Art
WHAT IS AN ARTIST or CRAFTSMAN?
By artist or craftsman I mean anyone who has tried to create something which was not in the world before him or her. The tools and materials used for this creation were and are the uncommerciable ones of the human spirit. To put this another way: the artist or craftsman is that person who has tried to carve, no matter how crudely, on the wall of that final oblivion, in the tongue of the human spirit, ''Kilroy was here.'' To put this yet another way: Richard Sennett(1943-), the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University, writes in his book The Craftsman that “making is thinking." There is a strong link, Sennett argues, between what the famous Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889-1951) who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, learned by building a house. His philosophy, Sennett states, took a new direction after building that house away from rigorous logic and toward a playful engagement with common speech, paradox and parable.
WHAT IS ART? WHAT IS CRAFT?
Art or craft are the product or process of deliberately arranging items, often with symbolic significance, in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. They encompass a diverse range of human activities and creations, as well as modes of expression like music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and painting. The creative arts include dramaturgy, music (music theory, music history, musicology), graphic arts/cartooning, performing arts, film and publishing, galleries and museums, the visual arts, choreography, composing and play writing. The performing arts include dancing, music, drama, concertizing and acting. The performing arts involve the use of the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium. The arts which readers will find at this site are, for the most part: literature and poetry, publishing and editing, as well as the photography of others and my comments on many aspects of the creative and performing arts.
A craft is a branch of a profession that requires some particular kind of skilled work. In historical sense, particularly as pertinent to the Medieval history and earlier, the term was usually applied towards people occupied in small-scale production of goods. The term crafts is often used to describe the family of artistic practices within the family decorative arts that traditionally are defined by their relationship to functional or utilitarian products (such as sculptural forms in the vessel tradition) or by their use of such natural media as wood, clay, glass, textiles, and metal.
AESTHETICS
The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze art's relationship with individuals and society both in the present and the past with an eye, in some cases, on the future. Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period(1750-1830) when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science."(1) Indeed, until the modern era, modern defined as about 1500, most, if not all art, was associated with religion. In the last five centuries, say, 1500 to 2000, art has had a myriad of other associations. The work of the hand can inform the work of the mind and, to draw on Sennett again: "thought arises in relation to craft." Sennett reimagines the Enlightenment in terms not of ideas but of how craftsmen learned to work.
For Sennett the emblematic Enlightenment publication was Diderot’s Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts. In 35 volumes, this great work told its readers how to keep bees, make cider or wooden shoes, cure tobacco, prepare hemp, build a windmill, grind wheat, or — in the case that Sennett expands upon — make paper as it was then produced at the great L’Anglée factory south of Paris. The Enlightenment as pictured by Diderot arose from the conversation between craftsmen and all the stuff — the wood, the gold, the papermaking rags — that met their hands. The material world speaks back to us constantly, by its resistance, by its ambiguity, by the way it changes as circumstances change, and the enlightened are those able to enter into this dialogue and, by so doing, come to develop an “intelligent hand.”
The categories which it has become customary to use in distinguishing and classifying "movements" in literature or philosophy and in describing the nature of the significant transitions which have taken place in taste and in opinion, are far too rough, crude, undiscriminating -- and none of them so hopelessly as the category "Romantic."(2) The list of art movements has become burgeoning in this last century as art has come under the microscope of art historians. Go to the following link for a comprehenisve list of the art movements in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_art_movements --Ron Price with thanks to: (1) Ernst Gombrich, "Press statement on The Story of Art," 2005, The Gombrich Archive; and (2) Arthur O. Lovejoy, "On the Discriminations of Romanticisms," 1924.
ART AND CRAFT: AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Richard Sennett, is a prime observer of society, an American, a pragmatist who takes the nitty gritty of daily life and turns it into a disquisition on morality. His earlier books include The Fall of Public Man, The Conscience of the Eye and The Corrosion of Character. Sennett's knowledge and interests range widely over architecture, art, design, literature and the ever fluctuating social life of cities. The components of the man-made environment enthral him. He is an enchanting writer with important things to say.
