Progressive Emancipation

[Ron Price]

PROGRESSIVE EMANCIPATION

Reading Colin Wilson’s summary of H.G. Wells’s thoughts on the freedom of the mind to work at creative and intellectual pursuits gave me some useful perspectives on writing poetry. Wells speaks of our entanglement with life and he craves release from the bothers, demands and distractions that he, and we, are air to. He speaks of our progressive emancipation from these everyday urgencies in the last century. The artist desires to impose his own meaning on life rather than have it imposed from the outside. He also writes of the desire for "pure mental activity" and "purposeful evolutionary activity" of the senses and the intellect which, he stresses, is "limitless."

-Ron Price with thanks to Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream, Abacus, London, 1979(1962), pp. 89-91.

We’re talking limitless vision.

We’re talking the head and the heart

being in one powerful symbiosis,

free from endless things that must be done,

the trivia, the bothers, the distractions,

free at last from domesticity’s domain

and employment’s consuming passion—

to find eternal silences in infinite spaces*

and the strength to will and dream

cultivating one’s time in a framework

of the imagination derived from science

as the method-the systematic use of the

rational faculty as applied to anything.**

Ron Price

3 September 1999

* From Pascal in Wilson, op.cit., p.109.

** see John Hatcher’s articles on "Science and Religion" in Baha’i Studies.

 

[alexa]

(..)to find eternal silences in infinite spaces*
and the strength to will and dream
cultivating one’s time in a framework
of the imagination derived from science
as the method-the systematic use of the
rational faculty as applied to anything.**

** see John Hatcher’s articles on "Science and Religion" in Baha’i Studies.

Hi Ron,

Can you give me a net link to John's Hatcher article (your ref. **), please ?

I cannot pass over "the imagination derived from science as the method", so I would like to understand what he means by that.

Thanks,

Alexa

 

[Ron Price]

Dear Alexa


I got the name wrong. it's William Hatcher not John. they are actually brothers. William is a science man and John is into literature. They are both professors at universities. I'd give you a net site if I could but everything I have is in books and journals. Let me say, though, that:

for William Hatcher science is 'the systematic use of the rational faculty." I tried to find a poem to reflect his concept, but had no luck. Intuition and reason both have strong parts in Hatcher's scheme. I close with a poem that reflects my own systematic approach within which my intuition can play its fertile role. I hope it is of some use. Write again if you want and I'm happy to try again.
________________
NOTEBOOKS



F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"1 some time after May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations. Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald, they are important.2 Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.



R. Frederick Price(that's me) "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and 1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he lectured and taught. His poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes that came from observations and ideas. By 2003, as this statement was being recorded, over one hundred two-ring binders and arch-lever files as well as over fifty booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.viii & p.ix.



It had become a massive embrace,

filled the spaces all around him

like a sprawling glove

that noone could wear,

like a collection of old shirts

nicely hung and arranged

to wear on cold or warm days.



He'd been warming to them for,

what, forty years now?1

It had been a lifetime

since that early start

with lots of practice

even in those earlier years,

perhaps as far back as '53--

surely not that soon,

not in grade four2

when he loved Susan Gregory,

listened to his father’s anger

and began his baseball career

while his mother was toying

with a new religion

that had just come into town.



1 1962-2002

2 I have vague recollections of 'notebooks' from school from about 1953 through 1958, grades four to eight in Ontario Canada. Nothing, of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The oldest item from a 'notebook' that I possess comes from 1962.

 

[alexa]

Dear Ron,

The fact John Hatcher is in literature gave me an indirect answer to my question. Only a writer can see imagination derived from science.

I'm inclined to agree more with his brother, William Hatcher who thinks science is 'the systematic use of the rational faculty."

I'm glad to see another Canadian on this site.

Alexa