| Home | Community | Message Board |
|
You are not signed in. Sign In New Account | Forum Index Search Posts Trusted Vendors Highlights Galleries FAQ User List Chat Store Random Growery » |
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.
|
| Shop: |
| |||||||
|
Bahaichap Registered: 09/15/04 Posts: 19 Loc: George Town Tasm Last seen: 8 years, 7 months |
| ||||||
|
This post may be too long and, if so, I am only too happy to edit-it-down.-Ron Price, Tasmania
____________________ ASPIRATION AND OCCUPATION “Poet” names an aspiration not an occupation...Once a poem is resolved, I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember circumstances, but not sensations, not what it felt like to be writing. This amnesia is almost immediate and most complete when poems are written quickly, but in all cases it occurs. Between poems I am not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve. What is it that I want to achieve? It is that same concentration again. -Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, NY, 1994, p.125. I lose the sense of even having written it. It’s like someone else’s. It surprises me; I may remember some trace element, some vague origin, circumstance. Yes, being a poet, like being a Baha’i, is an aspiration. It often feels like an occupation because of the intensity, energy, time, thought, devoted to the process, especially when the flow comes as fast as it has in recent years. I must stop now: it makes me tired even thinking of it. Ron Price 15 October 1995 ____________________ It is difficult to live to the age of sixty and not have death touch you in different ways. In addition to several family members who have passed on, I pray for more than fifty Hands of the Cause and seventy-five friends and people who have been important to me over the years. Due to my belief system the emotional disarray that often touches people when loved ones die has been rare and short-lived. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the founder of modern language theory, I have since about 1980 had a certain preoccupation with death. There have been times when the word obession seemed an appropriate one in relation to my feelings about death, but since my treatment with fluvoxamine in 2002, the experience of death as impending only occurs at night for short periods of time. When I wrote the following poem nearly ten years ago now I had what was, in some ways, an obsession with the subject of death. AT LAST From Sappho to Dickinson, Rossetti, and the nightingales, death has been an imaginative obsession for many women poets-an obsession resumed in the twentieth century by poets like Millay, Mina Loy and Laura Riding, Smith and Plath,1 male poets like John Berryman and Jack Kerouac and other writers like James Agee, Poe and Magritte. Knowing this pleased me because, since 1980, death has both haunted and attracted me. Somehow it did not seem right and yet, in another sense, it seemed the most natural of obsessions. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p.291. These words, these prayers, so many deeds, so many years have helped dissolve those walls which thankfully separate us from them: you wouldn’t want to go around hallucinating, would you? Enmeshed as we are in each other’s lives and will be, through these words, this unpopular art which can’t be hung for all to see or moulded like that stone statue, or turned into fine sound over time, but will remain on paper after the dilapidation of dilapidations, after the night wind wimpers, the leaves are all gone and we come forth and on with fragrances just beyond and we slowly emerge, exposed to our essential life, this real world, at last. Having grappled so long, so long with bits of paper and what they all were saying, a clearness fell over the river, so smooth with a thousand diamonds sun-studding: you could see them as you drove along the river, even in the night, a thousand eyes but one mind, at last, at last, even if the heart aches for one has been there so many times before. Somewhere in the stale familiarity, half-dead, weary-sings something tastes of home, just around the corner, beyond that cloud where the sun is breaking, strong and clear: at last. Ron Price 2 July 1995 _____________________ It is timely that I refer to Wiggenstein as this autobiography comes near to its end. This major twentieth century philosopher saw the object of philosophy as “the clarification of thoughts.” Surely, if nothing else, this autobiography is intended to do the same thing. It tries to make what is opaque and blurred the centre of clarity and sanity, of health and understanding to the mind. Like Wittgenstein, too, I see no division between my life and this work. It is all of a piece. I may not be able to remedy all the deep emotional difficulties in my life by untangling them philosophically, as Wittgenstein thought he could do. Lucidity, joy, wonder, the mystical, are all important to me as they were to Wittgenstein, too much to go into detail here. But as I pass sixty and go into the first months of my sixty-first year, with the great bulk of my bi-polar illness behind me I do not anticipate suffering the way many do after the age of sixty. I have a strange premonition that the worst is behind me. Unlike Mark Twain, whose life from age 60 on was blasted by calamity and sorrow; unlike the cinema director Alfred Hitchcock who was plagued by alcohol and depression from sixty-five until his death at the age of eighty, unlike many others in their declining years of late adulthood, I see my life as just beginning, albeit a different life than the one I have known, but one I am looking forward to with relish. This is not to say that fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety will not afflict me and forces at large in the world will not assail me. I may require the perserverence I have seen in my wife for the last twenty years. __________________ KIN AND KITH "The generation born in the mid-forties...were the most indulged, cared for and ‘liberated’ children in history...the narcissistic trend began in the 1920s...These between-wars folk were the parents of the post-World-War-II generation....who formed the ‘hippie generation’... still relentlessly ego-absorbed generation."1 These two generations have been the main pioneers of the second, third and fourth epochs. -Ron Price with appreciation to Ronald Conway, The Rage for Utopia, Allen and Unwin, 1992, pp. 146-148. There’s nothing like a parting to make you feel a piece. Nothing like a starting to make you ill-at-ease. Partings are a sorrow; I think I’ll keep them few, as I head down the home stretch to the newest of the new. ‘Cause one day we’ll part forever on this terrestrial coil; we’ll make this the last one on this our earthly soil. I may not talk with you so deeply that you feel connected with, but I’ll learn that one some day, as we become both kin and kith. I think Conway has touched the core of a certain ego-absorption at the heart of all these plans that make difficult their adoption. It also makes it difficult, dear, to grow close as you would like to. It may just be this narcissism which I must overcome too. Ron Price 10 July 1995 I would like to make one or two parenthetical remarks here before continuing and concluding with more of my poetry. Part of the way I view language and thus the way I view the writing of this autobiography is reflected in the way the philosopher Wittgenstein views language. He sees it as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among different strategies, approaches, multiple interacting conditions, ways and means not simply a configuration or tradition based upon "empirical stability." As I have pointed out earlier in this lengthy work, there is a basic facticity, empirical stability, in my life, my society and my religion that one can not get away from this. But they are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette, as that student of biography Ira Nadel noted with his humorous edge. One needs Wittgenstein’s culinary talent in the autobiographical kitchen. This poetry provides readers with some of the basic constituents of the language game and the multiple conditions as I see them. EX NIHILO There’s a mystery in poetic writing, some kind of creation ex nihilo, from within, but within bounds, the bounds of your way of living, of who you are. It’s like magic, a varying splendour, a stirring of atoms to find connections to release compulsions and find other selves. Scratch the itch of disconnection, the soup of this and that sometimes feeble, pathetic self, sometimes rich, fertile self in the core and an architectural correctness, balance, density, emerges: as if from the journey of one’s life-long, tortuous, sometimes lost. In the end you’ve preserved something of yourself and you wonder why. It’s quite mysterious. -Ron Price with thanks to Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville, Making Stories, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, NSW, 1993. UNINTERRUPTED POETRY The writer, unable to chose his language, can no more choose his style, this necessity of his mood, this rage within him, this tumult or this tension, slowness or speed, which comes to him from a deep intimacy with himself, about which he knows almost nothing, and which give his language as distinctive an accent as his own recognizable demeanour gives his face....a language inseparable from our secret depths, that which, therefore, should be closest to us, is also what is least accessible to us...to encounter and then to silence the empty depths of ceaseless speech...of uninterrupted poetry. -Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, editor: Michael Holland, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, pp.146-149. The revolution has come: the break! It twists and turns in metaphorical equivalents at special times, at any time it seems appropriate; for the whole history has, what shall we call it, mythological significance? This is the new myth! The end of history has arrived! Yes, this is the eternal Return and world shaking, world reverberating institutions have come, born, growing in a majestic process launched in 1953 within a rhythmic life pattern of fundamental happiness which itself contains anxiety and grief and a time for healing in those secret depths of ceaseless speech and what seems to be uninterrupted poetry. Ron Price 7 December 1995 During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while I was writing this autobiography, science was turning away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of autobiography there was an increasing consciousness of its complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. There is certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic in my own life. Sometimes the feeling of fragmentation is pervasive and sometimes it is short-lived, momentary. Rather than seeing form, literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that are at the core of structure, any structure. At one end of the continmuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder. Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found between life’s extremes. Fractal autobiography works in the ground between these extremes of life. Digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal world of autobiography. Fractal comes form the Latin for fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography. As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an incorrect, a finite view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality now is somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is expressed in, can be found in, literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry, the autobiography, I am calling fractal shares many defining traits with that contested term: postmodern. Some contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. Fractal poetry, fractal aesthetics, fractal autobiography describe one feature of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them. In postmodernism one read, watched, listened, as one had done for decades before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as