Typically his new book, The Craftsman, considers craftwork very broadly. Sennett does not stop at potters making mugs or Moroccan leather grainers, though such people do come into it, but extends his warm embrace to the crafts of making music, cooking, the bringing up of children. This is a book about perfectionist skills, the desire to do things well that (he thinks) resides in all of us, the frustration and damage once these urges are denied. When we downgrade dedication we do so at our peril, Sennett argues, in an erudite and thought-provoking work. For more go to these links:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/09/society and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/books/review/Hyde-t.html?pagewanted=all
LUCIAN FREUD AND ART
“For me, the paint is the person. I’d like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it.”(1) “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie.” By his own account, Lucian Freud is a painter who reaches after truth and substance. And for many today, the claims he makes hold good. Freud says that he wants his pictures to look “awkward, in the way that life looks awkward.” Of course, for many others, Freud does not paint truth or substance because the paint, in reality, can never in truth be the person. All Freud can do is cultivate the quality of attachment, the “ofness,” that the image bears toward its original.
To produce paintings means to rework the truths of personal experience. Many in the art world wish art and its artists to appear as Freud does. They know and understand, they accept, that many artists are, as Freud himself admitted in a recent interview, "completely selfish and only do what they want to do.” To treat Freud as “the greatest living realist painter” has now become commonplace. Robert Hughes gave Freud that title in 1987,(2) the point at which he started to acquire an international renown.-Ron Price with thanks to:(1) Freud quoted in Lawrence Gowing, Lucien Freud, Thames and Hudson, 1982, p.191; and (2) Robert Hughes, Introduction to Lucian Freud: Paintings, British Council Exhibition, 1987, p.7. For more on Lucian Freud go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/mar/06/the-way-to-all-flesh/
I enjoyed this discussion of Freud because similar issues are involved when one writes. I will discuss more on this later.
ART AND CRAFT: FROM CHILDHOOD TO OLD AGE
Perhaps the most amazing of the many remarkable aspects of Louise Bourgeois(1911-2010), the renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, is that if she had died in her middle seventies we would not have known how daring, strange, ambitious, or disturbing an artist she could be. We would not have known how lively a colorist this sculptor who lived to be 98 was capable of being; and we would have been deprived of the full measure of one of the loveliest aspects of her art, her feeling for a range of weathered, frayed, and matte textures. Go to this link for more: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/oct/23/daring-and-disturbing/
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND ME
"This is the true joy in life," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap…..being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."(1) In my late forties and certainly by the time I was fifty, I had my first feelings, the first intimations, of "being thoroughly worn out." I was not ready for the scrap heap but, toward midnight most nights, if I still happened to be up, I felt ready for this place of the proverbial end-game. In spite of these initial feelings of exhaustion, I was not inclined to be a complaining person, although my wife would give readers here a more reflective and perhaps diverging view of my complaint-syndrome; nor did I see that the function of the world was to make me happy. Still, I depended on much that was in the world for my happinees--as most of us do.
When not working in his studio, the famous artist Picasso had a nearly inexhaustible need for social and intellectual stimulus; he fed off the energy and the ideas of friends and acquaintances.(2) By the time I came to write seriously in my late 50s, the early years of the 21st century, I had the same need but I was able to satisfy it by reading and writing, and interaction on the internet with others who had similar interests. Perhaps my lack of need for social stimulus when I retired from the world of jobs was due to having spent half a century in classrooms; perhaps it was due to the medications I took for my bipolar disorder which only allowed me short bursts of energy; perhaps it was decades of having gone to meetings, as the comedian John Cleese discusses in a humorous fashion in his two videos on the subject; perhaps it was the feeling I had spent a lifetime in conversations and had indulged in "an excess of speech." -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Jan Carter in A Fortunate Life: A.B. Facey, Penguin, 1981, p.325; and (2) Andrew Butterfield, "Recreating Picasso," 20/12/'07, The New York Review of BookS. For more on Picasso go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/dec/20/recreating-picasso/
MY WRITING ON ART ON THE INTERNET
My poetry and prose, my essays and articles, my publishing and edited work, examples of my composition are found all over the internet. The following 10 links will take readers to several dozen pieces of my work and many of them in relation to the subject of art. Some writers and artists, for example, Picasso, must be seen in relation to their tertulia, the large and ever-changing circle of their friends who gathered around them. An irresistible force, writes a recent biographer on Picasso, pushed him relentlessly towards new and unknown horizons. Since retiring from work and being able to apply my energies to writing and not teaching, to reading and not going to meetings, to study and not socializing, I, too have been possessed of an irresistable force. Unlike Picasso, though, I must be seen not in terms of the circle of people who gather around me, but in the large and ever-changing topics on which I am writing from day to day, month to month and year to year---and the circle of my contacts on the internet, a very different context than human beings in real space.
