The whole of the poet’s experience, screened in the mirror of his memory, seems in retrospect a sequence of movie moments, great scenes in which he is the leading man.
-Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.147.
All of reality exists to end between the pages of a book.
-Mallarme in idem.
For this pleasure-loving society
there would be some good stuff
in this ongoing movie of my life:
plenty of skirt followed down the street
in comfortable spectorial distance,
to satisfy libidinous tendencies
in a gospel of eroticism,
with prurient presentation,
even neurotic desire,
a sexual cornucopia,
that ever-present orgy
for the randy adolescent
in wish fulfillment,
in clean moronic gaze,
the vacant field
of the eye’s entire universe.
I try to persuade my reading audience
to gaze at this page, once empty,
before I fill it with my life,
with thickly textured phrases
infused with the urgency of personal need,
no match I know for those technicolor dreams,
master narratives for a heterogeneous society,
vast, compelling fantasies where love,
laughter and a secular aesthetic
are the leading industries,
where beauty is marketed
like a basic food
and a former cultural hegemony,1
social consensus, diffused through society,
has come apart, more than creeping leftism,
after that revolutionary year of 1967
when we entered the dark heart
of an age of transition with Bonnie And Clyde
and The Graduate, radical social movements
and proclamation.2
This page is no match, either,
for that principle assassin of public life
and community politics, the TV,
that commodity of commodities
by which a submerged suburbia views,
periscope up, sees and understands;
and an atomized, fragmented public
goes for magical, private, moments
over public time with skepticism
legitimating withdrawal
and the canons of authenticity
gone from old politics and religion.
And so I write this page
to tell the story
of a new communitarian form
of reconstruction that has the capacity
to sustain faith, a truely cosmopolitan
universalism, non-sectarian, non-denominational,
no simplistic form of ignorant emotionalism,
a basis for a world commonwealth, the New Jerusalem,
that has been growing unobtrusively
around the planet and is about to burst bonds
that have held it since its inception
in a tapestry of beauty
that is spreading its awesome wings
over Mt Carmel.
Ron Price
7 December 1996
1 this cultural hegemony, many film critics argue, broke down in the 1960s due to a wide range of factors within the film industry and outside cultural factors.
2 In 1967 the Baha’i community launched a global proclamation to celebrate the 100th anniversal of Baha’u’llah’s proclamation to the Kings.
