Post by ronprice on Oct 18, 2005 23:04:39 GMT -5
;DSince no one took up the cudgels for dueling it out, I'll take these my apologetic inspirations, first voiced here at this site on the eve of my 61st birthday, on July 22nd 2005, in a different direction. 
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A NOURISHING MEDIUM
Poetic autobiography is not so much a generic category as it is a literary strategy, a strategy for voicing enthusiasms and complaints, observations and understandings about self and life; a strategy for examining what has determined and predetermined the status and voice, the role and nature of the poet; a strategy for creating meaning as much as, or more, than communicating it. For to write, as some poets argue, is to act. To confess failings is but one way of examining successes. Such writing is a uniquely civilized and civilizing phenomenon with many strategies underpinning it, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. Poetic autobiography can take all of the sensory input of life and make it a nourishing medium. It can take the personal life, the life that is deeply lived, and take it beyond the personal.1 -Ron Price with thanks to Anais Nin in Aesthetic Autobiography, Suzanne Nalbantian, MacMillan, 1994, p.171.
Mine is a type of conversion narrative,
an archtypal pattern,
part of a maturing process,
a move toward self-discovery,
a history of a soul,
an apologetics of theodicy
and of my individual being,
but one manifestation
of a subjective impulse.
A story of unrelated reminiscences
and anecdotes which flows
like a brook down through the hills,
its course changed by every boulder
and I just make the trip1
as naturally as the ancient land itself
which does not move in my whole life.
1 Alfred Kazin, “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Mark Twain, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House, 1986, pp.132-3.
Ron Price
8 September 2000
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FLOATING IN THE MILKY-WAY
In some ways, my approach to the writing of poetry, taken as a whole, I see in terms of a phenomenology of the whole of reality. Phenomenology emphasises the social construction of reality and the orientation of the individual toward practical problems in terms of his own experience, his inner life and his own intellectual processes. Within the limitations of my own capacity and my particular interests, my poetry attempts to understand the whole of life, especially the study of man in community, in the Baha'i community.
The data for my poetry comes from two sources: nature and the existential world on the one hand and the Baha'i revelation on the other. One part of my work is purely philosophical, using the resources of reason and experience. It is profoundly rational and is rooted in the cultural attainments of the mind. My poetry also constitutes an apologetics in so far as it is an approach to the supernatural and part of an act of faith. This apologetics is also expressed in my poetry in terms of the notion of an analogical and mysterious correspondence between nature and grace, between temporal and sacred history, between self, society and religion. On the theological plane my poetry is based essentially on the powerful and central idea, mystery or concept, of the manifestation of God and the doctrinal and spiritual consequences which I and others see as flowing from this idea.
Finally, I like to see my poetry as a stimulant to a climate of thought rather than a propagator of ideas. And it is not so much ideas as a spirit that I want to propagate. -Ron Price with appreciation to Emile Rideau, Teilhard de Chardin: A Guide to His Thought, Collins, London, 1967, pp.237-254.
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I’ve been catching the moment,
many of the moments, as they fly
from history’s vast empyrean sky,
reinventing them, inscribing them,
adding a layer of reality
to the abstractions of glass,
asphalt, aluminium and brick,
Althea’s warm-engaging beauty,
Zerina’s tears, the marks on a page,
small pieces of space and time
put onto memory, mine and yours,
gentle touches of air and water
working at their leisure with
a liberal allowance of years,
thousands of days slipping by
so fast that one senses a chaos
of dancing stars which can not be
brought to order, but which contain
the inner-light of one’s own star.
And there it is floating in the Milky-Way
far from the cancer-eating world
and its mad slaughter-houses.
Encapsulated in a bubble
of self-awareness, afloat
on a void, its idiosyncrasy
defining what I only partly share.
Ron Price
13 February 2001
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Thus endeth part two of this initial statement, this foundation essay on Baha'i apologetics, for a future, a possible debate, a possible duel, founded in this case, as this site suggests, on inspiration.-Ron Price, Tasmania.