http://www.artfreaks.com/forums/index
http://www.artforum.com.au/search
http://asingularcreation.com/Forums/search
(type 'RonPrice'---no space---into the Search for the Author' box, then click on the word 'search.
poemhunter (click on the top right side of the access page on the words "9 poems of RonPrice."
http://christo.wwar.com/artforums/
http://www.artforum.com.au/post
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/
(scroll down the access page for a list of many articles posted at this site)
WINNING SOME OF THE TIME
If you would prefer to stay on this page the following essayistic pieces and poetry may provide possible pleasure to you. A writer only wins the satisfaction of readers some of the time whether he writes: (a) in hard and soft cover books, (b) whether he writes for students as I did for 32 years as a teacher in the classroom, (c) whether he writes for teachers as I did as a student for another 18, or (d) whether he writes on the internet extensively as I have done for the last ten.
THE APPARENTLY IMPOSSIBLE
Goethe(1749-1832), that supreme genius of modern German literature, regarded his autobiography as "fragments of a great confession."(1) This conveys some truth to my own story, my own autobiography. The novel for German novelist Hermann Hesse was what he called "a personal transformation, a transformation adapted to the circumstances of his fiction." My autobiography, to use Hesse's way of conveying the role of the novel in his life, is also a personal transformation. My work and Hesse's was and is an "adventure of self-discovery"(2) shaped from and by autobiographical reality. We both began our writing in a serious way in our forties. Hesse's literary undertaking and mine was a reappraisal of our inner growth while we enjoyed a mood of contemplation and self-examination. My autobiographical undertaking took place as middle age/adulthood(40-60) developed sensibly and insensibly into late adulthood(60-80). It was an objective observation, as objective as I could be, of my surroundings and myself, my society and my religion. It was an analysis of the passing moment both in the present and the past. For both Hermann Hesse and myself, the desire to think and write often focused on self, on the psychology of the artist, the poet and the literary man; on the passion, the seriousness and some of the vanity of life which attempts, in part, the apparently impossible.(3) -Ron Price with thanks to (1 and 2) Hermann Hesse, Autobiographical Writings, editor T, Ziolkowski, Jonathan Cape, London, 1973, pp.ix-xiii, and (3) ibid., p.248.
MY NOTEBOOKS: A FORM OF MY ART
All of the above serves, in some ways, as a preamble to my discussion below of Notebooks which are a central aspect of my writing. The material below, not originally part of the 5th edition of my memoirs entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, was added as an appendix. This appendix may be useful for future autobiographical, biographical and historical work. Since such a substantial part of my life has been spent compiling and utilizing notebooks in my teaching, my personal study and my writing, it seemed relevant to include this commentary on my notebooks in the 5th and subsequent editions of my autobiography all written in this third millennium, the first decade of my retirement from FT, PT and casual-volunteer work: 2001 to 2011.
Notebook is the general name I give to each file that I have in my study in hard copy or in my computer directory. One can spend much time defining precisely what constitutes a file, a notebook and, now, a relevant directory listing in my computer, but I do not intend to do that here.(1) I do that in several places in my literary resource base and I do it briefly below in this overview of my Notebooks: Volume 5. This Volume 5 of my Notebooks focuses on the Notebooks of other writers and provides an overview of some 300 of my own Notebooks. So much of my art, the art of writing, begins in my notebooks and so it seems highly appropriage to make some comments here about this literary form.
THE NOTEBOOKS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF OTHERS
Insensibly, after I completed the first edition of my autobiography Pioneering Over Three Epochs in 1993, and as the 18 years since 1993 have run their course, I became aware of the importance of the Notebooks of other writers as models for my own. The genre Notebooks was so often the starting place to my eventual literary products, to my oeuvre in all its forms. It was my hope that I might learn a few things from these other writers and, in the process, define as precisely as I needed to do the concept of Notebook. This Notebook, Volume 5, attempts, as I say above, to place the Notebooks of other writers into some overview, some overall statement and perspective. After more than fifty years of keeping Notebooks of various kinds I am beginning to get a feel for their role in my life. In about 1950 when I entered grade one I produced a Notebook. It was another 12 years before anything substantial, anything was created, that could, that might, in time, become part of my archival Notebooks.(2) Now, like shards of memory distilled from the past they provide scenes to be contemplated, tasted, savoured when it serves my purpose. Now, after nearly fifty years(1962 to 2011), these Notebooks have become a type of memoir which contains a dialogue with the mixed legacies of my life: religious, cultural, historical, philosophical, inter alia. For the most part, though, these Notebooks are not poignant or provocative; they are, rather, workmanlike collections, general repositories, of other people’s ideas and words.
