1963 Was A Complex Year

The Baha’i community in 1963, when the apex of its administration was elected, had about half a million adherents. The deep conservatism of society just about everywhere was beginning to undergo a tremendous shift. The question and the issues in relation to this shift are immensely complex.

The last several decades are, among other things, the story of this shift. This poem is written from a perspective looking back thirty-four years to London in 1963. -Ron Price with thanks to Spencer Pearce and Don Piper, editors, Literature of Europe and America in the 1960s, Cambridge UP, NY, 1989.

The Beatles, the government and the flower children got it wrong back then in ’631: it was a thousand times more complex than they ever imagined and right outside everyone’s perspective—except for a few—as the tenth stage of history opened as if in some second generation Garden of Eden.

This grand design2, a million miles from the Profumo affair, obscenity issues3 and confessional poetry, 4 was so much more than Adam and Eve could ever be, a new beginning with new forces to deploy as history pursued its predestined course.

Ron Price
26 July 1997

1. The Beatles released their first LP in 1963: Please Please Me.
2. The Universal House of Justice refers to Shoghi Effendi’s vision as ‘the grand design’ in its first letter 30 April 1963, in Wellspring of Guidance, Universal House of Justice, USA, 1969, p.1.
3. In the summer of 1963 a sex scandal dominated English news, the Profumo affair. In 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover was established as ‘not obscene’; in 1962 the Vassall case, involving obscenity and homosexuality, titillated English sensibilities.
4. The New Poetry was published in 1962 by Al Alvarez. It contained a strong confessional element.