THEOPHANOLOGY
So many things hide from the mind and heart and so many things are revealed. I document them in this poetic as they rise-up in my world of possibility or remain unknown, hidden or obscure. I encounter them, not so much systematically as intuitively, organically, as part of the world of otherness, the world of will, the world of time, duration and perpetuity. My present decays into the past and an absence, a nothing, is left. Into this nothingness my poetic rises. This nothing, this absence, I fill insensibly and sensibly with so much from so many places in my life, from history, philosophy, from prolonged and not-so-prolonged dwelling on the multitude of life’s intricacies, secrets and myriad strangenesses. This multiplicity fills those interstices of emptiness and nothingness that pass by me into the present-past, that come into my life as the present decays into the past.
There is mystery in these intricacies. There is a home that unifies these mysteries and diversities.1 For me this home can be expressed in many ways. The word theophanology is but one.2 But, of course, there is much of these mysteries that language is unable to speak or comprehend.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Heidegger, “On the Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans, Peter Hertz, Harper & Row, 1971; and Juan Ricardo Cole, “The Concept of the Manifestation in the Bahá’à Writings,” Bahá’à Studies, Vol.9, 1982, p.2.
I had no idea, back then, that unity
was the hallmark of the goal, aim
and place toward which humanity–
harassed and beleaguered–was heading,
as you saw it, unity of everyone with
everyone and that the journey in life
was one of homecoming, the return to
one’s quintessentially mysterious source.
Joy, too, you said was at the height of life
and poetry something that happens to us,
engages us, in the midst of that shuddering,
dull, weighted, tension at the heart of life,
below, behind our growth, our sleeping,
ordinary selves and our conversation.
Over a lifetime we find things that tie
it all together, that tie our experience
and meaning. The Word brings creation
into being and words are, for me, signs
of eternal attributes of the world’s mystery,
one grand metaphorical painting of reality.1
1 Heidegger uses the word Being and I would use the word theophanology to capture the fundamental concern, a core aspect of the philosophy in our work.
Ron Price
24 January 2007