Those who have written exstensive autobiographies and memoirs in the Bahá'í community have been few and far between, although there have been many, indeed multitudes in the Baha'i community, who have kept a record in some shape or form of their experiences---and this has become especially true now that the world-wide-web has expanded into the labyrinth of sites that now exist. Those who did write their memoirs, for the most part, have written a short exposition--what might, and often did, become a chapter of a book. The closest I’ve come to reading about the notebooks of other Baha’is is their pilgrims’ notes and short autobiographical and biographical works in a wide range of Baha'i books and sources. In the last two decades, since I stopped buying books except on very rare occasions due to a lack of funds and the immense number of books that I would like to buy, there have been more and more autobiographical and biographical books available in Baha'i bookstores.
MORE ON MY NOTEBOOKS AND JOURNALS
What I have tried to do in my autobiography with its poetry and notes, journal and essays, is to do what Samuel Beckett did with his plays. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots, and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of his notebooks published by Faber and Faber. Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. In some ways my autobiography is an entire theatrical event. As this theatrical event approaches some 2600 pages of narrative and 1000s of pages in other genres, this comparison of my approach to Beckett’s is, I think, somewhat apt.
I now have more than 300 files or Notebooks and, by degrees in this 3rd millennium, it became tiresome to keep count. In the nearly 50 years of my pioneering life, 1962 to 2011 and of keeping material that has become part of a Notebook somewhere in this vast collection of material, I have also discarded literally hundreds of Notebooks. This Notebook: Volume 5 should be of value to anyone interested in general perspectives, overall pictures, of my Notebooks. I realize that future readers may find some ambiguity in my use of the term Notebook. I apologize here for placing any individuals who take a serious interest in all of this printed matter in these difficult positions with respect to my terminology and the resources in question. But I am confident that, should anyone really be interested in these Notebooks, I have done an ample job of organizing my printed matter for any future historical value it might have, if any.
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(1) Generally, though, I define a Notebook as an arch-lever file, a 2-ring binder, an A-3 manilla folder or an easy-glide desk file. In the last decade(2001-2011) with my computer directory coming to serve as a, or 'the' major place of storage of printed matter, the term Notebook could easily be applied to much of the content in my computer directory. Of course, within most of these different collecting points there are sub-files or separate Notebooks. If I considered these sub or separate sections as Notebooks there would be several thousand Notebooks in my collection.
(2 )The oldest document I have in hard copy, and occupying a place in one of my notebooks, is an essay I wrote in the early months of 1962 in English class.—Ron Price, 2006, updated in: April 2011.
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PERSPECTIVES ON MY CANADIANNESS
In the imagination of most Americans, Canada is a blur. It contains a lot of pine trees, moose, and Mounties; its population is relatively small, its politics relatively polite. Canadians are honest and serious but slightly dull. Some Americans may pity or scorn Canadians for not having joined the revolution of 1776, a revolution which led to a separate United States. In this American view, Canadians are like the goody-goody siblings who never rebelled against their parents. On the other hand, Americans admit Canada’s virtues, including a working national health care system, the acceptance of draft protesters during the Vietnam War, and the possession of many of the most brilliant and original writers in North America. It has sometimes taken us a while to notice these writers, of course. Alice Munro, for instance, had published three brilliant and strikingly original collections of stories and won the Governor General’s Prize before her work first appeared here in The New Yorker.
The Australians have quite a different view of Canadians. After living in Australia for more than 40 years, I am aware of both how similar and how different these two countries are. I am also aware that, as a Canadian, I do not experience the anti-American ethos that abounds in Australia. Canadians have the best of the British and the best of the American: the conservatism of the British and the get-up-and-go of the American. My writing, my art, reflects these 'bests' or so I like to think.
