The Spiritual in Autobiography & The Popular Press

RonPrice · December 9, 2007

If I give to my life artistic form, spiritual vision and design in retrospect; if I discover a more profound truth in the context of this vision than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver, I understand that is part of a design-imposed, meaning-making, process that I give to my life. Perhaps a great deal of what has happened to me is fate, destiny, a certain predestination. Such was the view Henry James took of his life when he wrote his autobiography in the evening of his life. There is little doubt of the importance of fate from a Baha’i perspective. I wish I could say in this context that my sentences had a quality of stunning exactitude, lyricism and comedy, an aphoristic concision but, alas, style is not a quality bestowed on me as it was on Flaubert. Perhaps this is because I have not been willing to work at it as obsessively as he over many decades. But I have made a start.

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NARROW HISTORY

The popularity of a product, an item of culture, is not related to its quality or its truth, its beauty or its spirituality. The sense of reality, realness, quality, in the world for many individuals, especially the artists, is related to creativity, to generativity, a voice that is uniquely one’s own, that has the stamp of one’s inner voice or self and that is part of a community. This is particularly true for the Baha’i who is also an artist. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert McDowell, editor, Poetry After Modernism, Story Line Press, 1991.

Feminist views of "history" support "anecdote as authority" since history has so largely ignored and distorted women’s lives and work. Women must learn to speak again starting with I, with we. -ibid., pp.175-76.

......the poem here has got lost......<SUP>1

1</SUP> Some poems get lost, some are not finished, some sit in a file waiting for completion....

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