Skip to main content

View Post [edit]

Poster: RonPrice Date: Jan 22, 2007 3:43am
Forum: forums Subject: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology

Since I have just posted here on some existentialism I will add this piece:
___________________________________
THE JOURNEY

This poetry describes a lifeworld, a domain of the everyday, an immediate social existence, a practical activity, with all its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic character, its autobiographical peculiarities, its decisive events and indecisive strategies. It describes beliefs and what happens to them when invoked, activated, put to work and realized in daily life. It describes how people, especially me, experience time, space and everyday reality. You could call my poetry a type of phenomenological autobiography. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Jackson(editor), Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996, pp.7-8.

It all goes by so many names,
names known only to a few
who live amidst certain kinds
of books. Sartre called this
everydayness our 'situation',
Wittgenstein our 'environment
of a way of acting', Habermas
our 'field of intersubjective
communication'. Others, many
others: our local moral worlds,
worlds experienced, primary
experience, our immediacy.

This poetry is an instrumentality,
a way of knowing the gritty,
the obscure drama of this everydayness,
a way of saying that this great lived
complexity cannot be possessed,
controlled, captured or pinned down
only awakened to transitory brightness1
by some inconstant wind, some invisible
influence, some root and blossom
of thought, my thought, thought that tries
to live on its own and tell of its happiest
moments, its tragedy, its vast tracks
of quotidian simplicities and its journey from
the abode of dust to the heavenly homeland.2

1 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry.
2 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.4.

Ron Price
2 November 1997