NOTEBOOKS: GENERAL OVERVIEW OF A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING
In the more than sixty years(1950-2012) that I have gathered my writing into Notebooks the writing has fallen into four general categories: school, job, personal and Baha’i. The first category: school--was created in the years 1949 to 1988 in primary, secondary and tertiary education and then external studies programs(1973-1988). From the hundreds of Notebooks created in these years only two remain. From the hundreds created in category two, jobs---and in the dozens of jobs I have had, the only ones remaining are the approximately 30 Notebooks from my last job at Thornlie College of Technical and Further Education(Tafe). These were and are Notebooks from several of the social sciences and humanities.
The third category of Notebooks: personal---that are now in my possession are what I created not for use in a place of employment, not as a teacher or in a school system. They were created for my own use in my personal use as a writer and poet. I have been gathering resources now for forty-five years, 1966-2011, but only seriously for the last twenty-five, 1986-2011. I have been fine-tuning this 25 year collection of Notebooks in the last fifteen years, 1996-2011. I now have some 300 Notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics. These Notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the base for my many writing projects in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should I be granted a long life. The fourth category: Baha'i---utilizes material from category three and has now come to occupy a multitude of Notebooks in these years of my retirement from the job world and my taking on the full-time role of writer.
Little did I know when I created my first Notebook at the mid-point in the twentieth century that more than 60 (1950-2012) years later Notebooks would come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 20 June 2011.
POETS AND NOTEBOOKS
Some modern poets have published novels, for example, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath. Others have worked hard on novels but never saw them published: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Clampitt. I was in this latter category during the late 1980s but, by the early 1990s I had given up trying to write a novel in any form. There are still others who simply can’t be imagined as novelists and who don't try. I moved into this category by 1992 and, in the last two decades 1991 to 2011 I call myself a poet and publisher, writer and author, essayist and blogger.
I am, like the American poet Theodore Roethke(1908-1963), a poet who utilizes notebooks. Roethke once declared, “I can become a bird but I can’t write a story." The recent re-release of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943–63 a selection from Roethke's notebooks first published in 1972, reflects the purity of his poetic devotion. The book contains whole poems, failed poems, promising poem fragments, and comments about poetry. Its editor, David Wagoner, culled the contents from the 277 spiral notebooks Roethke left behind at his sudden death from coronary occlusion in 1963, at the age of fifty-five. A friend and former student of Roethke’s, as well as a notable poet himself, Wagoner may well have made his selections primarily to illuminate Roethke’s poetry, possibly at the expense of other literary concerns. Even so, Straw for the Fire is remarkable for the degree to which the stock-in-trade of the novelist: anecdote, characterization, dialogue---is absent, as are the usual concerns of the cultural critic: politics, social trends, the fine arts broadly. Or as W.H. Auden, who greatly admired Roethke’s poetry, once observed: “Ted had hardly any general ideas at all.” Like his poems, the notebooks brim with turbulent emotion—despair, rage, fear—and yet always with a sense that poetry alone provides the medium for sorting out one’s profoundest feelings. He was a writer secure in his sense of calling. For more of an account of his notebooks go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/17/glassed-in/
THE CONCEPT OF NOTEBOOKS
Anselm Hollo wrote: "I love reading poets' notebooks. Poets are curious critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners."(1) Many writers and poets, though not all, keep Notebooks. This part of Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, contains information relevant to my Notebooks. What readers find here provides a general framework for the many Notebooks I have kept over the years. If there is any threat of philosophical textbookism hovering in the margins of my Notebooks, and the threat does exist, there is also my determination to "see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which I find them." This tends to fend off that danger of textbookism with what I hope is, at least sometimes, a dazzling effect. The term textbookism as I use it means collecting information and quotations which, for the most part, are not part of a live, a living resource base.
There are generally two types of Notebooks which I use. One is the type where I keep notes on a particular subject. The subjects on which I kept notes--and booklet, the notebook names--are listed in this section.(2) Another notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the subject of writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal keeping and letter writing, inter alia. In this latter category I have some 20 major files and in the former category I have some 280 files. There is material in these Notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks assumed the form they did in the last dozen years, after I retired from full-time employment in 1999.
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1 Anselm Hollo, The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et al., 1995.
