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: BURN AND HISS : Communion, extinguishedness and annihilation are alternative images of reintegration. They are symbols of a consummation that is ineffable because it is the antithesis of our earthly life. --Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, One Volume Edition, Oxford UP, London, 1972. * : : It burns with the faintest hiss, : extinguishedness, : symbol of a consummation : that is ineffable, : the antithesis of this life. : It burns in my lamp light, : annihilation, : symbol of a reintegration : that no one will see beyond : the gates of the placeless. : Drawn to the flame, : consumed, : symbol of a communion : with nameless, faceless friends : who died a thousand years ago. : O moth! : You can not achieve the ecstacy : of awareness of a great cloud : of witnesses surrounding you. : You can only burn and hiss. : Ron Price : 30 December 1995 : Note: I have spent many years, since acquiring Toynbee’s ten volume Study of History in 1964, reading this historian. He calls the Baha’i Faith ‘a religion of western civilization’ in Volume 7B, p.771. Toynbee was a historian who also saw himself as a poet. (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.16(1955), p.421)

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