HAUNTED
Part 1:
Joyce Carol Oates says in the introduction to a collection of her essays, Woman Writer: Occasions and Opportunities published in 1988, that writing comes to seem for many writers like a complex and essentially unknowable drama which is working itself out in their lives. Virginia Woolf says that the act of writing made her feel above time and death. The depth, the subtlety, the originality, the genius of writing is not explainable, although W.B. Yeats said he wrote because a terrible beauty was born. Others say they write out of loneliness, bitterness, galvanic energy, hallucinogenic drug-induced experiences, a profoundly moving event or a personal eiphany: a delicate and evanescent, sudden and unanticipated moment of 'spiritual manifestation' which evokes an already existing interior state. John Updike said that his inspiration came like "a packet of material to be delivered." But not any more, eh, John? No more packets to be delivered. For many, though, this inspiration seems quite inexplicable.
It really is a mystery why one writes. I'm sure that one of the reasons I write is my preoccupation, my obsession with the Baha'i Faith since at least 1962. -Ron Price with thanks to Joyce Carol Oates, Woman Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, E. P. Dutton, NY, 1988, pp.3-14.
Part 2:
Why this need, this compulsion?
To verify experience? Obsessed
by a world, a voice: hypnotic,
ravishing, inexplicable? To tell
where I am in an immensity of
space and time, man and society?
To make my life authentic by means
of words? My imprimatur? Converting
the bread of life, the riddle, the inchoate,
into something of permanent form? A
triumphant act? A wave, a sound in the
mind? A conjunction of inner and outer
forces? Preoccupied, haunted with memory's
chaotic jumble? Seeking order, understanding?
Ron Price
Last updated on: 26/9/'14.
Part 1:
Joyce Carol Oates says in the introduction to a collection of her essays, Woman Writer: Occasions and Opportunities published in 1988, that writing comes to seem for many writers like a complex and essentially unknowable drama which is working itself out in their lives. Virginia Woolf says that the act of writing made her feel above time and death. The depth, the subtlety, the originality, the genius of writing is not explainable, although W.B. Yeats said he wrote because a terrible beauty was born. Others say they write out of loneliness, bitterness, galvanic energy, hallucinogenic drug-induced experiences, a profoundly moving event or a personal eiphany: a delicate and evanescent, sudden and unanticipated moment of 'spiritual manifestation' which evokes an already existing interior state. John Updike said that his inspiration came like "a packet of material to be delivered." But not any more, eh, John? No more packets to be delivered. For many, though, this inspiration seems quite inexplicable.
It really is a mystery why one writes. I'm sure that one of the reasons I write is my preoccupation, my obsession with the Baha'i Faith since at least 1962. -Ron Price with thanks to Joyce Carol Oates, Woman Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, E. P. Dutton, NY, 1988, pp.3-14.
Part 2:
Why this need, this compulsion?
To verify experience? Obsessed
by a world, a voice: hypnotic,
ravishing, inexplicable? To tell
where I am in an immensity of
space and time, man and society?
To make my life authentic by means
of words? My imprimatur? Converting
the bread of life, the riddle, the inchoate,
into something of permanent form? A
triumphant act? A wave, a sound in the
mind? A conjunction of inner and outer
forces? Preoccupied, haunted with memory's
chaotic jumble? Seeking order, understanding?
Ron Price
Last updated on: 26/9/'14.
Last edited: