Dante, Skepticism and Baha'i Literature

A SEISMOGRAPHIC RECORD

Dante had at his disposal a comprehensive and intellectually consistent image of the cosmos and its relationship to God. -Harold L. Weatherby, The Keen Delight: The Christian Poet in the Modern World, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1975, p.5.

In an age profoundly infected with philosophical scepticism the problem of writing sacred poetry, the great song, requires that we recapture a genuine science of invisible things. This can be done through a grasp by the poet of both the external and internal worlds. The poet conveys his creative intuition into a receptive intuition.
-ibid. pp.123-149.

The poet, who is a member of the Baha’i community, has before him every atom in existence and the essence of all created things1. There is no break between nature, art, poetry, science, religion and personal life. It is all one, a dynamic unity amidst multiplicity, amidst an organic body of ideas. On the basis of a vast corpus of sacred Writings this same poet has before him a massive body of religious literature. Its frameworks of systematic theology, philosophy, epistomology, ontology, aesthetics, theophanology, history and psychology are, for the most part, in their early stages of development. But the foundation is there for a rich and fertile global literature to evolve within a fusion of opposites, on some ladder of reflection and, inevitably, amidst a complex cross-fertilisation. -Ron Price, The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature, Unpublished Manuscript, 1996.

You get enough principles here
to build a cosmos in your brain,
to wander with Dante through his
world of keen delight, to rebuild
his model, a reconstructed universe.

This is far more than mere living, of
simply amusing oneself, than some
restless dilettante spectator on the lounge
room couch; this is appreciation, deep and
full, far beyond a momentary touch of sorrow;
this is some vortex spinning with ideas driving,
hopefully, its readers into their own memory,
back into a reverie, past depths and the vagueness
of past-times into a oneness that is slowly sweeping
the face of the earth, a search that is self-expression.

This universe, this cosmos, this self,
its likes and dislikes, comings and
goings, faults and weaknesses are
one entity, even in its contradictions:
the oneness of a microcosm in its
egotism and limitations, walking
backwards or forewords, in some
new Rome at the crossroads, in some
solitude and aloneness which is
necessary and unavoidable, it seems,
bringing the past and the future into
now, with delicate scents, pulsations,
unnameable tactile sensations, with
an anxiety surrounding my moments
of tranquillity but with light as the
basis of structure and darkness always
at the periphery, on an inner lifeline of
such complexity, such a seismographic
record and sensibility, such a breadth of
compass within the distilled sphere of
these words and their fusion of opposites.


Ron Price
18 August 1996



1Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words.

It has been nearly a dozen years since I posted an opening note on this thread and, since no one has responded, I'll keep the thread alive with the following item I wrote about Dante some years ago.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania
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KNEADED

Part 1:

The whole of Dante’s Paradiso is an opening and a clearing of Dante's own eyes. I could very well see my own poetic opus with a similar note. To return to God, a man must open his eyes, open them to and into a just self-love. Bahá'u'lláh says, in one of His many aphorisms on introspection and the love of self and God: “man must open one eye to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved and close the other to the world and all that is therein.” And again: “One speck of chastity is greater than a hundred thousand years of worship and a sea of knowledge.” The mystic vision and narcissism are perilously similar in their function and structure. Dante, profound theologian as well as poet, acknowledges that this peril is a crucial element in life’s pilgrimage. This theme is also mentioned again and again in my poetry. I discuss again and again the poet’s, the pilgrim's, slow and painful emergence from narcissism to a just, a necessary, self-love and to the acquisition of chastity.

Scribe that he is (Paradiso, 10.27), Dante transcribes his memory and his vision in his canto. I transcribe my view, my reflection, in booklet after booklet of my poetry. The whole movement of vision in Paradiso is from sight to reflection. In my poetry the movement is back and forth, up and down, around and around in an interdependence of diverse points of view rather than the totality of a single vision. -Ron Price with thanks to R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry, Pilgrim Books, 1983.

Part 2:

I’d like to think I had the power
of precise statement found in all
great poets and again and again
in every new phrase but, sadly,
I describe things hazily with an
intense personal way of feeling
because I feel, but do not see,
with the necessary particularity.

Out of what seems a slimy mud
of words, a lotus-flower grows,
and with it imprecisions which
approximate my thoughts and
feelings to some order of speech
which springs like an incantation
with its beauty and truth to all
that I feel, to complex states,
recreated for readers by the letter
and the symbolic spirit rooted in
and nourished by my emotions.

I put so much down as if by
mystic vision and narcissism
so firmly intertwined, kneaded
into the very clay of every man.

Ron Price
28/5/'06 to 14/8/'15.