Rachael Carson and Silent Spring:1962

PERCEPTUAL CREATION

The question is not what you look at, but how you look and whether you look.
-Henry David Thoreau in`The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, Lawrence Buell, Harvard UP, London, 1995, p.115.

The year I went pioneering
Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring
was published and the Wilderness Act
was passed.1 Environmentalism had emerged
full-fledged as a topic of public concern
and in its burgeoning poetry.

This was, too, the eve of the tenth
and final stage of history
and the election of the apex
of Baha’i Administration,
the nucleus and pattern
of a future world Order,
where meaning and value,
consciousness and the mythopoetic
power of the human mind,
filled the intellectual gap between my role,
my place and the pervasive placelessness,
the vast absense which filled my head
when I theorized and watched
a 400,000 strong community
unfold the grand design,
keep the ship2 on its course
through yet another epoch.

A structure of meaning and freedom
is found in this Order
and a standard of public discussion
has been slowly emerging,
as this Order has been taking
fuller shape these last several decades
in a new etiquette of expression.
The poet can appreciate the great expansion
which has occurred since the apex was put in place.
It is an Order as much aesthetic as practical,
subjective as objectively realizable,
spiritual as an exercise in number crunching:
there is a religio-aestheticism here
in which we must practice
some kind of institutional therapy
to keep the boring, routine and familiar,
fresh, spontaneous and timeless.

So, I’ve known where I’ve been working
and on what these forty-odd years,
although it has often not been easy.
The places are all on the map,
perhaps two dozen of them,
but the what is based on an evolving understanding.
I might say that my where is as follows:

Near the outer rim
of the first concentric circle
of a vast system whose centre point
is the Bab’s holy dust,
Australasia, the south-west corner
of the spiritual axis in Australia,
Western Australia, Belmont
community of metropolitan Perth
on a flat plain beside the Indian Ocean,
about fifteen minutes by car from an escarpment,
from the city-centre and
from two universities.

and my what is:

a Baha’i and member of a Local Spiritual Assembly
serving as chairman, an international pioneer,
travel-teacher, husband, father, step-father,
lecturer at a TAFE college, poet, middle-aged man,
citizen of the world, student, friend, lover, income-earner.

I have described myself in terms of
this new organic form emerging on this planet.
I am partly one of its products;
I am defined by being confined.
This form acts like some ground conductor
of emotion, belief and conviction
that will take me a lifetime to articulate,
apprehend, describe. And even when I do
99.999% of what takes place within this form
will remain outside my oral or archival history.

My home is here within this vast design
which he unfolded and which I carry ‘round
in my head, in my bones, even if they fade
beyond thought into last traces of dust,
remembered by some cold stone
on a sunlit day and star-lit night.
I carry it ‘round in the silence
of the tongues of the departed
buried all ‘round this home whose design
is carried in their heads too: for there is now
only one home, one place, one humanity.

This vast design, my home, is not without
its complacency, smugness, simplicity,
obviousness. I reach out for an exhuberance,
wonder, freshness to recalibrate the familiar.
to perceptually recreate the universe
in a grain of sand with thoughts too deep for tears.

Ron Price
16 June 1996

1 1962
2 Universal House of Justice, first statement, 30 April 1963.