Perspectives on History

WALDO

...He alone is an artist whose hands can execute perfectly what his mind has conceived...an artist spends himself, like the crayon in his hand until he is gone...Writing is like shooting...success depends on the aim not the means. Look on your mark not on your arrow....growth is the constant effort of the soul to find outside itself that which is within...as a man chooseth so is he...a man is a method...a selecting principle...our own life is the text of history and books are the commentary...-Ralph Waldo Emerson in Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995.


It was a pleasure....
spending an evening with you Waldo.
Yes married and chained for eternity
would be frightful if we could not share
truth together. It has taken me a lifetime,
it seems, to learn to share bodies
and minds, truths and beauties,
surely some souls are worth
going the distance with, Waldo?

Yes, art is a process and the poem
marks some ossification, some end,
some death; poetry is a process
that produces the poems;
it is in the world and I catch it.
The fire within may be modest,
but it is sufficient and excells
any impossible promise,
any awakened expectations
brought by fame and its ploughing-of-the-air.

And so the beads of my life are strung defining
the who that I am, aroused by this writing.
And I shall go on with this fire within
which burns with a white heat,
but always more, more, always more,
always deeper, higher, richer, more profound:
all in the name of principle, Cause,
emerging world religion
and an emotional intensity
born of some finger-mark
of beauty and insight.

Ron Price
21 October 1995





TRACES THAT SHALL LAST FOREVER


....The writing itself...I just have to keep going until I finally make something out of it. I don’t know what that something is going to be, but the process is one through which I make a good part of my own experience meaningful. I don’t mean in any easy autobiographical sense, but the matter of drawing actual experience, thought, and emotion together in a way that creates an artifact through which I can reach other people...I regard this as a very serious...sacred...function of the writer....the problem is one of being able to receive from my work that sense of tension, that sense of high purpose being realized, that keeps me going.-Ralph Ellison in “A Completion of Personality: A Talk With Ralph Ellison”, John Hersey in Speaking For You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, Kimberly Benston, editor, Howard UP, Washington, D.C.,1987, p.291.


Tension and sense of higher purpose
underlies the whole sacred enterprise
and sometimes autobiographically easy
as it flows down onto the paper like
an ooze of oil crushed and uncrushed.
Meaning unfolds as the words move,
drawing me, the world, experience,
thought, emotion, God--into one
mysteriously interlinked mix in
these epochal years of the first half
century of the tenth stage of history,
leaving traces that shall last forever
engaged in the most meritorious of deeds,*
bearing, if possible, that chalice of pure light.


Ron Price
5 October 1995

*Ridvan Message, 1995.