French Composer Maurice Jarre: Passed Away 30/3/09

[RonPrice]

NEW LIFE AND A NEW LARA

Oscar-winning French composer Maurice Jarre who wrote the rich, lyrical scores for films including Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, died last weekend in Los Angeles at the age of 84. I post here this prose-poem as a personal quasi-eulogy to this pioneer-traveller in the world of music composition for film.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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Ten weeks after I had come to the firmest and most realistic of decisions I had yet made regarding my future career—the decision to become a primary school teacher--the film Dr. Zhivago was released. During my pre-adult life(1963-1944), I had wanted to be a bricklayer, a fireman and a professional baseball player--in that order. My career as a primary school teacher also proved unrealistic and was short-lived, although it proved to be much more realistic than those other three alternatives mentioned above, all of which were early life enthusiasms born of childhood and adolescent play and dreams.

On 22 December 1965, the day that the film Dr. Zhivago was released, I was on my way to a Baha’i youth winter school at the University of Waterloo campus in Waterloo Ontario. The film was shot in the previous months while my father lay dying in Dundas Ontario, while my mother was finishing her working life and retiring and while I was majoring in history, philosophy and sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. In the first year(22/12/65-22/12/66) of the release of Dr. Zhivago, a film that became one of the most popular 20th century movies, I moved to Windsor to study under Dr. Jameson Bond, an anthropologist at the University of Windsor and a Baha’i who had lived in the high Arctic for a dozen years; I also began my teacher training and started a relationship with Miss Judy Gower whom I married in August 1967.

After pondering with some anxiety for eight months(12/65-8/66) the decision to teach school in the Canadian Arctic and after finishing my degree; after selling ice-cream for the Good Humour Company for three summer months and after attending a one week Baha’i youth training institute in Michigan, I left my home town, family and friends and started teaching career on Baffin Island among the Inuit. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 March 2008.

I knew nothing of Dr. Zhivago
until years later and little of the
Russian revolution or communism,
for that matter, although I had studied
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.1 I had discovered my
own romance not unlike Zhivago’s in
a revolution of quite another order in a
snow-bound world of quite another time.

With tragedy and a new high-seriousness
built into my daily life and with decisions
made---the enterprize all came to naught:
the north, the Arctic, the Eskimos, health,
marriage, career and, like Zhivago, I found
an inner poetic beauty, a new life and--like
Zhivago--I created one with my own Lara2
and life went on and on toward my own
mysterious end which has not yet come.

1 Written by Karl Marx in the summer of 1844.
2 While married, but separated from my first wife, I formed a relationship with a woman who became my second wife in December 1975.

Ron Price
30 March 2008

[RonPrice]

.....and here is my 2nd prose-poem as part of that personal memoiristic eulogy.-Ron in Tasmania
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EPIC

The shooting of the film Lawrence of Arabia was completed in the first two months of my own travel-pioneering life for the Canadian Bahá'í community, from 20 August to 20 October 1962. The film was released in North America on 16 December 1962 as I was finishing my matriculation exams in Ontario at the age of 18. Lawrence of Arabia has been ranked as the greatest film in the epic genre; it won seven Academy Awards that year and is today regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema. The film depicts the experiences of T.E. Lawrence, author of The Pillars of Wisdom, an autobiographical account penned in the aftermath of WWI. It tells of the experiences of British soldier T. E. Lawrence during WWI serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918 against the Ottoman Turks.-Ron Price with thanks to “Lawrence of Arabia(film),” in Wikipedia, 1 April 2009.

There are epics and epics, eh Lawrence?
Little did I know that I would come to
write one forty years later and they could
argue over whether I, too, was egotistical.

Your epic has many twists and turns, eh?
But that is the way life is, Lawrence. I’ve
found it so and I never even went to war,
but I must say, Lawrence, that my years
have seen a war of sorts, goodness, it has
never ended.1 It’s been an epic tale and
associated with what well may become
the greatest drama in the world’s religious
history, what Gibbon said was the most
aweful scene in the history of humankind
only he was out by at least 200 years!!!!!!

1 American writer Henry Miller described as "far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the destruction we are now witnessing with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." –Henry Miller quoted in Geoffrey Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, p.55.

Ron Price
1 April 2009