RonPrice

Thanks Phyllis 20.....here are two pieces I wrote about the snow of my youth using skiing as a metaphor. Readers here may find all this: (a) too long and/or (b) too obscure for your tastes. If that is the case just don't read what I have written below.-Ron in Australia
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THE GREYING OF THE RED AND YELLOW PERIL

We grew up at a time
when Karkhov, Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk
were black foot-prints in the snow
-Bruce Dawe, “What Lies on Us”, Sometimes Gladness, 3rd edition, Longman, 1988, p.142.

Some of us grew up at a time
when Krushev, Kiev and Kennedy
were part of the language of the big world
that we only ever partly understood at best.
The yellow beast and her red friend
gradually became greyer and greyer
and then the whole thing fell apart
in a brave new world for which most
of us had lost whatever bravery we had.

By then, I’d lived in so many houses,
in so many towns, known so many
women and thousands of people that
I was never shocked by headlines or
news from the lighted chirping box
and its anonymous deaths, or private
griefs immortalized yet again for
the zillionth time on film or video.

I clean my teeth and wind the clock
for I am still living. I have just
returned from another evening where
I watch merchandised desire-rented
embraces exhaust the night air,
where frightened cries rise and
occasionally pierce my quiet little
suburban landscape in the Antipodes.

What is happening now that the land
has become grey and the red & yellow
hues do not threaten us still? What..
does all this mean for us who have
seen a century bathed in blood-tears
on television and in movies, indeed,
we've been skiing in human misery!!!

Ron Price
17 December 1995

This would be a good juncture to make some comments on television and the movies, mediums that have become very infuential in the half century with which my autobiography is concerned. I have collected three arch-lever files of notes on the media from the recent times that I taught media studies and I could wax eloquent. Instead I will include another poem here. It was inspired by a documentary about a man on death row.
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SAINTSHIP

After ten years you go beyond feeling.-C. Chessman, BBC, 1993, ABC TV, 30 November 1995: Great Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century. Chessman was a man waiting on death row in California from 1950 to 1962, in the years I was preparing, little did I know it, for a lifetime of travelling and pioneering. In those years, too, I did all the skiing I would do in my lifetime.

After thirty-three years in the field
your feelings learn to protect themselves
with humorous asides and saying ‘no,’
dwelling in some inner landscape where
the Master rides, lightly rides:in the
mountains you reach for Him. You cloak
yourself in a privacy which sometimes
tastes of dignity and hints of spiritual
charm like herbal remedy, ever so distant,
ever so subtle, dry even, dry to the touch.

Sometimes you feel like a delectable,
mysterious sauce, piquant,puzzlingly
attractive, lingers on the tongue,
surprising their taste buds with
unexpected combinations of colourful,
scented, ingredients. You meet a human
need for delighted astonishment, but
sadly(thankfully?) only sometimes.(1)

So much of it is dry paperland
with no more juice than some of
those useless lemons,that is why
you admit people to a friendship
slowly. You had to after winning
all those popularity contests of
a lifetime which you didn’t even
want to enter: So you perfected
evasion into an art form;and kept
away the bore, the pedant and the
obtuse, the fake, the chatterbox,
the loud, just about everyone and
gave them the slip when they came,
blundered uninvited with their chit-
chat into your personal space, with
their well-intentioned catechism of
things that would be good for you.

For the cosmic patriotism of this Cause
and its enthusiastic temper of espousal
can get a little thin,unless one is
constitutionally sanguine and possesses
a congenital amnesia, an incapacity for
even transient sadness,a temperament
organically weighted on the side of cheer,
fatally forbidden to linger-even momentarily,
on the dark side-and I'm not talking Vadar.

But you, and many of them, have a different
susceptibility to emotional excitement,
to the impulses and inhibitions that they
bring in their train. This rank-and-file
believer,part of the warp and weft, an oh
so ordinary chap, seems to have softened
with the years, has unobtrusively acquired
an incapacity for those sacrificial moods
that once inspired his being; perhaps he
has just learned to inhibit his instinctive
repugnances, has acquired a fierce contempt
for his own person which he is learning to
moderate in both his private and public domains.

Is this how one discovers and measures saintship?
Is it like a long slope for skiing and always
learning to be better or just giving-it-all-up.

(1) When I look at some celebrities especially comedians, like Robyn Williams, I wonder how what seems like their infinite capacity to delight others must have a wear and tear factor on their lives.

Ron Price
30 November 1995
(up-dated for Skiing Forum
8/3/10)

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married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50