The Matrix was released in Australia the very week I taught my last classes as a full-time professional teacher, April 8th 1999. I had been teaching for thirty years. I won’t summarize the details of the plot and all the characters. But some of the theme is as follows: a fundamental discovery is made about the world, namely, that it doesn’t exist. It’s actually a form of simple, or not-so-simple, Virtual Reality designed to lull people into lives of blind obedience to the system.

People obediently go to their jobs every day without knowing that The Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over their eyes. The reality of life, so the view goes, is that people are slaves. The rebels in the film want to crack “the framework” that holds this Matrix in place; in this way they see themselves as freeing humankind. Some believe a messianic One will lead a social uprising; this messianic One will possess both mind power and physical strength. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 November 2006 with thanks to Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 31st 1999.

The world has been in a great sleep
from which it is slowly waking
thanks to that messianic One
and the uprising has begun
silently, unobtrusively, for
the revolution is global and
out of man’s control–it is also
spiritual–having begun within
the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-
Ashariyyih sect of Shiah Islam.
But don’t tell anyone–it’s the
best kept secret-non-secret in
the world and it is slowly rising
from the obscurity in which it
has been shrouded for 160 years.

Ron Price
4 November 2006

PS Who is this guy kidding? The answer, surely, is in the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Green Party, a Christian evangelism, an Islamic conservatism, or in a what, a where, a why, a how, a when???
______________
That’s all folks!

As an individual in contemporary capitalist society I see the world through what I call my Baha’i imaginary. This is a coherent, specifiable, politically non-partisan, cognitive and social map of the world. It is what might be called an ideal type, one of the many ‘ideal types’, a term that finds its origins in the writings of Max Weber. It is but one of a range, part of the available repertoire, of maps of my environment, of social and political constructs for developing a consciousness containing deeply held attitudes and beliefs. This consciousness is also the basis of a vision and, in my own case, a far from arbitrary vision, an intellectual position, that I have incorporated and which has evolved into a way of life, a view of reality through my experience and life history. My poetry tells the story of this incorporation, this evolution, this life history. I live this imaginary, draw on this map, as Douglas Kellner uses the word.1 It is the core of my common sense, as the way I see things and define them as they are, as the way the world is, as the way things should be.
-Ron Price with thanks to 1Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford UP, Stanford, 1989,pp.186-187. the term ‘imaginary’ draws on literature concerning political socialization and political cognitive mapping in Austin Ranney, Channels of Power, Harper and Row, 1983.

I’ve developed this map for decades,
but then there are all these other maps,
the media cyberblitz, the hyperreality,1
which hit me in these last stages of history,2
say, for arguement’s sake, since 1953 and
the beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
And I wonder what is real, any more,
as the polarities of life implode, absorb
each other, in a fascinating, instantaneous,
integrated and immensely complex whole
with the structure of language itself
producing reality,
with structure at the centre
not the individual: 3

And what is this structure?
A sliding, fragmentary, open, evasive underpinning,
but increasingly, for us, formalized, beautified,
a crystal concentrate of magnificence, marvelled at.
She is all loveliness. She is the dawning-place of His signs.4

She will yield, wield, exquisite power:
this matrix of fascination
where we fall prey to her charms,
her seduction in a world
of a staggering ubiquity of things
with media-tape-hype going on fast-forward.

1 These are terms Jean Baudrillard uses to describe the media.
2 1953-1963: stage nine; and 1963 to now: stage ten, of history.
3 Core of post-structuralist thinking and theorizing. This idea is also, it seems to me, central to my Baha’i imaginary position.
4 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.

Ron Price
24 March 2000

What about libertarians, greens, and independents who are right on some things and left on others?

When discussing politics, unfortunately, there’s two sides. Right, Left, and everyone in the middle. The middle doesn’t get a side or a voice.

And it truly sucks.