2 Too many to list here. -9/9/04.
MORE GENERAL COMMENTS ON NOTEBOOKS
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. The significance to Marx of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the simple fact of his copying passages of Spinoza.(1) The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering over three hundred, could be viewed for the significance of the thought of these various authors in relation to many Baha’i themes, There is, of course, significance beyond Baha’i themes but, after nearly 50 years of pioneering(1962-2012) the main focus is the connection of these resources to the Baha’i Cause. If a reader sifted my entire oeuvre, and any specific writer, through the collyrium of the Baha’i teachings, I’m sure he would find many interesting connections. For Price, these Notebooks were themselves a significant sifting mechanism.(2) -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Eugene Holland, “ Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, 2002; and (2)Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, January 11th, 2004 to 20 June 2011.
I take a hint from Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, that there may be a couple of good ways to think about ideas, and it would be a shame to blur them. Here he reports on a poet and a physicist talking about their work habits: When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one"(p.123).
Writers very often keep Notebooks and dip into them for ideas later on. They do this for at least two reasons. They want to preserve the energetic bits of language that come to them from time to time because they know that inspiration usually doesn't deliver whole poems and certainly never whole novels. Instead, they have to come back to the inspired bits and grow them into larger works, through regular practice of their craft. And they know that if they write regularly they will have more inspired bits to come back to. Good language comes to a writer who is working regularly with language, and not so much to one who writes only when on holiday, sporadically as if part of leisure time.
NOTEBOOKS: THE WORDS OF OTHERS---AND LANGUAGE
Einstein’s point needs emphasizing here because my Notebooks are full of ideas but they are significantly the words of others. To have an idea that is all yours is a rare experience. Poets have inspirations in all sorts of situations: as they walk along, sit, eat, or whatever. I knew a fiction writer once who said he thought poets were always "working." “Working is” that magical insider's word that writers use with each other to describe their writing activity. But there are different styles of working. T. S. Eliot once said in an interview that he didn't keep notes of ideas for new poems because he thought they froze when they were written down, but they kept evolving when he had them in his head rather than on paper.
The French poet Valery is surprised at Einstein, I believe, because as a poet he thinks through the specificity of language, and needs to keep the rich, promising clusters of new writing at hand somewhere, somehow, in order to save and work with the specificity. One way or another, Valery needs to preserve the hints, the false starts, the fragments, that might lead him in the direction of that specificity. Language is not the form his work takes; language is his work. And for me, of course, the language bites are different. Each writer has a different game and his Notebooks reflect his game and the quality of his intellectual clearing house.
I can't speak as clearly about the specificity in Einstein's field. I don't know it very well. I recognize its power, its workable specificity, even if I don't speak his language and don't know, perhaps, what to make of his allegiance to mathematics and quantitative analysis. But Valery offers a clearer clue, at least to this reader, about writers having a generative relationship to language. It's visible in the ways they work, as mine are visible in the ways I work. –Ron Price with thanks to Ken Smith’s website, 03/07/03 at 8:33 p.m.
THOMAS HARDY AND HIS NOTEBOOKS
I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p.26.
Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;
confusing burying with repressing is understandable.
For me burying is an unconscious process
associated with memory, so that remembering
is like creating something anew,
not always mind you, experiencing it
for the first time, again and again.
If I have any gift as a poet it is this
and it extends from strong experiences
to minute observations. This is the fresh centre
of richness which feeds imagination,
feeds the present with charged particles,
with blood and bone, with glance and gesture
and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix
from ashes where emotion lies buried,
exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world
by some other me, as if for the first time.
17 September 1995
7 REECE MEWS/6 REECE STREET
I think what caught my fancy about the story of Francis Bacon(1), in addition to his works of art and some of the quite stimulating and provocative things he said about art and the creative process, was the transfer in tact to Ireland of Bacon’s entire art studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. Bacon worked in this studio from 1961 to 1992. It is unlikely that this will ever happen to my study. The reasons for this are complex but obvious after a brief reflection.
My study holds less interest for the eye than Bacon’s studio. There is less colour, little clutter, far less heterogeneity and diversity of materials here. What I have here in my study is an orderly arrangement of books, files, furniture and stationary resources. In a general culture that takes more interest in the visual than in print a place like this study has virtually nothing to offer the art gallery, the library, the museum. The archivist or the librarian might find some print materials here that they could integrate into their wider collections. But I can not think of any reason to keep this study at “6 Reece Street” in tact for some future generation, as the studio of Francis Bacon has been kept.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)“7 Reece Mews,” ABC TV, 11:20-12:20 p.m., 14/15 August, 2005.
