SOME ENCHANTRESS

I had a desire to create, to recreate, the world I had grown accustomed to, was comfortable with at last, but which I was also getting tired of, was growing old with, was losing. The desire to capture, to fix, to preserve the world I had lived in and was experiencing with varying degrees of joy, fatigue, enthusiasm and emptiness, came on me gradually as I approached my fiftieth year. So I began to write with a passion, a purpose, at times a pride, and nearly always a poetic inclination. -Ron Price with thanks to Max Putzel, “Overture”, Genius of Place: William Faulkner’s Triumphant Beginnings, Louisiana State UP, Baton Rouge, 1985, pp.1-12.


Poetry became a way of defining,
expressing, the discomforts, the comforts,
the way it was now, then, when.
It became part of my map:
my narrow world and wide vistas,
my invasion of outer worlds by inner worlds,
a certain improvisation, a fusion of sound
and sense, understanding my landscape.

It passed through me like a storm-wind,
like a gentle breeze, the warm sun of day,
the cool evening freshness after the heat.
Doors of perception were flung open,
pressing the architecture of my days
with their subtle power, composing
and conceiving with some enchantress,
in my soul, nameless, inexplicable elegancies.

Ron Price
15 April 1996

RonPrice

CONNECT

Architecture, from the earliest times, has served to impress an idea on people by means of the splendour of its expression. Architecture can inspire awe for the heavenly powers and it can possess an educative function. Generally, in architecture, it is better to ere on the side of conservatism. In building, memory is reality; it is better to recycle existing forms of beauty. It is in formality that we find a certain basis for sanity. This is also true of the architecture of one’s life: formality, conservatism, the inspiration of beauty, memory—they all all critical elements in the overall design of one’s life. -Ron Price with thanks to Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1935, p.47 and Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, BBC, London, 1980, p.211.


Beauty seems to require that we take
ourselves a little more seriously---
connect our lives somehow with the
deeper roots of truth and creativity.

This terraced landscape I see here,
green and white with a formality,
it seems to speak in complicated ways
about relationships, hints, uncertainties
and contradictions; it does not force
meaning; it emerges, adds up, unfolds
from history’s tortured, complex, scape.
Signs endlessly suggest, take me through
a process of discovery, educate my very being.

I’m thrust into history’s matrix
gradually appropriating its meaning.

Ron Price
18 October 1996