the self, myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is reality and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form. Postmodernists saw the eclipse of grand narratives and pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity. This new world is monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold. This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded. I outline briefly the shift from postmodernism to pseudomodernism which has occurred in the time I have been writing this memoir because my writing is, to some extent, a reflection of this change. But I do not want to go beyond these few, these brief remarks. Conversion and a religious conversation prevails in my poetry. It is part of an archtypal pattern because it represents part of a maturing process and a move toward self-discovery. It is part and parcel of this autobiography, unavoidably, I find. It is part of a personal life, which Anais Nin says, if it is lived deeply moves beyond the personal.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, p.6; and 1Anais Nin in ibid.,p.171. CICERO(106-43 BC) A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds realized (in Auden’s work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41. Cicero came long ago, at a critical juncture, he urged his combative peers to end their recriminative posture, political moralist who saw the value of philosphy in politics, an idealist in an age of extremes, complex personality who saw kindness as a means to justice, the goal of society. The main branches of society must work together, love each other for this is the foundation of law which holds society together. Popular Assemblies, like today, no longer expressed the will of the people, no longer aspired to higher culture, honesty, propriety: for real politics was a way of life. Ron Price 10 June 1995 Source S.E. Smethurst, “Politics and Morality in Cicero”, The Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121. RULING CONCEPTIONS If poetry is an intellectual/intuitive act it is not a random indeterminate process, but is governed by a previsional end....there must be a ruling conception by which it knows its quarry: some foresight of the work to be done, some seminal idea. -James McAuley in Meanjin, Summer 1953, vol.xii, p.433. The conception here’s been getting more detailed, massive, as the decades have come on since 1953. The conception was extraordinary, then, with the ten stages of history and the ten year crusade just having begun the Kingdom of God with a bang, a quiet one, not much of a bone crusher, pretty unobtrusive then, even now, with that conception described in a thousand books, too much for most. And the LSA Handbook getting so big you needed a degree in law or big biceps just to carry it to the meeting. By God, the quarry! Nothing less than the spiritual conquest of the planet, the conquest of self and the attainment of a tranqill heart: and a thousand other mysteries waiting to find form.. Ron Price 16 December 1995 CONTEMPORARY MODERN Of the many currents of contemporary modern poetry in Australia I have selected Bruce Dawe’s poetry and particularly his book of poems No Fixed Address, published in 1962, as the starting point. This title is taken from one of his first poems, written back in 1954, by the same title. It is a suitable starting point for 1962 was the year when this pioneering venture got its start. By the time I began writing poetry seriously there were, arguably, 40 to 50 years of a tradition of the colloquial to build on, to help me on my way.-Ron Price from information in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press, 1995, p.2. They started to say it differently, to use the colloquial, the vernacular, the everyday stuff as early as 1962, if not before, when I had started my pioneer life, quite early. Had many fixed addresses. I counted them once: 37 in twenty-five towns. You had been writing for some time with that ‘No Fixed Address’ the first that I knew about: that one who in solemn state lies garlanded in gin, part of a poetic legacy that takes us back to the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth. The whole world started to change its spots in that ninth stage of history when, coincidentally, I entered the field. And now I’m trying to say it using the new form, wave, style, humour, normality of the ordinary, unpretentiousness, highest spirituality. A late starter, building on thirty or forty years of other writers of contemporary modern. Ron Price 9 December 1995 -------------------- I have been married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, a publisher and scholar. I have been a Baha'i for 55 years(in 2014). My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 68. We have had 3 children: ages in 2014: 48, 43 and 37. I am 70, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written 3 books--all available on the internet.
| |||||||
| |||||||
| Shop: |
|
| Similar Threads | Poster | Views | Replies | Last post | ||
![]() |
Autobiography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda | 1,250 | 14 | 11/29/03 08:25 PM by medicinebag | ||
![]() |
The Holographic Universe- Science and Spirituality ( |
6,633 | 42 | 03/17/08 03:25 AM by 764hero | ||
![]() |
Belief in God: A form of schizophrenia?! ( |
6,584 | 47 | 08/26/09 12:01 PM by OrgoneConclusion | ||
![]() |
The Stages of Spiritual Growth ( |
4,623 | 21 | 08/01/03 07:13 PM by Phluck | ||
![]() |
The Substance of the Abyss: An Exploration of Postmodern Nihilism ( |
3,554 | 80 | 07/24/12 11:44 PM by 10thousand | ||
![]() |
Spiritual Dilemna ( |
4,214 | 49 | 04/05/04 10:48 PM by Sclorch | ||
![]() |
spiritual truths ( |
2,457 | 37 | 06/29/04 10:32 PM by Panoramix | ||
![]() |
Is atheism a form of spiritual retardation? ( |
5,067 | 52 | 01/16/24 02:21 AM by NoviceCultivator |
| Extra information | ||
| You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled Moderator: Middleman, DividedQuantum 381 topic views. 1 members, 16 guests and 7 web crawlers are browsing this forum. [ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ] | ||


