Inexplicable Architectural Elegencies

[RonPrice]

INEXPLICABLE ELEGANCIES

All writing is hard. Creative writing is intellectual drudgery of the hardest kind. Creative innovation, particularly on a fundamental level, requires a still more exceptional degree of concentration and energy. To spend one’s entire working life continually advancing the creative frontiers in one’s art implies a level of self-discipline and intellectual industry which few writers have ever possessed. -Paul Johnson, “Henrik Ibsen”, Intellectuals, Harper and Row, NY, 1988, p.82.

It took me twenty years to find a voice
and ten more to get tone and timbre right
to use at a fundamental level.
After these few years devoted to advancing
a Baha’i consciousness in world literature,
I am aware of the concentration and energy required;
and there is an element of drudgery, especially
the exhaustion from an orgy of acquisitive reading
and the long hours, but there is some enchantress
in the soul, in the dreams, flinging open the doors
of perception, passing through me like storm-winds,
pressing upon the architecture of my beliefs
with its transforming power, searching for
nameless and inexplicable elegancies.

Ron Price
13 October 1996