I watched “7 Reece Mews,”
on ABC TV last night
14th /15th August 2005
and wondered to myself
if there was any point in
transferring my study to some
home for tourists to come,
a place to serve as model
location for serious reflection.
But after brief consideration
I concluded that this could
never happen to my world,
this extension of who I am,
this identity framework
that tells much about this
self, this person, this man
from Canada transplanted
to the Antipodes near the
end of the Nine Year Plan
to spend the rest of his life
and lay his bones in the soil
at the southern end of the axis.
Ron Price
August 15th 2005
AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS: Part 1
In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519. His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific inquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made from the age of 37 to 67.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October 31st, 2004.
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Some may regard me as a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”(1) ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t enumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949-1950 in kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1.
I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s. Most of these notes are: (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my notes comes from the last three decades, 1981 to 2011. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997 in over 30 instalments(2); many were given to my colleagues when I left the teaching profession in 1999; many were thrown out when I reorganized my Notebooks on retiring from teaching in 1999 and retired from casual and volunteer teaching by mid-2004.
What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a thirty year period, 1981 to 2011, from the age of 37 to 67.(3) This collection consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and, to a far lesser extent, my observations and experiences. There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i) journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines /topics in 300(ca) Notebooks in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files, inter alia.
AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS: Part 2
I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have also added additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping. I should add, too, that there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories of Notebooks that I have in my study 30 years after I began to keep notes that became the collection that now exists.(4)
New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry. They are scattered like seeds on page after page and sometimes they fall on the right soil and grow into poems, essays or chapters of a book.
There are now 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.(5)
_______________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
1 Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.
2 Now at Baha'i Library Online
3 My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1984, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first notes from the period 1984 to 2011 come from January 19th 1984, a journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
4 Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 by which time I was in grade 4 and nine years old.
5 Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs. –2004 to 2006.
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UNPRECEDENTED DIGNITY AND EASE
It is by a continual effort that I can create....My deepest, most certain leaning is toward silence and everyday activity. It has taken me years of perseverance to escape from distractions....It is how I despair and how I cure myself of despair.-Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, Penguin, 1970, p.276.
I tend toward ‘the work’ every minute
and can sit vacant staring at the garden
or some inane bit of TV or some vacuous
act for only so long without a feeling of
great emptiness invading which I must fill
with my ‘planned program’. If this cannot
be done, I fill my own mind with my own
thoughts or some Passage. But, generally,
in a chaos of reading, silence and creation
I keep out a distracted, frenetic passivity
and a mountainous world of trivia as far
away as I can until necessity intervenes.
And then, then.... some holy simplicity,
some rest, plain mysterium, a feeling of
the numinous, a nothingness, an idiosyncratic
something that is incommunicable, gliding on
a sea of faith with reason resting in the wings,
the burning desire to seek enjoying a low
flame, quietly flickering, in a free zone
of some unprecedented dignity and ease.
12 January 1996
MY TRIBUTARY
Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.
There’s been a stream, scented,
I’ve been drinking from since
before I came of age. The waters
have been sweet and deep, with
periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry
and the blackest soil filled my soul
with fear, disorder and desiccation.
My own tributary of this stream
only began to run in my middle years.
Inspiration has run with a force
that I barely understand, nor can withstand
its roving eye and hand like an interwoven
carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.
Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed
my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,
more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve
in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary
of a great and thundering river whose waters will
flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:
as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;
I know many who have not
the will that will not will belief.
The mood will not strike them here below:
I know not why?
12 January 1996
MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS
...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgment 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
NOT QUITE ME
It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams(1883-1963)
Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last thing the poet would ever say-like a will. -Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.
Every once in a while I go
to some plush joint on the
sixteenth floor and get a view
of the big smoke, or eat a lunch
in the finest restaurant in town
and discuss the state of the world,
or travel in the fast lane for an afternoon
with dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car
for the day; it’s a dip into another world for
an instant in time, a world that belongs to
someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for
a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new
desires, significations, to savour, like a dream,
vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.
