This Book Is Simpler
Heidegger's books are not all as massive as "Being and Time." I wrote the following after reading just the short introduction. Can I recommend you start with smaller works. Just an idea.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
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A SWEET PERFUME
This is a poetry which memorializes a particular religious tradition as well as my society and my life. It is a poetry which grows out of the events of these three categories of my experience. I like to think that this poetry reaches into the truth of this experience and responds to the appeal of its presence in my memory and imagination. I know from more than twenty-five years of writing this prose-poetry that it holds itself open to the very stuff of my living, the dwelling of my inner and outer self and the happenings of my religion and society. I have come to see my prose and poetry as equally poetic; indeed, in some ways they are interchangeable. I like to think, too, that there is in my writing a purity, a thickness and a solidity that is itself a human activity like singing, thinking, cooking or reading among so many other forms of doing. My writing, my poetry, is an expression of my own way of living, my modus operandi, modus vivendi, my style and content of thinking, how things occur to me, how I see things happen, how they move and have their being, their presentness, their being and existing. -Ron Price with thanks to Martin Heidegger, "Introduction," Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Rowe, NY, 1971, pp. ix-xxii.
When these ideas became accessible
in the introduction to that small book,
I was on my way to South Australia
with the commemoration of the 50th
anniversary of His passing, the inception
of the Formative Age of a new Dispensation
and the birth of an Administrative Order--all
on the horizon. There was a sweet perfume
of victory in the air back then and we tasted
it again in that dry dog-biscuit of a town in
the malee of South Australia. A new horizon,
bright with intimations of thrilling developments,
charged with meaning, half-sensed, half-seen
through my young eyes, laying bare special
challenges as I tried to seize opportunities
unique in human history to radiate a message
to the many seekers among my contemporaries.1
1 "Letter to Baha'i Youth in Every Land," The Universal House of Justice, 10 June 1966.
Ron Price
22 January 2007
