RonPrice
12-23-2005, 05:34 AM
AMIDST THE TRIUMPH OF CONFORMITY
AND THE DEATH OF INDIVIDUALISM
Although the years before my joining the Baha’i Faith were ones with a strong conformist orientation and, although individualism in the movies was moving toward its deathknell, I joined a movement which was, then, small and intense. In a deeply conservative country I took a step which was highly individualistic, but had no conception of just how individualistic my step really was. The late 1950s was a period in which the mask of Faith was being drawn aside in North American society to reveal a search for rebirth. It was a time in which there was a lack of ways to express the deepest suffering. Rock-and-roll woke us up from that dream of the way we were, without negroes or genitalia, and luxury without stress. -Ron Price with thanks to D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Were, Doubleday and Co., Inc., NY, 1977.
Back in ’62 it was breaking down:
a whole structure of moral convictions,
as a new world struggled to be born,
but I knew little of this as we walked
in the evenings in that spring and summer
before my world began its slow explosion
into meaning over three epochs. Of course,
it had been breaking down for some time,
perhaps all the years of my growing up.
Now I can watch it in old movies,
in fleeting encounters
with those vague longings,
part of collective nostalgia
for the way we were,
when we were the preeminent victors,
before our supremacy began to unravel
in rock-and-roll, Vietnam and in
an escapist triviality of the endless
bread and circuses of our epochs.
After forty years of mass terror,
and two centuries of vast social change
young men and women wanted to break
with the past. I made my break in ’59
when I joined this new religion.
The setting of the Dead Poet’s Society,
before self-realization had become cliche,
in a world of simple polarities,
when most people were totally unaware
of modern poetry and that we’d spent
a decade on the eve of destruction.
I was in love with baseball,
fathers were tyrannical,
individualism in the movies
a dead letter1 and all the boys
wanted to become like John Keating
(Robin Williams) in a triumph of conformity.
Ron Price
14 April 1997
1Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, Anchor Press, NY, 1976, p. 177.
AND THE DEATH OF INDIVIDUALISM
Although the years before my joining the Baha’i Faith were ones with a strong conformist orientation and, although individualism in the movies was moving toward its deathknell, I joined a movement which was, then, small and intense. In a deeply conservative country I took a step which was highly individualistic, but had no conception of just how individualistic my step really was. The late 1950s was a period in which the mask of Faith was being drawn aside in North American society to reveal a search for rebirth. It was a time in which there was a lack of ways to express the deepest suffering. Rock-and-roll woke us up from that dream of the way we were, without negroes or genitalia, and luxury without stress. -Ron Price with thanks to D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Were, Doubleday and Co., Inc., NY, 1977.
Back in ’62 it was breaking down:
a whole structure of moral convictions,
as a new world struggled to be born,
but I knew little of this as we walked
in the evenings in that spring and summer
before my world began its slow explosion
into meaning over three epochs. Of course,
it had been breaking down for some time,
perhaps all the years of my growing up.
Now I can watch it in old movies,
in fleeting encounters
with those vague longings,
part of collective nostalgia
for the way we were,
when we were the preeminent victors,
before our supremacy began to unravel
in rock-and-roll, Vietnam and in
an escapist triviality of the endless
bread and circuses of our epochs.
After forty years of mass terror,
and two centuries of vast social change
young men and women wanted to break
with the past. I made my break in ’59
when I joined this new religion.
The setting of the Dead Poet’s Society,
before self-realization had become cliche,
in a world of simple polarities,
when most people were totally unaware
of modern poetry and that we’d spent
a decade on the eve of destruction.
I was in love with baseball,
fathers were tyrannical,
individualism in the movies
a dead letter1 and all the boys
wanted to become like John Keating
(Robin Williams) in a triumph of conformity.
Ron Price
14 April 1997
1Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, Anchor Press, NY, 1976, p. 177.