Expert: Ron Price - 5/13/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear Ron,

This is not a question but a thank you for your perspective and your wide ranging focused effusions. I have recently found your writings and will dive into them as time permits in this very busy Day. I always liked Steven's "Let the lamp affix it's beam, ...." but more so after finding Baha'u'llah. Also, Ferlingheti: "the poet, like an acrobat....". Without the center, all things fall apart. I am always quite happy to let my past recede, even though it continually bubbles up in the present day where i more prefer to live as much as possible letting the Uncreated Unknowable take care of things. Let the feather hit the canyon.

love, peace and loving kindness,

john

ANSWER: What a lovely, light and stimulating comment, John. Thank you so much!(and with no question---that is a first at this site...."Goodonyer," as they say Downunder.....Yes, indeed, "let the feather hit the canyon." I will respond by including below my piece of writing---which I hope you have not seen---on the elsewhere community.-Ron
-------------------------------
         MY ELSEWHERE COMMUNITY

The essential ideas in this poem come from Hugh Kenner’s 1997 Massey Lecture in Canada and William Wordsworth’s poem “A Poet’s Epitaph.”  The greatest shift in the last thousand years has been from a Eurocentric, Christocentric, tradition centered, civilization to a gradually evolving global civilization with no special political and moral centre in a universe of infinite space and time. It is this phenemenon that this poem tries to speak to, of, about.  -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1998.


I have my own Grand Tour1 now,
my ‘elsewhere community’,2
my journey through what I know
to what I have yet to learn;
and when the war is over
I will go home.

There are no more Colosseums
or Roman Forums.
My education takes me down
different paths past other Alps,
another Paris, some other Channel
en route to finding out who I am,
absorbing life to make me someone else,
to discover impulses of deeper birth
which come to me in solitude.  
The harvest of a quiet eye,
random truths around me lie.

In these verses I impart
what broods and sleeps
what in my own heart
and in my mind I keep.  
In the meadows of His nearness
I try to roam to get some clearness.
For the Grand Tour is my own creation
and can’t be found on any tourist guide,
only in my own world where I now abide.

Ron Price
27 December 1998

1 In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was the trip from some place in western civilization through Europe to Rome. This is no longer the Grand Tour. We all make our own now.
2  We all have what Hugh Kenner calls ‘elsewhere communities’, places we travel to and things we do and think to find out who we are. The traveller absorbs this ‘elsewhere community’ into himself to become what defines him throughout life.
-------------------------------------
LANDSCAPES AND ELSEWHERES

My poetry has come to be defined by some things, some topics, to such an extent that it is simply unimaginable in any setting outside these subjects; the essence of my poetry is so much associated with this typical, prototypical, subject matter and so detailed in its particularities of description and definition that I construct, in the process of writing my poetry: a world, a home, a place, a mise en scene, where these topics invariably occupy locations in a physical and intellectual landscape and domain.  These subjects appear again and again.  For some readers this repetition will be tiresome, I’m sure.   

I have made my home, my place of residence, in life in so many places, so many towns and houses where the sense of home did not exist before.  It had to be created, recreated, again and again.   I always had a mother, a father or a wife or a wife and children to help in the process.  I’m not so sure I’d do a very good job if I was on my own.  I might find the task too lonely and immensely routine to do as good a job.  I may never find out.

None of us are islands; we all tend towards insularity in some respects. That has been especially true of me since I retired.  We also contain multitudes within us.  I became very conscious of this internal diversity as the decades advanced in the 50 years before I retired(1949-1999), years filled with high levels of social interaction.  Shakespeare says that we need to be able to people our solitude and know how to feel alone in a crowd.  That is what I do now that I am in my sixties.  These insularities and these social engagements are, it could be said, the countries of our soul, countries mostly unnamed and unknown. My poetry begins to name, to describe, these unknowns.

We all have, too, what Hugh Kenner calls ‘elsewhere communities’, places we travel to and things we do and think about to find out who we are. The traveler, the pioneer-travel-teacher absorbs this ‘elsewhere community’ into himself to become what defines him throughout life.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Hugh Kenner, Massey Lecture, 1997.

I have my own Grand Tour1 now,
my elsewhere community,
my journey through what I know
to what I have yet to know;
and when the war is over
I will go home.

1 In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was the trip from some place in European civilization through Europe to Italy and Rome. This is no longer the Grand Tour. We all make our own now.

Ron Price
April 22nd 2006
-------------------------------






---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: hello Ron,

Thank you for your reply,

I hope that you soon get some young singing Bahais down there in Tasmania. I have been on my own grand tour for 63 years now and it brought me to Baha'u'llah's Word about 9 years ago which gave me and happy unexpected center. I am happily retired here in pago pago where it is hard to be anonymous wherever one goes. We will be deepening on the Ridvan letter this Sunday, choir practice tonight for a TV show tomorrow, do my stats to send to your son, reports, etc. i have had some friends that had memories like yours but mine more just keeps the skeletons of the past with the fuller memories only now and again bubbling up due to a smell or a sound and i rather like it that way - content to live in the present with the sunset of yesterday and sunrise of tomorrow always there. i also like gardening or just sitting or walking in it - just beyond the last thought as maybe Wallace Stevens said.

