Avoiding The Dust--With Virginia Woolf

[Ron Price]

MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS

...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee....
-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.

To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.

It was not all risk, though;
some of it was simply pure
surprise and wonder: like
the two exploding stars colliding
17 million light years from Earth
and taking, according to one astrophysicist,
1200 years to do their colliding;
shooting out gas in all directions
at 36 million kilometres per hour,
creating a supernova,
a brilliant light show, in a place,
a galaxy, where six supernovas
have been produced
since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His
Tablets of the Divine Plan.

And me, defining myself,
my sense of nothingness,
in the face of that immensity.

Ron Price
14 June 1997

[Ron Price]

DROP BY DROP

Coleridge tended to identify closely with the self within...He was acutely sensitive to audiences...driven by a pronounced, at times pathological dependency on others’ approval. His fears of offending, his uncertainties over his own motivations, his low self-esteem...-Charles J. Rzepka, The Self as a Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, Harvard UP, London, 1986, pp.100-101.

The secret of self-mastery is self-forgetfulness.
-’Abdu’l-Baha

Well, they are gone, and here I must remain,
in a prison I entered hardly knowing back then.
Such sweet-scented streams, fruits of luscious
delectation, bringing life to my world
until a final hour with fragrant memories;
but these strangers, so many, a myriad, exist
in another world, far beyond the deep beauty
of this emerald world of eternal wealth,
delighting in some withered bloom,
in some dark green file of long lank weeds
that nod and drip beneath the blue clay-stone.

They are gone and they’ve been going,
always going from the rose-garden
of this spirit where I planted my flowers
many summers ago. Content with
transient dust, they shall never see
the hyacinths of divine wisdom
springing from their heart: yet
I have the seeds, unplantable, it seems,
They wander on pining and hungering
in their own way, as we all do, with
sad and patient hearts: stoic, sometimes
happy, living in this yellow light with
the blue ocean, often silent, swimming.

Pale, they hang beneath the blaze where
hangs as well a transparent foliage and
where I watch some broad and sunny leaf
dappling beneath the sunshine, or some
deep radiance laying full on the ancient ivy.
And they travel busily to their destinations,
plant their gardens, love their families
as the rain falls upon the earth with the
branches dripping, drop by drop.

Ron Price
1 June 1995