The Hour Had Come

Twenty days after the Centenary of Baha’u’llah’s release(15/12/52) from oppressive imprisonment in the Siyah-Chal, Tihran, synchronizing with the termination of the epoch-making, two month period associated with the Birth of His Revelation, unsurpassed, with the sole exception of the Declaration of His mission, by any episode in the world’s spiritual history—Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett’s tragi-comedy in two-acts, opened in Paris. Three months later, in April-May 1953, the Mother Temple of the West was dedicated and a World Spiritual Crusade was launched. The world premier of Waiitng For Godot was timely, prophetic.-Ron Price with appreciation to Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Baha’i World, Wilmette, 1958, p.46.

You’d1 been writing for the entire
Formative Age with your war on
words and the silence behind them,
the last of those second-generation
modernists who arrived in the 20s
and 30s, turning toward a dark, acrid
and mocking world with its forelorn
hope, bitter regret, emptiness, need
unresolved and everywhere obscurity,
inexorable decline--with your desolate
monologues---realizing how little one
could really understand or explain,
on the edge of that last whimper
with your portrait of boredom, sorrow,
nothingness and futility—the jig was up
with solitude resonating all around you.

We’ve been waiting: He came and went
and a great festival was taking place
in the Realm above.2 The Day of great
rejoicing had arrived to deliver them all
from the fire of remoteness, but so few
knew and fewer understood that the verses
had been sent down and the hour had come.

1 Samuel Beckett
2Baha’u’llah, The Perspicuous Verses
-Ron Price March 8th 2006
 
Beckett

The self-chosen place of the autobiographical mode, the point of real reference, is the act and the situation of writing, which provides a sense of coherence. Coherence can be obtained in many ways in life. But, for me, the autobiographical mode, the situation of writing and its products are an important aid. The recent increase of writings in the autobiographical mode, perhaps as far back as the early 1960s, seems to represent both a reaction to the so-called crisis of the novel and a possible artistic solution to the fragmentary nature of human experience. Yet at the same time the autobiographical turn reveals the paradox inherent in this form insofar as it reflects a nostalgia for stability, continuity, the past experiences and its memories as well as life’s vacuous, empty, semblances of reality, absurdities and vanities.

If conventional autobiographies could be regarded as the proper medium for the realistic representation of a self and for the narrative recovery of past events from the perspective of the present, contemporary autobiographical texts stress the illusory nature of such mythopoetic endeavours. Due to the breakdown of a clear demarcation between reality and fiction or reality and imagination, the traditional conception of the autobiographical genre has lost its degree of certainty and truth. Any sense of perfection, of completeness, of comprehensiveness cannot be achieved in written works and most certainly not in these kinds of writings composed of thousands and thousands of potential scraps of recollection. Memory follows exactly the course of events and chronology, but that which emerges from it is totally different from the actual happening.” –Ron Price with thanks to Alfred Hornung, “Fantasies of the Autobiographical Self: Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Federman, Samuel Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 1989.
 
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