After my years of early childhood(1944-194, I enjoyed life as a student for nearly twenty years; for many years I enjoyed teaching, perhaps as many as thirty to thirty five, full and part-time. I don't think I was a natural teacher, but I grew into it. After several years I became successful; I became a person enjoyed by my students and enjoying them. I loved to explain things and rarely made a questioner feel stupid for asking. Although I had broad intellectual interests, my pursuit of career, family commitments, simple lack of money and my involvement in the Baha'i Faith left little time for other activities: I did not play golf or follow sports after the age of 21; I did not take up painting or cooking or photography or anything one could call a hobby, although I did collect stamps in my teens; I watched little TV, had no TV from 1956 to 1976, although after I retired I watched over two hours a day; I rarely went to movies, to various forms of entertainment or ate out. For 40 years I played the guitar and led sing-alongs. I joined the Baha'i Faith with its world of meetings and outings, lounge-rooms, conferences and clusters. I went for a daily walk of about half an hour among a host of other domestic, familial and social activities that are part of the lives of fathers and husbands in the west.

Given all the television shows, commercials, and infinite number of images that people are confronted with every day, their creators usually go by unnoticed, working behind the scenes. Their identities are known to a knowledgeable few, but for the most part, they remain anonymous. In place of sentences and paragraphs, aesthetic devices are used to portray mood and appeal to the senses of sight and sound. At its lowest point, mediums within media such as television, film, music, and computers can appeal to people's lack of attention. A lack of the ability to read will not hinder their enjoyment for any given sitcom or video game. Readers of new work through the use of appropriation, if the work is successful, will be able to disregard the original author's influence on the creation. The author will have become an inactive participant, whose roll will no longer extend itself into the piece's interpretation. The death of the author is the only thing that will yield a pure, untainted view of the piece. Some may say that this authorless creation lacks soul. Perhaps. On the other hand, when one views the credits at the end of some program, some film, it is clear that the creation is the collective work of many and could be said to possess a collective soul. Perhaps this notion of the collective soul has been present right back to the beginning of narrative in the western tradition. In place of speculations and fabrications about the narrator of Hesiod, for example, modern analysts are returning us to the way Hesiod the narrator, the Sender of the Way,5 would surely want to be understood--through his words. If we don't know who wrote the words, does it matter.

Often, though, if not to a significant extent, we come to be known through our body language. A study of body language reveals how much of our entire communication process relies on body language. I was often seen as a laid-back person. One of my students once said that he thought I was so laid back that I might as well have been parallel to the ground. I never felt I was super cool like, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, Jim Morrison in the Doors or Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. They were all cool and I was not in their league.

Toynbee discusses the "piling up of colossal buildings in honour of a god", a "monarch who was an object of worship because he was a guarantor of peace through unity." He says that during the Third and Fourth Dynasties of Egyptian civilization these great structures, like the Sphinx of 2575 BC, were a mark "not of a temporary rally in a long-drawn out losing battle against the forces of social disintegration, but of an early stage of social growth." Their distinctiveness parallels the beautiful exactness of workmanship with the Parthenon. It is fitting then for Harold Bloom, in his analysis of W.B. Yeats' arguably most famous poem The Second Coming, written in 1919, three months before the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, to interpret the poem as 'the second birth of the Egyptian Sphinx." Of course, I would add my own interpretation in terms of "the early stage of social growth" of a new Force, a new Revelation, that was just about to begin the opening stage, the opening note, of a teaching Plan. -Ron Price with thanks to Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.9, 1963(1954), p. 690.

Yes, there was a turning, a turning,

for that was the core

of a message that thousands

had come to adore.1

Yes, there was a falcon, royal,

that was at the door

with his message for every broken bird

to free it from the gore and more.

Yes, things fell apart

and the centre did not hold,

but a new centre formed

a new revelation, so bold.

The Second Coming

had come and gone.

Now a lion moved its slow thighs;

a light in the darkness now shone.

The blood-dimmed tide

rose along the shore

sapping all conviction

from the best of men at war.

Slowly, inch by inch,

the Son laid down a Plan

that would take the ocean's

Water unobtrusively to man.

1. By 1919 thousands, virtually all the Baha'is, had turned to 'Abdu'l-Baha. -5/10/'00.

2. This poem uses some of the imagery and phraseology of Yeats' poem. ---Ron Price