Pioneering Over Four Epochs

3 responses to “Hello world traveller!”

1. admin says:

   January 8, 2007 at 9:30 pm

   Thanks folks for making the entry, the process of blog creation so easy. I write to you from Australia, the country with that beautiful bridge and opera house near.

2. Ron says:

   January 14, 2012 at 9:56 pm

   I edited the above post on World Traveller, but could not figure-out how to ‘save’ it. And so I will post that edited version of this post here/below.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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   Pioneering Over Five Epochs, the title of my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ ……..is a tapestry of statements, reviews and comments about various themes in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the biological and physical sciences, and a list of subjects and topics too long to list. I attempt to endow these themes with many layers of meaning and tries to evoke a complex range of responses in readers.

   I am a Canadian living in Australia and, after decades of writing, I have evolved a style and content which has finally expressed what writers call their voice. By fusing together much from the humanities and the social and physical sciences, from my own life and my religion I try to appeal to both the novitiate and the veteran Baha’i as well as people on a multitude of spiritual and secular paths.

   There is, too, a certain and an inevitable autobiographical aspect to these bits of prose and poetry I have posted at a myriad places in cyberspace. In some ways all of my posts at this site, at this blog, can be seen as one long diary, journal and commentary on life, my life, the life of my society and the ongoing narrative of the emergence from obscurity of the religion I have been associated with for nearly 60 years.

3. Ron says:

   May 11, 2013 at 7:38 pm

   After 15 months it’s time I thanked you, Dyson. I’ll post a little autobiographical piece FYI-Ron
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   TIME AND WRITING
   Reading and circumstance

   Part 1:

   One of the many pleasures I have enjoyed during my retirement from the world of jobs, of paid employment, with its 50 to 70 hours a week of responsibilities, is the freedom I have found to read what I never had time to read, and write what neither time nor circumstances allowed. In my younger years, from childhood and adolescence to early-and-late-middle-age, I also did not have the interest and, when I had the interest, I did not have the time.

   I was occupied with all sorts of things: with growing-up from childhood to adulthood, with sport and having fun, with getting an education, with relationships involving the opposite sex, with family and friends, with social life and many community responsibilities: the Lions Club, the Red Cross, Rostrum, volunteer teaching, the Baha’i Faith, inter alia.

   Part 1.1:

   This piece of writing benefits from the availability of many free online electronic journals and, as I approach the age of 70 in the next 14 months, a broad interest, a developed interest, in many disciplines and fields of learning. One subject of interest developed over the last three decades has been autobiography.

   I have written my autobiography by stages from 1984 to 2013. I have written it from many different locations: in the Northern Territory of Australia, in Western Australia, in Tasmania, in several towns and in several places in those towns. I have written at many different times of the day, at virtually any of the day’s 24 hours. I write after I have experienced some activity or event that moves my emotions or mental faculties, that creates a nostalgia or energy, or both. Each time I write is a now time, a unique time, a unique viewpoint from which my past and future extend from the poi nt at which I am writing.

   During each of these now times, the history of my life, my society, and my beliefs is described differently. There is a different tone and weight, thickness and mode, manner and style to what I write. As I direct my attention to my experiences over the last 70 years, they seem distant or near, indifferent or touching, engrossing or dull, according to the light and manner in which the present moment envisages them.

   I use the word seem with some care and caution. Is the history of my life really dependent on the mode and manner in which that history is seen from the particular now in which I write? The word seem can mean appear in the sense that it only appears but is not real, is not a fact of my life. I might say “I seem to be sick” in the sense that I’m not faking the fact that I am sick. Seem can also mean appear in the sense of something coming into appearance, becoming visible. The sense in which my personal history is deployed, is described, is something, as I say above, that feels near or far, indifferent or touching. Will the personal history I am writing be different at the three different times during which I am writing today? That question can be answered as follows.

   Part 2:

   Something, some fact, in my history will not be different at three different times today. The real chronology, my historical timeline, the actual events will be the same in the face of all of the nows during which I write. Such is the way it seems to me. But will that really be the case? Will the timeline of my life really be the same at all three times? Will the sequence of facta, of data, that compose my life-history be the same throughout the day despite the multiplication of nows from which my personal history is deployed by me while I am writing today? I am forever adding historical facta and subtracting or redescribing them. If a new event is added to my timeline registry, thanks to some activity I have remembered, this may lead to a redescription of a sequence in my life-history, my life-narrative.

   Certain events in my historical timeline may be highlighted by others. Timeline debates–what goes where, what effect a given addition has–are the daily fodder of the classroom historian. They often modify the historical sequences of my life. By and large, though, the timeline is not subject to change; my personal history may take on a different quality according to the light in which the moment presents itself, but the event itself has an unchanging facticity.

