RonPrice
08-12-2007, 10:18 AM
SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ON NOTEBOOKS
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. The significance to Marx of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the simple fact of his copying passages of Spinoza.1 The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering over three hundred, could be viewed for the significance of the thought of these various authors in relation to many Baha’i themes. There is, of course, significance beyond Baha’i themes but, after 40 years of pioneering, the main focus is the connection of these resources to the Baha’i Cause. If a reader sifted my entire oeuvre and any specific writer through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings, I’m sure he would find many interesting connections. For Price, these Notebooks were themselves a significant sifting mechanism.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Eugene Holland, " Spinoza and Marx," Cultural Logic, 2002; and 2Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.
I take a hint from Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, that there may be a couple of good ways to think about ideas, and it would be a shame to blur them. Here he reports on a poet and a physicist talking about their work habits:
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one"(p.123).
Writers very often keep Notebooks and dip into them for ideas later on. They do this for at least two reasons. They want to preserve the energetic bits of language that come to them from time to time because they know that inspiration usually doesn't deliver whole poems and certainly never whole novels. Instead, they have to come back to the inspired bits and grow them into larger works, through regular practice of their craft. And they know that if they write regularly they will have more inspired bits to come back to. Good language comes to a writer who is working regularly with language, and not so much to one who writes only when on holiday, sporadically as if part of leisure time.
Einstein’s point needs emphasizing here because my Notebooks are full of ideas but they are significantly the words of others. To have an idea that is all yours is a rare experience. Poets have inspirations in all sorts of situations: as they walk along, sit, eat, or whatever. I knew a fiction writer once who said he thought poets were always "working." "Working is" that magical insider's word that writers use with each other to describe their writing activity. But there are different styles of working. T. S. Eliot once said in an interview that he didn't keep notes of ideas for new poems because he thought they froze when they were written down, but they kept evolving when he had them in his head rather than on paper.
The French poet Valery is surprised at Einstein, I believe, because as a poet he thinks through the specificity of language, and needs to keep the rich, promising clusters of new writing at hand somewhere, somehow, in order to save and work with the specificity. One way or another, Valery needs to preserve the hints, the false starts, the fragments, that might lead him in the direction of that specificity. Language is not the form his work takes; language is his work. And for me, of course, the language bites are different. Each writer has a different game and his Notebooks reflect his game and the quality of his intellectual clearing house.
I can't speak as clearly about the specificity in Einstein's field. I don't know it very well. I recognize its power, its workable specificity, even if I don't speak his language and don't know, perhaps, what to make of his allegiance to mathematics and quantitative analysis. But Valery offers a clearer clue, at least to this reader, about writers having a generative relationship to language. It's visible in the ways they work, as mine are visible in the ways I work. –Ron Price with thanks to Ken Smith’s website, 03/07/03 at 8:33 pm.
________________________________
THOMAS HARDY AND HIS NOTEBOOKS
I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p.26.
Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;
confusing burying with repressing is understandable.
For me burying is an unconscious process
associated with memory, so that remembering
is like creating something anew,
not always mind you, experiencing it
for the first time, again and again.
If I have any gift as a poet it is this
and it extends from strong experiences
to minute observations. This is the fresh centre
of richness which feeds imagination,
feeds the present with charged particles,
with blood and bone, with glance and gesture
and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix
from ashes where emotion lies buried,
exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world
by some other me, as if for the first time.
17 September 1995
7 REECE MEWS/6 REECE STREET
I think what caught my fancy about the story of Francis Bacon1, in addition to his works of art and some of the quite stimulating and provocative things he said about art and the creative process, was the transfer in tact to Ireland of Bacon’s entire art studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. Bacon worked in this studio from 1961 to 1992. It is unlikely that this will ever happen to my study. The reasons for this are complex but obvious after a brief reflection.
My study holds less interest for the eye than Bacon’s studio. There is less colour, little clutter, far less heterogeneity and diversity of materials here. What I have here in my study is an orderly arrangement of books, files, furniture and stationary resources. In a general culture that takes more interest in the visual than in print a place like this study has virtually nothing to offer the art gallery, the library, the museum. The archivist or the librarian might find some print materials here that they could integrate into their wider collections. But I can not think of any reason to keep this study at "6 Reece Street" in tact for some future generation, as the studio of Francis Bacon has been kept.-Ron Price with thanks to 1"7 Reece Mews," ABC TV, 11:20-12:20 p.m., 14/15 August, 2005.
I watched "7 Reece Mews,"
on ABC TV last night
14th /15th August 2005
and wondered to myself
if there was any point in
transferring my study to some
home for tourists to come,
a place to serve as model
location for serious reflection.
But after brief consideration
I concluded that this could
never happen to my world,
this extension of who I am,
this identity framework
that tells much about this
self, this person, this man
from Canada transplanted
to the Antipodes near the
end of the Nine Year Plan
to spend the rest of his life
and lay his bones in the soil
at the southern end of the axis.
