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Poster: RonPrice Date: Jan 22, 2007 3:39am
Forum: netlabels Subject: Re: Houseplant defends netlabels

I am responding to your quotation from Heidegger. Heidegger says many things. I find alot of his writings complex, but here is a piece I summarized in a prose-poem.
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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

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Poster: RonPrice Date: Aug 26, 2007 9:28am
Forum: netlabels Subject: Re: More on Heidegger

Martin Heidegger's concept of dasein is also useful in an attempt to understand autobiography. Heidegger said there were three modes of possible existence: factuality, existentiality and fallenness. We all live and take part in mode one and understand that mode to varying extents. People who find a sense of purpose in life, find authenticity and are therefore successful in their drive toward existentiality. Those who do not find their purpose, these are the fallen, or so he calls them. They never understand why they are here or they make up their own framework of understanding completely, or so it would seem, divorced from any traditional religious system of meaning. Often, too, some in this category do not seem to care about ultimate questions. They learn to live with an ultimately existential meaninglessness. The world, for them, is essentially incomprehensible and indifferent, although they often take pleasure and meaning in the day to day, the physical realities of life itself.

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Poster: RonPrice1 Date: Aug 25, 2009 3:55am
Forum: netlabels Subject: Re: More on Heidegger

It has been more than two years since this first post here. Since there have been no responses I will add another prose- poem in which the philosopher Martin Heidegger plays a role.-Ron Price, Australia
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Martin Heidegger(1889-1976), in a book published in English at the very start of my pioneering-travelling journey in 1962(1927 in German), Being and Time, said we have two possibilities as we go through our lives. We can be the author of our own story or we can traverse life according to a script composed by others. I like to think we can do both.
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A knowledge of Heidegger′s Sein und Zeit(1927/1962) is essential for anyone who wishes to understand a great deal of recent continental work in theology as well as philosophy. Yet until this translation first appeared in 1962, when I was working on my grade 13 in Ontario with my intellectual nose to the proverbial grindstone, this fundamental work of one of the most influential European thinkers of the century remained inaccessible to English readers. In fact the difficulty of Heidegger′s thought was considered to be almost insuperable in the medium of a foreign language, especially English.

This most influential of European thinkers of the century is still inaccessible to English readers because (a) most readers don't like reading philosophy especially a book of more than 500 pages and (b) those who do read philosophy are now faced with so many books to read they would drown if they tried to even cover the field.-Ron Price, Australia

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Poster: RonPrice1 Date: Aug 25, 2009 4:07am
Forum: netlabels Subject: Re: More on Heidegger

WHIMSICALITY AND SELF-INDULGENCE

In an essay on the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, John Bayley quotes literary critic Edmund Wilson to make the point that “Flaubert, Joyce and Virginia Woolf were in a sense poets who wrote in prose because….prose seemed to offer the freedom and authority”1 for the writing they were attempting. This idea struck me as significant for the writing I do because I often feel I am a poet who writes in prose. There is certainly a kinship between my prose and my poetry for many reasons one of which is expressed by John Crowe Ransom: “There is no principle of rightness in poetry;….there is only ponderous whimsicality, labour of wit and a certain obscure self-indulgence.”2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary, Cambridge UP, 1971, p.236; and 2 J.C. Ransom in Author Unknown.

I seem to learn of my profoundest
yearnings though an awareness
of other selves and their yearnings.
Whatever is within me it is so often
found in the shame, the splendour,
the ideas and wisdom of others.1

Making present the possibilities
of the past, actualizing historical
possibility, this is live tradition2
and I am helped in this effort by
the ponderous whimsicality
and the self-indulgence of poetry.

1 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp.25-6.
2 Martin Heidegger in Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, Paul Bovem, Columbia UP, NY, 1980, p.90.

Ron Price
August 30th 2005



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