One Hundred Years of Euro-Russian Culture: After Pushkin

This prose-poem examines the roots of the poem-fragment, the literary fragment, and my own work as a 21st century form that finds its origins in Pushkin--to some extent.-Ron Price, Tasmania:)
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BEWILDERING AND WONDROUS

The century 1837 to 1937 preceded the initial stage, the preliminary task, the first Plan(1937-1944), in the unfoldment of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s vision for the stupendous, holy enterprize involving the spread of the Baha’i Faith throughout the planet. A detailed and verifiable record or history of the birth of this independent religious system which that Seven Year Plan was aiming to spread and the last six years(1837-1843) in the life of its critical precursor, Siyyid Kazim, in that same century(1837-1937) can be found in the annals of this new Faith. The annals of modern history are also replete with a corresponding, a parallel, record of events. It is one of the aspects of this parallel record, this corresponding thread, this synchronizing set of events, that interests me here in this prose-poem.

“One hundred years of Euro-Russian culture,” writes Monika Greenleaf, “were symmetrically and symbolically bracketed by the dates 1837 and 1937.” In 1837 Alexander Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature and arguably Russia’s greatest poet, died. Like Wordsworth and the romantics in western poetry, he used everyday speech in his poetic oeuvre. He began writing his first major work, an epic poem, in 1817 when he was eighteen the year Baha’u’llah was born.

It is the fragments, the fragmentariness, of Pushkin’s poems that interests me here. His works were casual, unplanned, in many ways quite unclassifiable. The poetic fragment is in itself a literary genre. The fragment as poem, as poetic style and content, is a recurrent historical phenomena which crystallizes in transition periods. The French Revolution of 1789 had brought society into a state of chemical dissolution and inaugurated such a period of transition. I have lived a life in another such transition period.

The literary-poetic fragment is characterized by the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, segmentation and montage, fragmentation, recombination and textual discontinuity. It is a fundamental building block of much poetic work, certainly much, if not most, of mine. Fragments of prose-poetry like mine can often be interpreted and found meaningful only by readers especially tuned to their content. These fragments of my words, my prose-poetry, are especially addressed to such readers.

The manifesto for this modern fragmentariness was written, it could be argued, by the Atheneum, a group whom some call “the first avant-guard in history,”1 in Jena in the years 1797 to 1802. This group was an incubator of new kinds of literature. During these same years many new beginnings occurred two of which were: Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography, The Prelude, with its new vitality and its inclusion of a host of fragments from his life; also the first precursor of Baha’u'llah, Shakyh Ahmad, began his scholarly life, eventually becoming the leading Shi’a scholar of his generation. The Shaykh paints multi-coloured word pictures aned relies on an intuitive mystical element in his writings, a different kind of fragmentariness.2–Ron Price with thanks to 1Moniko Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony, Stanford UP, Stanford, 1994, pp.3-18 and 2Juan Cole, “Individualism and the Spiritual Path in Shakyh Ahmad,” Occasional Papers, September 1997.

There’s a world progressively rediscovered,
reinvented, redefined, decentred, diversified--
for me to make a clearing and attend my past,
the past, in a different way, feeling my way
back to moments and movements in time,
along a narrative line, telling of a whole life,
some perpetual flight forward and backward,
always slipping from a fixity of definition,
twists and turns of a strange yet comforting
hallucination into a plastic-life world of creative
representations, richly introspective, analytical
with shifting and sliding memories, continuous
inquiry into self-definition, self-apprehension.

Here is an autobiography of an age in another
great divide in time, in my time, conceptually
flawed, avoiding categorical, chronological
constructs and linear periodization, cohering
into working models and interpretive categories,
hermeneutic tools of symmetries, correspondences,
disjunctions, asymmetries and endless fragments.

This new world began to be studied at the time
I began to write my memoirs, this post-modernist
Zeitgeist, worldview with only language as real--
at least in some very basic ways---shaping myself
and my society from some underworld of thought—
preoccupations in a kaleidoscopic array, a protean
series of intensely imagined selves fashioning this
human identity as a manipulable, artful process,
prose frame after prose frame, always unfinished,
exotic, self-effaced and self-indulged, autoportrait,
mirrors of ink on heterogeneous textual incarnations,
like vapours in the desert which I dream to be water,
but find them in the end both: illusion and paradigm
of a bewildering, wondrous and subtle subjectivity.

Ron Price
18 July 2007