KMC Forums - James Bond: A Retrospective

With the showcasing of half a century of the Bond style, I post the following 3 prose-poems in relation to how this icon came into society and my life. For readers who prefer short posts, I suggest you just skim or scan or move on to something else.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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THE SECRET AGENT MAN

In life and in the arts there are old formula which weave their magic again and again in our lives. One such formula had its birth or perhaps its most significant and popular and modern incarnation in 1953. That was a very big year for the Baha�i community, an international group I have been assoicated with now for nearly 60 years. The year 1953 saw the completion of the mother-temple of the west in Chicago and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Of course, Ian Fleming, the creator of what has become the world�s most famous secret-agent-man and superhero, James Bond 007, had no idea what that year meant to a global community of some 200,000 Baha�is back then. It is quite probable that he had never heard of the Baha�i Faith at all back in 1953. But in 1953 his first book Casino Royale appeared and it was followed by 13 more books.

In 1962, the first 007 film Dr. No starred Sean Connery. I pioneered for or perhaps in the Canadian Baha�i community that year. I moved to a nearby town in Canada, Dundas, at the far western end of Lake Ontario. My Baha�i life and my pioneering life follow the time trajectory of 007. James Bond films are an outrageously popular fantasy genre with a secret agent man who is handsome and well-known wherever he goes�and who attracts stunningly beautiful women. Real secret agent men, of course, are just the opposite that is, secret types who try to blend in and don�t do things that attract attention. Fleming�s hero is a globe trotter who goes again and again to exotic locations and slugs it out with the bad guys. These stories are tales of leisure which are adventures, scenes of life and death. They are anything but leisure holidays. They are modern fairy tales with 007 as the knight, the villain as the dragon and lots of beautiful women as the maidens.1-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 28th 2005; and 1Christopher Lindner, editor, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester UP, 2003.

It�s outrageous really to call
007 a spy, a secret agent man.
He�s the antithesis of such an
individual. But, of course, the
Bond books & movies are not
about reality are they, Mr. Jones?

They�re about mass entertainment;
no one is kidding anyone here
about these fantasy productions.

And no one is kidding anyone
when I call myself a secret agent
man too, a spy, who came in out
of Canada�s cold down to Australia.
I was a man who often felt like a spy
without those pretty girls, but who
represented a political worldview,
a global cosmology, the coming
zeitgeist, the spirit of the age that
the world was about to enter.......

I was someone on the outside who
had a message for the inside, for
all the powers of the world did
they but know it, but they didn�t.

It was a secret; just about always,
I was the only one who knew it,
who was at all privy-wherever I
went during this epochal period.

Ron Price
May 28th 2005
Updated on: 3/10/�12
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MORE SUBTLE THAN BOND

In Casino Royale there are already the elements for the building of a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules, play situations and side issues. The pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which the final moment is deferred, how foregone conclusions are reconfirmed by ingenious deviations and how various trickeries make rings around the opponents.

The greatest pleasure arises not from excitement but from relief. -Ron Price with thanks to Umberto Eco, "Narrative Structures in Fleming", Gender, Language and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, Glenwood Irons, editor, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992, pp. 157-182.
In the several genres of Pioneering Over Four Epochs Price describes his experience with a system, an order, a framework, a structure at once precise and vast, articulated in an aesthetic form of great beauty, but immensely various in its application from place to place and situation to situation; indeed often it appeared absurd, impossible of achievement.

Some of the goals of both the system and individual life were always far off; some were achievable, short term entities. Pleasures arose in the most surprising places, partly because of the heterogeneity of the groups, partly because of the changes in experience from decade to decade and because of the relief from the tension that so often arose from place to place. -Ron Price, Comment on Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Published Manuscript on the Internet, 2004.

Casino Royale came out in 1953(1)
and James Bond has been with us
ever since�..That same year saw
the beginning of the Kingdom of God
and the beginning of the ninth stage
of history for this embryonic global
community. Both build an Order,
fight for truth, justice and the rules
of the game---just a different set of
rules, a different fight, a different plan,
defeat the right and left wings of the
hosts of the world with romance, and
drama, the greatest in the world's long
spiritual history as far back as Adam!!

But one, thusfar, so subtle, so elusive,
so capable of a far different cinematic
description, far different than the Bonds
of yesteryear and all their ingenious
virtuosity and trickery and bold eroticism.

1 the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming

Ron Price
16 October 2004
Updated on 3/10/�12
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A LIFETIME CHOREOGRAPHY OF DEPARTURES

I don�t like good-byes; they are always sad; somehow you can never quite say it all, what needs to be said, I mean, but for some reason, can�t. -Overheard on a train, or was it a bus or a plane?

Our departures are choreographed clumsily:
from those slow exits when your organs of
sight and speech are put on shutdown and
you lay about becoming someone else whom
you can�t even recognize; to those simple
goodbyes in one of those towns you lived in
after several years of tightly-packed life. A
perfunctory wave, a moist kiss colliding
distractedly, with a touch of embarrassment
and a don�t forget to write! And you do and
you will, but after ten or fifteen towns they
all somehow slip into a grey, not-quite-oblivion.

There is much less choreography of departure
now in these middle years. You can carve a good-
bye in the hazy air as quick as a wink, merge with
the pedestrians in another delirious street, flag a cab
and slip into anonymity as fast as James Bond
in yet another incarnation, but you don�t and you won�t
for this hello is one that will endure forever.

You are no longer bored with safety;
your world is no longer dense with unarticulated motives;
you are no longer keen to populate your world
with private mystery, become yet again an inexplicable stranger
climbing a ladder, moving through ambition�s corridors,
the fresh ambience of another town
where you can make a name before hitting the road again,
in this wide world and another mise-en-scene.

-Ron PriceCasino Royale Dr. No