My Complex Raison D'Etre for Writing

[RonPrice]

The poet Byron expressed the view that his writing derived from a painful intensification of self and the desire for relief from it. To withdraw himself from himself, to be relieved from what he saw as his "cursed selfishness," this was his sole, his entire, his "sincere motive in scribbling at all." While I find there is some truth in this explanation for the origins of my writing, there is so much more to it; indeed, the raison d'etre is quite complex.

It is a subject I have gone into from time to time throughout my five volume memoir and I feel the need to expatiate on it in order to touch the motivational matrix, the explanatory framework, for why and what I am doing in this department of my life. Writing as I do here may be an escape from self, but it is also a royal road to selfhood. This work also negotiates the relationship between self and community in both the Bah??? Faith and the nations I have lived in, Australia and Canada. This exercise in negotiation is also a source of the complexity I refer to above. There seem to have been many different impulses at work in these volumes.

I often think that the seeds that germinated into this memoir fell in my youth, if not before and I take consolation in the slowness of its production. Perhaps, as Rodin once wrote, "slowness is beauty." In the dance of life, in the growth and development of my personal life and the Bah??? Faith, slowness is one of the essential roots of any achievement that I have observed. Civilization's development seems inversely connected with rapidity, with the speed of the process. And still, however extensive the book has become, it is still incomplete, still unfinished, still unround and unpolished. It will soon be published as it stands without regret or remorse. I have left my regrets and feelings of remorse to my life and I have had plenty of them in the sixty plus years since my first memory in 1947.

Readers will carry on this work as it stands before me and as it stands before them as they reads the text. They will find a veil which covers both my worked and unworked material. They will find, too, that my work is like an opal that never appears the same twice or, as Heraclitus might have put it, the reader will never step into the same book twice and my book changes with every word I add and would be different, so different if I wrote it again. This book remained latent, unconscious, concealed within my own soul and I'm sure for some if not many it will be a shock since it is such a manifest revelation of self. I anticipate that it will knock again and again at the closed doors of people's hearts and like some importunate strange I will be asked to go away.

I like to think that eventually I will be let in because what I write is not only about me, but about them. As Bertrand Russell once put it "ever so many people are just like" me. If there are any abnormalities I exhibit, I also share them with millions.

My essays, my books and my poetry are all prompted and sustained by a sense of power to which writing itself gives access. These literary forms dramatize my efforts to contact the sources of that power and to gain the knowledge it permits. It is a contact that can easily be discouraged by the cynical frame of mind of modern man and so I must cut through this cynicism by means of a literary, a poetic, effort, a knowledge that is not inhibited by society's phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination and by the beliefs and attitudes of the masses who are ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion at play throughout the planet. The more positive frame of mind found in modern society is often one which is desperate to believe that through some fortuitous conjunction of circumstances society will find it possible to bend the conditions of human life into conformity with its desires.-Ron--moreif desired by readers