Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Thanks For Your Email Today, Studio Eight dot TV community....and in response I forward to you one of my recent prose-poems.-Ron Price, Australia
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THE FIRST FLOWER

In the last months of my career as a full-time teacher, the last months of my part-time and casual teaching as well as into the early years of my full retirement from virtually all volunteer work,1 news was reported of the discovery in northeast China of the earliest flowering plants more than 124 MYA. The print and electronic media, first in scholarly journals and the popular press and then on TV,2 told us about what they called the first flower among the world’s flowering plants. Flowering plants are the dominant vegetation on the planet and they include: flowers, trees and many life sustaining crops. The field of study in which this knowledge, this specialized expertise, can be found is called palaeobotany and palaeobotany is a child, one of the multitude of children, of the Enlightenment. Its founding father was Gasper Maria von Sternberg(1761-1838).3 -Ron Price with thanks to 2the journal Science in 27 November 1998; the National Geographic News, 3 May 2002 and SBS TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 17 February 2008; as well as 2 Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

1 Except for my work with the International Baha’i community

Yes, you can learn all about this
in the world of palaeobotany, or
in a newspaper or on TV—all to
the level of your capacity and
interest. If, as it is often said,
people prefer entertainment to
edification and put a premium
on personality at the expense of
issues, they can get a quick TV-
hit of that first flower and tree
back in the cretaceous period--
Cainozoic era in their fragmentary
forms: leaves, stems and branches,
stems, trunks, pollen, spores, seeds--
all old ancestors in the evolutionary
story of flowers back to dinosaur times.

But now, growing in this new age, a new
flower has begun to bloom compared to
which all other flowers are but thorns;
and, yes, a tree is now growing in the
world of existence: its boughs and its
branches, its stems and its offshoots,
its leaves and its trunk will endure as
long as those most august attributes
and most excellent titles will last,1
attributes and titles of that essence
which the wisdom of the wise and
the learning of the learned can not
comprehend--will never understand.

1 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, Wilmette, 1985, p.233.

Ron Price
16 April 2008
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For your pleasure Studio 8 Readers--Ron

When was the first flower?

Sometimes it's not much but a micro-second.
I live on a 'show me' planet, a nuclear ocean nightmare.
I drag an Eighteenth Century cannon thru the Enlightenment.
I'm going out to save the world with gunpowder.

The first flower, say paleo-botanists at the moment in 2003 anyway, seems to be about 124 MYA(million years ago).-Ron Price, Tasmania

I'm guessing the new flower must be Baha'i, a natural progression in the enlightenment? Hey, sounds good to me-- peace, unity and justice on a global scale...

Hmmm.. I see my own wacko word-play was flowering today as well... Sorry about that. Although I like that bit I wrote about dragging a cannon around through the enlightenment-- may have to work that one... Interesting stuff, Ron.

Any serious study of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, mnaz, reveals many currents, many streams of thought and, so, "dragging a cannon around through the enlightenment" may not be a bad idea at all, intellectually speaking. I leave this with you and with the burgeoning literature on that 18th century and its drifting steams into our time in the 21st century.-Ron

PS Good interpretation of my prose-poem, mnaz. Go to the head of the class and receive your A+ i.e. 90 to 100%

Ba'hai humbug.
No offense.
I guess this just seems kinda esoteric for me right now, living in the weeds of it all.
I want you both to see the impatience weeds right now.
Weeds that used to be flowers, that used to blossom, until they began whacking them away pre-petal.
Cannonballs. Gunpowder.
Even the intelligent metaphors here, we weeds cannot appreciate the weight of them, which is light compared to the weights we feel have fallen from literally out of the sky, like disguised bombs, victims of which, go unaccounted for, too numerous to acknowledge....mebbe?.
Let's talk about balance.....
Interesting, and obviously a provoking thread. (to me anyways....)
H

To me, "the enlightenment", which Thomas Jefferson drew from and actively participated in, would imply a multifaceted sort of "ongoing human evolution" toward self-determination and success/survival of both the individual and the entire race as a whole. To that end, I think "dragging a cannon around through the enlightenment", presumably to mow down large populations of "undesirable weeds", has some merit as a metaphor for the U.S. of the last several decades, or really, the war-obsessed materialism, greed and nationalistic paranoia of any straggling world power as population and technology soars into the 21st Century...

Oh yes, indeed there is merit.
But I also think that many of the "weeds" are not undesirable.
Perhaps if the cannonball were drug around by an escaped weed...heh.
Mnaz, do not take my reply as anything but esoteric in itself.....
a weedy wailing voice to add to it perhaps.....
the cannonball, (an excellent image) has been drug through the ages by the underdogs and indeed it is rare that a person of Jefferson's status even noticed it....I wonder ....what would Jefferson being reading today when it comes to fiction? poetry?
I'm working on a piece right now with a long title....."I got a job that starts in two weeks...and thirty dollars in my account" or I might just call it "hawkin my microphone at the pawnshop...."

H

That's just it. They're not all "undesirable"-- only "undesirable" from the viewpoint of the war-obsessed, profit-obsessed, materialistic world powers-- those who insist on "leading" that way, and those who willingly, unthinkingly participate.

I think maybe I need to write a nice bombs-a-burstin' 4th o' July canto.... Back to the weeds with me!!

I build my narrative, my story, my approach to life, out of individual agency, the agency of my own actions, its surprises and its events, "the shadows on the high road of an inevitable destiny," and my own sometimes peaceful and secure world and, like Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by the the sheer accumulation and repetition of events.

My memoirs and the unprecedented tempest of my times, in the end, leaves its readers, I am inclined to believe and it is my hope, with patterns and processes, ideas and ideals, philosophy and analysis and a much bigger picture than an isolated, an individual life. Along the way I hope, too, that readers experience an element of surprise. I hope it comes to them like a bonus, the way flowers grow in a garden and one enthuses over them with friends. But the book, this book of my memoirs, as Proust argued, is "the product of a very different self" than the one I manifest in my daily habits, in my social life, in my vices and virtues. The self that writes is a mysterious entity that no amount of documentation can take the reader into.

In the end this autobiography must remain incomplete, not because it does not tell all the facts--which is impossible anyway-- but because it deals with a mystery, a human being. I trust that those who enter into this dialogue here find some of this mystery indeed are attracted to life's mysteries---the answers are often elusive.-Ron Price, Australia