   Part 3:
   Over the years, as I write my autobiography in thousands of pages, I look at different kinds of history. There is what you might call an unchanging timeline history on the one hand and, on the other, an affectively shaded, idiosyncratic, history governed by the multiple nows in which I am writing, whenever I begin my account, my story, again.

   My affective and factual personal history is a landscape pitted and scarred and humped beyond description. It is also at times smooth, at other times flowing like a river, and at still other times like the waters in the ocean during a tempest. I have created, over these last 30 years, a myriad of fragmented mini-histories. The multiple now perspective does not undermine the key doctrine, the key facticity, of chronology; I still have a unitary past-to-present-to-future movement in human time taking place.

   My personal history, though, is affectively shaded; it is different tonight from what it was this morning. The construction of chronology is the primary function of thought within a spaco-temporal framework. I examine my inherited spaco-temporal system sometimes in a shaky and self-interested way, at other times in a confident and knowing way. I am not changing my personal or institutional memory, but I often give it a particular ontological dignity and meaning. I have opened the door of meaning by the use of multiple nows; my door has been opened for at least the last 30 years while I’ve been writing my autobiography. Questions have legitimately poured-forth over these years, questions of meaning, interpretation, description.

   Part 4:

   Is the story, the history, of my life always the same? If time can be fractured into the deployment of multiple nows, can the rigid past-present-future linearity of the timeline be sustained? In a new, in a different, perspective I may write in a now which is deeper into the past than those events were dealt with last time I wrote. In fact I have imagined many different personal histories; I have been “into” my past at all sorts of depths and levels, times and sequences.

   I approach the multi-directional flow of time in my life, parting that fabric’s web from the far as well as the near side, reflecting on time and myself as a being-made by time, as well as myself as a fait accompli. As I do this I experience, I suffer, the out-flowering flow of time. I also wonder at the vastness of what has become of my life in time, in the history of my 70 years of living. To cast my eyes over time’s valences is to feel the huge asynchronous inner-web of the temporal which is driving me into some corner of the instant, the now time. There is also an opening through me from that instant, that now, in my disclosure, to the power, the vastness, of the past.

   I am at every instant inter and intra-creating; my compassion is driven into the open. It can never be driven in such a way in a survey of time linking past to future by a causal chain like one of my favourite historians. This is not to say that the causalists like Gibbon or Toynbee do not shed compassionate understanding onto vast swathes of chronology. They do so, though, from within their perspective in which the past is over and done with; here the historian’s magnanimity accords new life to all it touches.1

   Part 5:

   Physical time moves both backward and forward. Psychological time can move both backward and forward as I describe something in my past or present. I can dawdle into the past or actively recover the past with a great variety of speeds. I can fill the present with the anxieties and dreams of the future. Affective-historical time is distinct from psychological time. It is a time as real as the time of physics or psychology. This affective-historical time is the medium and occupant of a unique realm of variable past-present relationships. This time is susceptible to diverse directional arrows. It is through that aperture, that opening into a past, my past, that I see the bi-directional movement that appears to regulate the “flow of time.”

   “Affective time is graspable as a whole, but not in the same way as the “historical whole” understood in chronometric history. The great system thinkers in the philosophy of history: Vico and Spengler, Toynbee, among others–have sought to embrace the totality of the human experience. Affective time presents a different kind of challenge to the holistic thinker; he/she must factor in a mathematical dimension, a calculus of the multiple relationships between any now, any knower, and the past, a flexibility to include the bi-directional character of time. He/she must have some susceptibility to geometrical relations, as they play out in trans-historical relations. But the skill-set required of the affective time historian is not formalistic; he/she must be able to appreciate, inside the calculus of relationships, the privileged, the indifferent, and the meaningless/null category of juxtapositions.”1 -Ron Price with thanks to Frederic Will, Temporal Foundations in the Construction of History: Two Essays, in: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009.

   I often cannot absorb all of some
   journal article, or all of what has
   been my life. I can only get part
   of the parcel, and there is so very
   much to get, so many parcels, that
   there is little point in belabouring
   the fact that I can’t take it all in…

   That’s part of the reality of my life,
   & that’s the way it has always been.
   As far as time is concerned, there are
   so many ways of looking at it. For the
   moment, I thank you, Frederic Will,
   still going into your mid-eighties!!!1

   1 Frederic Will(1928- ) is a Midwestern American writer. Will has been active in many genres: poetry, fiction, cultural history, philosophy, translation, travel memoir. Will was raised on the campus of the University of Illinois, where he remained until going to Philips Andover for his senior year of high school. His subsequent education was at Harvard (1946), Indiana University (B.A. in Classics, 1949), and Yale University (Ph.D. Comparative Literature, 1954). He currently teaches in the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Phoenix(2008-).

   Ron Price
   11/5/’13