TAILORING

After forty years as a pioneer and travel-teacher I have developed what I call "an idiosyncratic teaching style." It is a style that is tailored to each situation, is based on years of experience in bringing this Cause to my contemporaries and on how I perceive the general response of the culture I am living in to the efforts of Baha'is in that culture to teach this new and emerging world religion. This poem is about my efforts to teach two ladies who live around the corner from my home here in George Town Tasmania. The ladies are in their sixties and seventies; one is single and the other married. They both know I am a Baha'i because I have mentioned it on several occasions in our conversations in the first two years of our contact, 2000-01. - Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 2 January 2002.

There is no direct hit here,

a multi-faceted knowledge process

with no grand unified theory,

rather a myriad eyes, voices,

bodies with no one monopoly.

and certainties kept out-of-play,

lots of experiential enthusiasms,

with frequent spot-checks,

answers to big questions played with,

toyed, subtle-ins-and-outs

in a dynamic cluster

of interacting perceptions

being constructed and transformed

by real people and an immense

multiplicity of forces and elements,

viewpoints and heterogeneous reality.

Getting to the point perpetually deferred,

beating around the proverbial bush

but always aiming to connect,

always trying to get right in there

with the light touch and enough

seriousness to keep the fish on the line,

with so many random, tenuously

connected signifiers, with the past

and the future conflated into

a perpetual present and a utopian

longing always somewhere,

indispensable to my thought.1

Two fish, one beyond catching,

playing them off each other

always to my advantage

for my aim is to catch a fish.

1 William McPheron, "Frederick Jameson: Introduction," Internet, 23/10/01...(2/1/02)