MORE COMPLEX THAN EVER

Six weeks after my pioneering life began and, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was hotting up in mid-October 1962, Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened in New York. One of the theatre critics, Howard Taubman, wrote that Albee’s characters were “vibrant with dramatic urgency.”1 My own life was faced with a period of dramatic urgency as well. It was not so vibrant, as I recall, but my life was busy: pioneering to a new town, aiming to pass nine matriculation subjects, six months left in the Ten Year Crusade. Like the antagonistic relationship between Martha and George in this play, my future antagonisms in marital relationships, my part in the war between the sexes, had yet to come. Twenty months after the theatre opening, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor would enact Albee’s play on the silver screen. It was a year before my first marriage with its own tragic ending a decade later in a complex and tragic world that was the world of my adulthood. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Howard Taubman, “The Theatre: Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid,’” the New York Times On The Web, October 15th 1962.

Six months before my
pioneering life began,
Edward, you wrote about
the theatre of the absurd.1

The difficulty of talking,2
communicating, beginning
while that soul was energizing
the planet, its radiance not
beclouded by His human temple
in complex ways some resulting
in a perception of the unrelenting
malignancy of incomprehensible
cosmic powers and preoccupation
with failure, dread, a fallen world,
purposelessness, death and absurdity.

So it was this world they told
and so it was this world I tried
to teach in the next 40 years
where men were uncommitted
except to subtle and complex
systems of individualism
linked to gardens, families,
jobs, TV and a cornucopia
of hobby apparatus--with
systems of beliefs long gone
and an endless game, sometimes
savage, comic, pathetic, mysterious,
compassionate, many things.

It became more complex than ever
and impossible to verify the past
or so your fellow dramatist said
on March 4th 19623 just before
I pioneered to the next town.

1Edward Albee, “Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” The New York Times On the Web, February 25th 1962.
2 The theatre of the absurd can be dated from December 10th 1896. See Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, Twayne Pub. Inc., NY, 1967, p.26.
3 Harold Pinter, The Sunday Times, March 4th 1962.

Ron Price
March 6th 2006

Since no one has reponded to my first posting here some 4 months ago in the "relationships all over" sub-section of "The Lounge", I might add a posting myself on the topic of relationships. Issues related to relationships we will all have with us always, even unto the end of our days.
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Whatever sense of fancifulness, what some call conceit or pleasure, whatever empathetic responsiveness and emotional relatedness I exhibit or achieve, and I have done in my relationships as a teacher, a parent, a member of a community, et cetera, I do not find I do so to anything like the same extent all the time. This is of course true of all of us. For there is, as I have said many times in the text of my writings, fragmentation, diversity and conflict, incompleteness and dissatisfaction. These abstract words have very concrete meanings in reality and they exist in our walks, our journeys in life. I have had a sense of wholeness in much of life's personal journey, but this is not always the case in relationships, in all the journey. You can't have it all. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You wins some and you loses some.-Ron[8D]

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married for 41 years, teacher for 35 years and a Baha'i for 49 years.

No one has posted yet to your threads.

However, many of us love to read your poetic outlook about your personal experiences and life in general.

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Cheers,
Shlomo Tommer
Top Synergy Admin
Facebook me!

I'll keep posting from time to time and I thank you, Mr. Tommer, for your encouraging words. -Ron

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married for 41 years, teacher for 35 years and a Baha'i for 49 years.