A Sort of Running

[RonPrice]

A BALANCING


Something which one could call ruminativeness, speculation, a running commentary is going on unnoticed in us always and is the seedbed of creation...It is the lumps and trials that tell us whether we shall be known and whether our fate will be exemplary, like a star. -John Ashbery in John Ashbery: Modern Critical Reviews,, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House Pub., 1985, pp.180-181.


Twenty years ago I passed along these roads:
dried out and free from old entanglements.*
These same fields ran to the horizon on and on,
on and on with the Nine Year Plan just ended
and fences shaping everything in sight
along this road to Gundagai in early spring,
as the sun warmed my cheek
like a piece of bread in a toaster,
with blue sky for a ceiling
under the roof of the universe, silent.
The hum and chatter of the wheels,
music of this sphere, backdrop,
as I gazed at her shiny brown hair and soft hand-
touching my eyes like rain on this dry endless road,
going home past these fields of cows and sheep
which keep doing what nature has trained them to do
and I do what empathy and distance reinforce,
a balancing of unresolved and conflicting elements
which threaten to tear me apart, but which I know,
from experience, I will resolve sufficiently and
which I will find relief from, from restraint,
in a process known as writing.

Ron Price
10 September 1995

* first marriage had just ended.
____________________________
that's all folks!

 

[RonPrice]

Carpe Diem and Running and.....

CARPE DIEM

This Latin expression applies as much to running as to many other things in life-some of which I write about in the following prose-poem.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson set to work early in 1963 putting their radio astronomy receiving system together. I had no idea at the time since I was 18, studying nine matriculation subjects in the most demanding part of my formal education and my interest in sport and girls far exceeded my enthusiasm for either physics or astronomy. In the early months of 1963, as the Baha’is of the world were preparing to hold their first international election, two American scientists, Penzias and Wilson were most concerned about the quality of the components they were adding to the system they were developing. It was a system they had been given to do their work and the existing components of that system had superb properties.

They began a series of radio astronomical observations, ones that Penzias had proposed, so as to make the best use of the careful calibration and extreme sensitivity of their system. Of their various projects, the most technically challenging was a measurement of the radiation intensity from the Milky Way galaxy at high latitudes.1 This endeavor resulted in the accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. Wilson gives a detailed description of the development of their system in his 1978 Nobel lecture.2 Their discovery established the Big Bang theory as the leading contender by far for the explanation of the origins of the universe. For this discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Arno Penzias, “Autobiography,” Nobelprize.org; and 2Robert Wilson, Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1978.

The balance of opinion
was now shifting to the
Big Bang hypothesis,
just as the apex was finally
placed on this System and
that charismatic Force was
finally and fully given the
seal of good-housekeeping,
institutionalized in a unique
victory of consolidation
beyond the reach of our
understanding in these
years at the start of the
tremendously long tenth
stage of history which was
finally off and running,
in the first Plan launched to which
we were asked, yet again, to:
carpe diem or seize the day.1

1 This was an important part of the philosophy of the apostle Paul as expressed in Philippians 3:7-16. Carpe diem, seize the day, has been an important part of Baha’i philosophy as I have understood it in my life. The Universal House of Justice wrote in its first Ridvan Message in April 1964: “we must seize the opportunities of the hour and go forward…..” Wellspring of Guidance, p.27.

Ron Price
March 26th 2006