About My Favorite Author: Ron Price

[RonPrice]

THIS HUMBLE HABITATION
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When a person plies their trade, their profession or some personal activity in one place for any length of time they tend to keep certain items of equipment, gadgets, tools and resources on their work table or bench, in their study or shed. Were some observer with literary skills to comprehensively describe the work area of a writer and poet like myself such an observer might include in his description the following:

the writer’s desk--its size, quality and orderliness--his files, notebooks, stationary, pens and other aids, his computer, printer, sources of illumination(lamps, lights, access to daylight), photographs, paintings, pictures, objets d’art, a brief outline of his library, the writer’s attitudes to and treatment of his books, the frequency of their use; other items of furniture, technology and resources; the time spent in the study, in this micro-milieux, on a daily basis; the view out of the window and at the doorway, the sounds of the street and of nature; the cleanliness, the frequency the study is dusted and vacuumed.

There is much to describe and depending on the level of detail in the description a writer could go on for pages, but the above provides a general overview.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 20 February 2007.

I’ve had a variety of workplaces
over the years: bedroom, lounge,
dining-room, study and now, in
these early years of late adulthood,
I have the kind of order suited to
my needs: an 18 ft. sq. desk space
with its lamp, trays and dictionary,
printer, computer, keyboard, jug
and glass of water, pens, mouse
and that lemon tree outside the
window in my wife’s lovely garden.

This place of creative tranquillity,
this humble habitation, this place
that is my study where I repose
in peace in this my retirement
far, far from the tumult of society
and its madding crowd in these
darkest hours before the dawn
where my soul can enjoy the
rendezvous with its Source and
the ventilation of a quickening,
renewing, clarifying, amplifying
wind and its rigorous effects.


Ron Price
20 February 2007
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That's all folks!

 

[RonPrice]

More About My Favorite Author: Myself

THE ARENA​

Another week of talking and listening—24 hours worth. Family, friends and community activities—all essential and unavoidable parts of my social constellation. In this my 63rd year this extent of social interaction is about as "heavy" as it gets. I sleep it off and in two days my psyche gradually gets back to normal, to a working order, to the tranquillity of silence and creativity’s somewhat overwhelming forces. Where did my former social enthusiasms go? Rubbed out by degrees over half a century from the age of 5 to 55? The roles of: student, teacher, friend, associate, colleague, husband, father, step-father, uncle, cousin, taxi-driver, milkman, steel-worker, editor, writer, tutor, lecturer, union secretary, Baha’i chairman/secretary/committee member, book and vacuum-cleaner salesman, clerk, patient, truck-driver, researcher and more-- roles that filled the air with words to varying extents all drawing forth my social energies, some social quotient and leaving me, by temperament and circumstances at the age of 55, preoccupied with internal processes of integration, with a desire for repose not activity and with a passion for study.

This latter, this academic, activity which now supplies each hour and each day with perpetual pleasure and an equal passion for coherence and order in the realm of thought and writing have turned the source of my happiness away from the social domain, outside the arena of human interaction. And so it is that I avoid the social and the emotional and their respective entanglements–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 19 February 2007.

Those fifty years of the social
left my fragile craft tired and
called me, by a certain sorrow
and tarnished hope to quietness.

Not that happiness had not been
mine with its intimacies and life
exchanges, the exercise of talent
and love’s pleasures and tastes,
but after half a century I turned
to other sources and found the
central place in my imagination
which coloured my external world
with its warm, subtle, complex hues.

With Montaigne I reserved a little
back-shop where I made solitude
and retreat, experienced a taste for
peace and quiet to the full, oneness
with the absolute in a spirit of play,
and dream and work and escape
from the madness inherent in life’s
lot, to numb the pain from my
unquiet heart and brain, to enjoy
my self’s idiosyncrasies and let
things happen amidst heat and flame.1

1 In writing this prose-poem I drew on Anthony Storr’s Solitude, 1988.


Ron Price
19 February 2007
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the end!