BEYOND: A Prose-Poem

[RonPrice]

Lara, in the film Dr. Zhivago, says that you and I are "like the first two people, Adam and Eve, just as unclothed and homeless." It seems to me that, since 1844 or thereabouts, perhaps since Shaykh Ahmad came out of Bahrain in about 1793 or, as the modern historian might argue, since the French Revolution in 1789, humanity has slowly been acquiring clothes and homes. There is a sense of new beginnings for people everywhere, of the immeasureable distance we have travelled as a species, of new frameworks of time and space, once quite contained, now are infinite. There is a sense, too, that we may finally be coming of age in a period of late adolescence, part of the planetization of humankind. At the same time, Lara is right. There are millions who are homeless and unclothed, although not in the sense that Lara intended. We are all faced with these two paradoxical realities among a host of others: enigmatic, puzzling, troubling.-Ron Price with thanks to Richard Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel, Cambridge UP, 1973, pp.278-9.

There's been a rise to greatness

in our age: a pleasure, for some,

in a cunning tenacity of mind

even while suffering from life.

Of course, it's not new,

this resilence, this animal toughness,

this persistence, this endurance

of men like Dostoevsky, of Badi,

TO MENTION ONLY TWO.

This over-flowing vitality,

this explosion and excess of health,

this intensified reality, sensibility,

temperament, faculty, capacity,

something titanic, some wholeness

of conception, this outpouring effect

is discussed and analysed....and, then,

beyond: some power, some influence

which shatters the cup of speech,

as engineers fail to dam the sea,

creates new categories, new faculties

for the mind, but somehow, strangely,

I find after all these years of holding

this power in my hands, my critical

faculties prevent me from even

approaching its outpouring effect:1

greater and beyond.

1 Horace Holley in The Ocean of His Words, John Hatcher, p.3.

Ron Price 27 March 2002
Updated for: Russia.com
1/10/07