Ron Price
August 15th 2005
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. The significance to Marx of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the simple fact of his copying passages of Spinoza.1 The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering over three hundred, could be viewed for the significance of the thought of these various authors in relation to many Baha’i themes. There is, of course, significance beyond Baha’i themes but, after 40 years of pioneering, the main focus is the connection of these resources to the Baha’i Cause. If a reader sifted my entire oeuvre and any specific writer through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings, I’m sure he would find many interesting connections. For Price, these Notebooks were themselves a significant sifting mechanism.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Eugene Holland, " Spinoza and Marx," Cultural Logic, 2002; and 2Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.
I take a hint from Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, that there may be a couple of good ways to think about ideas, and it would be a shame to blur them. Here he reports on a poet and a physicist talking about their work habits:
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied. "It's so seldom I have one"(p.123).
Writers very often keep Notebooks and dip into them for ideas later on. They do this for at least two reasons. They want to preserve the energetic bits of language that come to them from time to time because they know that inspiration usually doesn't deliver whole poems and certainly never whole novels. Instead, they have to come back to the inspired bits and grow them into larger works, through regular practice of their craft. And they know that if they write regularly they will have more inspired bits to come back to. Good language comes to a writer who is working regularly with language, and not so much to one who writes only when on holiday, sporadically as if part of leisure time.
Einstein’s point needs emphasizing here because my Notebooks are full of ideas but they are significantly the words of others. To have an idea that is all yours is a rare experience. Poets have inspirations in all sorts of situations: as they walk along, sit, eat, or whatever. I knew a fiction writer once who said he thought poets were always "working." "Working is" that magical insider's word that writers use with each other to describe their writing activity. But there are different styles of working. T. S. Eliot once said in an interview that he didn't keep notes of ideas for new poems because he thought they froze when they were written down, but they kept evolving when he had them in his head rather than on paper.
The French poet Valery is surprised at Einstein, I believe, because as a poet he thinks through the specificity of language, and needs to keep the rich, promising clusters of new writing at hand somewhere, somehow, in order to save and work with the specificity. One way or another, Valery needs to preserve the hints, the false starts, the fragments, that might lead him in the direction of that specificity. Language is not the form his work takes; language is his work. And for me, of course, the language bites are different. Each writer has a different game and his Notebooks reflect his game and the quality of his intellectual clearing house.
I can't speak as clearly about the specificity in Einstein's field. I don't know it very well. I recognize its power, its workable specificity, even if I don't speak his language and don't know, perhaps, what to make of his allegiance to mathematics and quantitative analysis. But Valery offers a clearer clue, at least to this reader, about writers having a generative relationship to language. It's visible in the ways they work, as mine are visible in the ways I work. –Ron Price with thanks to Ken Smith’s website, 03/07/03 at 8:33 pm.
________________________________
THOMAS HARDY AND HIS NOTEBOOKS
I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks, in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Functions of Poetry, Clive Sansom, selector, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p.26.
Some would say that’s not a good idea, Thomas;
confusing burying with repressing is understandable.
For me burying is an unconscious process
associated with memory, so that remembering
is like creating something anew,
not always mind you, experiencing it
for the first time, again and again.
If I have any gift as a poet it is this
and it extends from strong experiences
to minute observations. This is the fresh centre
of richness which feeds imagination,
feeds the present with charged particles,
with blood and bone, with glance and gesture
and the poem rises and goes forth like a phoenix
from ashes where emotion lies buried,
exhumed fresh and tasted as if in some other world
by some other me, as if for the first time.
17 September 1995
7 REECE MEWS/6 REECE STREET
I think what caught my fancy about the story of Francis Bacon1, in addition to his works of art and some of the quite stimulating and provocative things he said about art and the creative process, was the transfer in tact to Ireland of Bacon’s entire art studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. Bacon worked in this studio from 1961 to 1992. It is unlikely that this will ever happen to my study. The reasons for this are complex but obvious after a brief reflection.
My study holds less interest for the eye than Bacon’s studio. There is less colour, little clutter, far less heterogeneity and diversity of materials here. What I have here in my study is an orderly arrangement of books, files, furniture and stationary resources. In a general culture that takes more interest in the visual than in print a place like this study has virtually nothing to offer the art gallery, the library, the museum. The archivist or the librarian might find some print materials here that they could integrate into their wider collections. But I can not think of any reason to keep this study at "6 Reece Street" in tact for some future generation, as the studio of Francis Bacon has been kept.-Ron Price with thanks to 1"7 Reece Mews," ABC TV, 11:20-12:20 p.m., 14/15 August, 2005.
I watched "7 Reece Mews,"
on ABC TV last night
14th /15th August 2005
and wondered to myself
if there was any point in
transferring my study to some
home for tourists to come,
a place to serve as model
location for serious reflection.
But after brief consideration
I concluded that this could
never happen to my world,
this extension of who I am,
this identity framework
that tells much about this
self, this person, this man
from Canada transplanted
to the Antipodes near the
end of the Nine Year Plan
to spend the rest of his life
and lay his bones in the soil
at the southern end of the axis.
Ron Price
August 15th 2005