting years 1961-2003 I applied for some four
thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of those forty years!
This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can
calculate for this forty++ year period. The great bulk of the thousands of
letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, quite
exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small
handful of perhaps half a dozen of those letters in a file in the Letters:
Section VII, Sub-Section X of my autobiographical/memoir work, I have
entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Given the thousands of hours over
those forty years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the
importance of this key to the pioneering venture that is my life; given the
amount of paper produced and energy expended in the process; given the
amount of writing done in the context of these various jobs and roles,3
some of the correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written
story of my life.4
It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire, to write this short
statement fitting all those thousands of resumes, all those job
applications, into a larger context: the things we do when we retire!5

9. ____________________________FOOTNOTES___________________
__________
1 This 60 hours involves reading, posting on the internet, developing
my own website and writing in several genres. With 56 hours devoted to
sleep, the other 50 hours are filled with ‘other stuff.’
2 I sometimes include my resume with this general statement of
employment and its focus on the application process. But I only include
the resume, as I say, with this statement when it seems appropriate, on
request, or in my memoirs. I have not included it here in this posting.
3 Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research
Institute in 1964(or perhaps and arguably with that essay in grade eight in
1957 that won me a public speaking contest in the town of Burlington and
its primary schools) I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries,
reports, essays, evaluations, subject notes, inter alia, in my many jobs.
None of that material has been kept in any of my files and, over 40 years,
it amounted to literally millions, an uncountable, number of words and a
guesstimated 10,000 documents of writing.
4 The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-
lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1957 to 2007; and
another 25 volumes of internet postings at: discussion sites, message
boards, forums and special topic locations. I guesstimate the collection
contains about 5000 letters, emails and assorted documents. This does not
include, of course, those thousands of job applications and their replies,
the thousands of emails and an unnumbered quantity of in-house letters of
a basically trivial/non-archival nature at places where I was employed. I
have kept, as I say above, about half a dozen to a dozen of the job
applications and their replies, and several hundred emails.
5 Since the late 1980s, say 1988-2008, thousands of emails have been
sent to me and replies have been written but, like the job application,
most have been deleted from any potential archive. For the most part
these deleted emails seem to have no long term value in an archive of
letters. They were deleted as quickly as they came in. Of course there
are other emails, nearly all of the correspondence I have sent and received
since about 1990 to 1995 which would once have been in the form of
letters, is now in the form of emails. They are kept in my letter-files. In
August 2007 I began to keep such item only in electronic form.
________________
That’s all folks!
_______________________

10. ____________________________FOOTNOTES___________________
__________
1 This 60 hours involves reading, posting on the internet, developing
my own website and writing in several genres. With 56 hours devoted to
sleep, the other 50 hours are filled with ‘other stuff.’
2 I sometimes include my resume with this general statement of
employment and its focus on the application process. But I only include
the resume, as I say, with this statement when it seems appropriate, on
request, or in my memoirs. I have not included it here in this posting.
3 Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research
Institute in 1964(or perhaps and arguably with that essay in grade eight in
1957 that won me a public speaking contest in the town of Burlington and
its primary schools) I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries,
reports, essays, evaluations, subject notes, inter alia, in my many jobs.
None of that material has been kept in any of my files and, over 40 years,
it amounted to literally millions, an uncountable, number of words and a
guesstimated 10,000 documents of writing.
4 The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-
lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1957 to 2007; and
another 25 volumes of internet postings at: discussion sites, message
boards, forums and special topic locations. I guesstimate the collection
contains about 5000 letters, emails and assorted documents. This does not
include, of course, those thousands of job applications and their replies,
the thousands of emails and an unnumbered quantity of in-house letters of
a basically trivial/non-archival nature at places where I was employed. I
have kept, as I say above, about half a dozen to a dozen of the job
applications and their replies, and several hundred emails.
5 Since the late 1980s, say 1988-2008, thousands of emails have been
sent to me and replies have been written but, like the job application,
most have been deleted from any potential archive. For the most part
these deleted emails seem to have no long term value in an archive of
letters. They were deleted as quickly as they came in. Of course there
are other emails, nearly all of the correspondence I have sent and received
since about 1990 to 1995 which would once have been in the form of
letters, is now in the form of emails. They are kept in my letter-files. In
August 2007 I began to keep such item only in electronic form.
________________
That’s all folks!
_______________________