REPROJECTED
Like so many artists and poets before me and thousands of Baha'i pioneers, my life is fixed in the ordinary and it is the ordinary that I wish to transmute into the ever-living body of art. My personality, like those around me over these forty pioneering years, often begins as a cadence, a mood, a sharp or a dull note or no note at all, then it becomes, as time travels on, a fluid, a lambent or a tint in a many-coloured narrative. I can, and I have, made the whole story into an epic narrative partly out of concern that the account may refine itself out of existence having become so impersonal, so purified and reprojected from my imagination as I sit, or stand, behind or above or beyond this handiwork which is my life. For so much of it, nearly all, becomes in the end, invisible, a memory, a thought, containing intense, vivid or quite indifferent feelings and handiworks while I sit here gazing into space and wondering, pondering. -Ron Price with thanks to Marguerite Harkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1990, p. 84.
Episodes, sensations, dreams,
emotions, trivial or tragic,
joyful or sad, succeed each other
neither coherently nor incoherently,
each occurs vividly for a moment
then fades away into the next
and so life is, for the most part, so.
Meaning, causation, can be attributed
in more than one way as I select,
weigh the elements of my experience
and I require active readers, accomplices,
who will share in the shaping, creation,
of this pioneering poetic over four epochs.
And I, too, walk down the path,
open the door, encounter
for a millionth time
the reality of my experience,
forge in these quotidian days
this pioneering life and invest it
with more blessedness and merit,
more spirit than it has hitherto shown,
than I had originally envisaged1
in those halcyon days several epochs
ago when I was young and untried.
1 Shoghi Effendi, July 5, 1950, in Citadel of Faith, p.87.
Ron Price
1 December 2002
Like so many artists and poets before me and thousands of Baha'i pioneers, my life is fixed in the ordinary and it is the ordinary that I wish to transmute into the ever-living body of art. My personality, like those around me over these forty pioneering years, often begins as a cadence, a mood, a sharp or a dull note or no note at all, then it becomes, as time travels on, a fluid, a lambent or a tint in a many-coloured narrative. I can, and I have, made the whole story into an epic narrative partly out of concern that the account may refine itself out of existence having become so impersonal, so purified and reprojected from my imagination as I sit, or stand, behind or above or beyond this handiwork which is my life. For so much of it, nearly all, becomes in the end, invisible, a memory, a thought, containing intense, vivid or quite indifferent feelings and handiworks while I sit here gazing into space and wondering, pondering. -Ron Price with thanks to Marguerite Harkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1990, p. 84.
Episodes, sensations, dreams,
emotions, trivial or tragic,
joyful or sad, succeed each other
neither coherently nor incoherently,
each occurs vividly for a moment
then fades away into the next
and so life is, for the most part, so.
Meaning, causation, can be attributed
in more than one way as I select,
weigh the elements of my experience
and I require active readers, accomplices,
who will share in the shaping, creation,
of this pioneering poetic over four epochs.
And I, too, walk down the path,
open the door, encounter
for a millionth time
the reality of my experience,
forge in these quotidian days
this pioneering life and invest it
with more blessedness and merit,
more spirit than it has hitherto shown,
than I had originally envisaged1
in those halcyon days several epochs
ago when I was young and untried.
1 Shoghi Effendi, July 5, 1950, in Citadel of Faith, p.87.
Ron Price
1 December 2002