MORE SUBTLE THAN BOND

In Casino Royale there are already the elements for the building of a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules, play situations and side issues. The pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which the final moment is deferred, how foregone conclusions are reconfirmed by ingenious deviations and how various trickeries make rings around the opponents. The greatest pleasure arises not from excitement but from relief. __________________________ and more.............. below................. -Ron Price with thanks to Umberto Eco, "Narrative Structures in Fleming", Gender, Language and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, Glenwood Irons, editor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992, pp. 157-182.

In the several genres of Pioneering Over Three Epochs Price describes his experience with a system, an order, a framework, a structure at once precise and vast, articulated in an aesthetic form of great beauty, but immensely various in its application from place to place and situation to situation; indeed often it appeared absurd, impossible of achievement. Some of the goals of both the system and individual life were always far off; some were achieveable, short term entities. Pleasures arose in the most surprising places, partly because of the heterogeneity of the groups, partly because of the changes in experience from decade to decade and because of the relief from the tension that so often arose from place to place. -Ron Price, Comment on Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript.

Casino Royale1 came out in 1953
and James Bond has been with us ever since.
That same year saw the beginning of
the Kingdom of God on Earth
and the beginning of the ninth stage
of history for this embryonic community.
Both build an Order, fight for truth,
justice and the rules of the game----
just a different set of rules, a different
fight, a different plan, defeat the
right and left wings of the hosts of
the world with romance, drama,
the greatest in the world's spiritual history.

But one, thusfar, so subtle, so elusive,
so capable of a far different cinematic
description, far different than the James Bonds
of yesteryear and all their ingenious virtuosity
and trickery and bold eroticism.

Ron Price
16 October 1998

1 the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming

More on James Bond and a connecting link to my life and the religion I first became associated with in 1953.
_____________________________

THE SECRET AGENT MAN

In life and in the arts there are old formula which weave their magic again and again in our lives. One such formula had its birth or perhaps its most significant and popular and modern incarnation in 1953. That was a very big year for the Baha’i community—the completion of the mother-temple of the west in Chicago and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth. Of course, Ian Fleming, the creator of what has become the world’s most famous secret agent and superhero, James Bond 007, had no idea what that year meant to a global community of some 200,000 Baha’is. It is quite probably that he had never heard of the Baha’i Faith at all back in 1953. But in 1953 his first book Casino Royale appeared and it was followed by 13 more books. In 1962, the first 007 film Dr. No starred Sean Connery. I pioneered for or perhaps in the Canadian Baha’i community that year. I moved to a nearby town in Canada, Dundas, at the far western end of Lake Ontario. My Baha’i life and my pioneering life follow the time trajectory of 007.

James Bond films are an outrageously popular fantasy genre with a secret agent man who is handsome and well-known wherever he goes—and who attracts stunningly beautiful women. Real secret agent men, of course, are just the opposite that is, secret types who try to blend in and don’t do things that attract attention. Fleming’s hero is a globe trotter who goes again and again to exotic locations and slugs it out with the bad guys. These stories are tales of leisure which are adventures, scenes of life and death. They are anything but leisure holidays. They are modern fairy tales with 007 as the knight, the villain as the dragon and lots of beautiful women as the maidens.1-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 28th 2005; and 1Christopher Lindner, editor, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester UP, 2003.

It’s outrageous really to call
007 a spy, a secret agent man.
He’s the antithesis of such
an individual. But, of course,
these books and movies are not
about reality are they, Mr. Jones?
They’re about mass entertainment;
no one is kidding anyone here
about these fantasy productions.

And no one is kidding anyone
when I call myself a secret agent
man too, a spy, who came in
out of Canada’s cold down to Australia.
I was a man who often felt like a spy
Without those pretty girls, but who
represented a political worldview,
a global cosmology, a coming zeitgeist,
the spirit of the age that the world
was about to enter. I was someone
on the outside who had a message
for the inside, for all the powers
of the world did they but know it—
but they didn’t; it was a secret and,
just about always, I was the only one
who knew it, who was at all privy to it—
wherever I went during these epochs.

Ron Price
May 28th 2005

This is about another James Bond in my life....

WRITE YOUR OWN STORY, BOY

Some of us, when young, know what our story is going to be, know what we want to be. Some of us find this story reflected in literature and, finding that literature, that book or books, see our lives set out before us: tragic, heroic, sad, joyful, adventurous, et cetera. Such people seem to know what they want and where they want to go to get it. Others have no idea of their story; the long range simply eludes them. It is just too complex a set of questions, filled with too many options and too many variables to make any clear-cut decision, to see any specific ‘story’ for them. For these people, their life-story often unfolds, evolves, is put together, as the years follow each other one by one. They work out the pattern, if they can see one at all, as they go along. For some of these people a sense of direction comes and goes but, in the main, they never really connect with an overall life thrust that carries them on decade after decade.

For still others, something, some seed, some need, some core, gets planted when they are young, in their teens and twenties, and they run with it for life. They follow their story, their game plan, their drummer and its beat. There is no ideal path, of course, no best story, no one way, we should all go. For the young Baha’i who looks at his life, where he is to go and what he is to do, the challenge is great, the task complex; indeed he is placed in a milieux which will keep him or her busy for all their days.

The growth of the soul in the garden of existence takes place, it seems to me, in optimum conditions. Nothing is too easy. Life is sufficiently complicated to keep the soul--or the inner spiritual powers1--nicely occupied until the end. For we all go on and on until the last hours of our recorded time. Then, we sleep no more; neither do we act. -Ron Price with thanks to “Book Talk”, ABC Radio National, 9 December 1999; and 1‘Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, London, 1907, p.197.

Let me tell you how it went for me, boy,
back then when I was young and trying
to get a hold on life, a sense of clarity
in the haze, the complexity and blaze.

I had simply no idea until October ’65
when I heard James Bond give a talk
on The Tablets of the Divine Plan,
Eskimos and being a precisioned
instrument of The Universal House
of Justice. I tell you, things started
to fall into place, but I often wished
they hadn’t. For I got a new set of
problems associated with pioneering.
Now, noone even believes I’m a pioneer;
they look bemused when I speak of it.
I came to the end of the earth and
to the top-of-the-world on a life-plan,
a game plan that makes me often feel like
a secret-agent man, a second James Bond,
only not as clever-a-dick, or as handsome,
or as rich, or as smooth, never in hollywood.

So, I know where I’m going, but I can’t tell anyone.
I have often got sick, crazy really was what it was
and that did not help my image. I married a lady
who got sick a lot of the time; I kept wearing
myself out not being a moderate man, it seems.
I committed many sins that I would not want
to confess for fear of shame and I wonder,
sometimes, whether my pioneer role was really worth it.
But I believe in the Cause that I’ve worked for all these
years: that is my hope, my aspiration, my dream, my life,
my all. That is what I will take into old age.

Yes, a single day is like life,
no matter how you play it.
You finish in a place and
condition that is virtually
unpredictable at the start.
But your job is to travel
down the day, hour by hour,
minute by minute, running
those errands, examining
those bits of rock under
a microscope, keeping
the large picture in mind
and many, many of the
little pictures as described
quite brilliantly in
The Writings. But,
it seems, you have to
figure it out for yourself,
write your own story, boy.

Amen

Ron Price
10 December 1999