love and peace,

john

Answer
It would appear that your comment, john, resulted in "a question pending" for me here at this site. So I will respond to your comment about memories with some thoughts on the subject for your private and perhaps public delectation.-Ron
----------------------
A personal event memory is much more than a passive record; it is an active agent of direction, guidance, and deepened understanding. The psychological reality of the event for the rememberer, including the constructed meaning it holds within the context of an autobiography, takes on a life of its own apart from the objective, historical truth, however that elusive quality of objectivity is defined, writes one analyst. Some memories, for example, contain themes of "redemption" in which a negative event or experience eventually comes to represent a positive outcome or life change. On the other hand, in "contamination" stories, positive events or experiences eventually yield negative life impacts.
------------------------------
Opportunities for positive life change may exist whenever memories of momentous events are open to reconsideration and reinterpretation.  If the negative memory can be integrated into an overarching narrative theme of purpose and self-worth, then its damaging impact may be neutralized. If the memory can be reinterpreted in terms that are motivating rather than demoralizing, it will be transformed from a limiting force into an enabling one.   In writing one’s memoirs there is a search for psychological drives the interpretive process of selectively remembering and reconstructing one's experiences through narration.

I was impressed with how the Australian Clive James approached his autobiography in his Unreliable Memoirs published at about the time I began to collect my own writings for a possible posterity.  “Most first novels are disguised autobiographies,” he wrote.  “This autobiography is a disguised novel. On the periphery, names and attributes of real people have been changed and shuffled so as to render identification impossible. Nearer the centre, important characters have been run through the scrambler or else left out completely. So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth.  All you can be sure of is one thing: careful as I have been to spare other people's feelings, I have been even more careful not to spare my own. Up, that is, of course, to a point.”   

James says that he felt he had for too long been a prisoner of his childhood and wanted to put it behind him and that was the reason he wanted to “dredge it all up again without sounding too pompous.”  He did not want to “wait until reminiscence was justified by achievement.” All attempts, James wrote with a strong vein of Australian humour and cynicism that runs through his entire work—indeed all his writing—“all attempts to put oneself in a bad light are doomed to be frustrated.”  

Proust argued that, while nostalgic memories may not be accurate, the experience of reworking memory traces can sometimes be even more powerful than the original experience.   Memory can give the past a definition and shape by creating a personally meaningful narrative out of disparate and often irrationally recalled fragments.  But one must be careful or the comment that the philosopher Santayana made about the Confessions of the famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau may apply to one’s own efforts; namely, that candour and ignorance of self were obvious in reading them—and in equal measure.  

Some writers, Margaret Atwood among others, alert us to the criminal potential found in reminiscence.  The act of softening the past through nostalgia is not free from consequences, and these consequences have the potential to corrupt present and future society.  This potential for corruption is linked to the postmodern notion of the past as a “hybridised discourse of varying modes” rather than a “static fact.”  While I don’t think my memoirs are significant enough to act as a corrupting influence, I find this postmodern notion of the past as no ‘static fact’ most apt.

Perhaps the historian Jane Welsh Carlyle was right when she said about autobiographies that: “Looking back was not intended by nature….from the fact that our eyes are in our faces and not behind our heads.”   One critic calls the personal memoir which many people write “a strange hybridization of the autobiographical genre" which is "seeking an intimacy with history that will give public meaning to personal identity."   Looking backwards or forewards, I have certainly sought intimacy in my writing, intimacy whereever I could get it: with people, with history, with my own dear self.  Perhaps understanding is a better word for me to use here, a more accurate word than intimacy. After decades of intimacy, of what are often called deep-and-meaningful discussions and relationships, I settle for and prefer understanding now.  The understanding that I desire does not require face-to-face contact, at least only a modicum of it as I head into these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood.  

I see this piece of literature, my autobiography, as released from "literature" with its capital "L."   I  give it the broadest possible construction and set of genres and media/mediums in which to find expression.  I utilize texts fashioned from letters and essays, diaries and journals, memoirs and stories, oral narratives and songs, photographs and assorted memorabilia.  Texts, for me, are everywhere and the limits to the sources for study are only the limits of my imagination.   This now multi-volumed autobiography will be left one day in the hands of my executors. While I am alive I leave this work in the hands of a 1000 executors in cyberspace, site administrators and moderators, to decide what to do with parts of my many-millioned word ediface of verbiage.  I post sections of this ediface all over the space in that wide-wide-world and at a few sites I post the whole editions.
Some autobiographers have little interest in the world outside themselves.  One autobiographer, Frederick Grove, once said to the French writer Andre Gide: "I feel the same need for lying and the same satisfaction in lying that others feel in telling the truth."    I am less disturbed by this egotistical propensity for lying that Grove admits to because recent theories of autobiography ask us to look at such writing from the same viewpoints as fiction.  Grove had an obsession with failure. For me, I have an obsession and have had it for over half a century---it is teaching and my memoirs are aimed at that domain in as many ways as I can.....it's a passion of a lifetime. One wins some and one loses some....the story is long.

--------
That's enough for now, john.....on a subject that could do on and on.....and I have cleared-up this 'unanswered' question, one that required 'a revision' since you made a response.....take care, John, as the years go on. Content to live in the present, as you are, with the sunset of yesterday and sunrise of tomorrow always there. Keep enjoying your gardening or just sitting or walking in it - just beyond the last thought as maybe Wallace Stevens said.