[Science and Art] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS ForumA New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum
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Science and Art
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Posted by: RonPrice
For me science is essentially "the application of the rational faculty to any phenomenon." Here is a prose-poem I wrote which reflects this view.
____________________
VIEW AND VISION
In what seems to me, as I reflect back on my life, the several manifestations of what could be called my career and my extraordinary and ever-changing life-narrative, that I created one of the largest, richest, and most varied bodies of work of any poet of the twentieth century. In shorter and in longer forms, I combined a vigorous interest in the humanities and social sciences, a searching and often playful intellect and a passionate moral-spiritual sense. I enjoyed a lifelong engagement with the issues of human imperfection, sin and redemption, community and the individual and a quest for both social and spiritual justice. Although I often address myself to the intellect and speak in a public voice reminiscent of a lecturer and schoolmaster, something I was for over 30 years, I am capable of heartrending emotion, although I’m not sure many others experienced this emotion in my poetry, at least thusfar as I enter the early years of my late adulthood in this new millenium.
Although I do not regard myself as one of the finest poets or, indeed, even in the category of a major or a minor poet of the twentieth century, I certainly see myself as one of the most fertile. I am virtually an unknown in the public domain except by a coterie so small as to be about as significant as the eye of a dead ant, a term I always enjoyed in the writings of the Bab. My work has never enjoyed any bursts of popularity or public enthusiasm. In many ways and for many reasons, I have never been a controversial figure from the beginning of my public days in the 1950s to the end of my professional career around the year 2000 to the end of my poetic career which is on the horizon some time in my late adulthood and old age at sometime in the early decades of the 21st century. When all the controversies have ended, perhaps in some far off century, it may be that I will remain one of the most significant poets of the fourth and fifth epochs epochs of the Formative Age in the 10th stage of a Bahá'_ paradigm of history. Time will tell and I will never know.-Ron Price with thanks to “Biography of W.H. Auden,” Student Resources, Longman Publishers, 2001.
Well that’s one man’s view!
And vision, it is said, creates
reality: past, present and future.
Even though there is no critic
who would agree with my words.
My life is what I have done
and writing is part of this,
inseparable from the totality,
expression of some inner story,1
beginning as far back as my
earliest years with influences
prefigured there in ghostly
figures lost in time and memory,
part of some autobiographical
enterprise as serious as the public
deeds recorded by historians and
the thoughts of philosophers.2
1 Carl Jung in An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology, 3rd edition, Frieda Fordham, 1966, p.14.
2 Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” of Political Philosophy, Cornell UP, 1987, p.12.
Ron Price
May 27th 2006.
Posted by: RonPrice
Leonardo, one of the greatest men of science, opens up this prose-poem:
_______________________
Four hundred years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 and Tablets of the Divine Plan were first promulgated in 1919. Five hundred years after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1453 the Kingdom on Earth had its official beginning in 1953.
For Leonardo much, if not all, of existence, was subject to the rigid, unchanging laws of Nature. He repeatedly underlines the analogy between building and the mechanical structure of the body. This analogy rests on the conception of structures as organisms composed of fully integrated parts.
For Price, poetry was not subjected to any rigid unchanging pattern of laws. Indeed, for him, writing poetry occupied a place between nature and Divinity. Yes, the power was an organism of fully ingreated parts, a structure; but principles and laws of expression eluded him except of course for the broad spelling and grammatical conventions of English. The more he wrote and studied poetry, the less he saw the elegance and organism that was poetry in terms of regularly occuring forms.
-Ron Price with thanks to the Science Museum in London and their special exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci, 3 June 2000.
His Notebooks were:
rarely tidy, seldom homogeneous,
or coherent in their discussion
over a long series of pages;
each leaf of paper an autonomous universe,
unrelated to the last one and the next,
a chaotic stratification of odds and ends,
filling dozens of notebooks
with half a century
of reflections, projects and experiments
in the realms of art and science.1
1 a description of da Vinci’s Notebooks found in the Science Museum. One description of my own work could very well be expressed along these lines, at least in part; and that is why I wrote this poem. Of course, it is in some ways presumptuous to compare oneself to a man of such preeminence. But, in another sense, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes, “we should try to circle around the great”(Baha’i Studies, Vol.10) as far as possible.
Ron Price
3 June 2000
Posted by: GiacintoPlescia
ontology....art
Posted by: Abby Nussey
^Giacinto, could you please provide more content in your posts? Attaching images with no requisite post-text content is spamming.
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