[RonPrice]

THE BIDDING OF THAT IDEAL KING

In his banquet speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature J. M. Coetzee spoke about a man who “years ago…resolved to set down on paper the story of his island.” “He found,” Coetzee went on, “that the words would not come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff and reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing business, until by the time of his adventures……in the frozen north the pages were rolling off easily, even thoughtlessly.” But then, later, time passed and “That old ease of composition….alas deserted him.” When he sat himself down at his little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand felt as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before. -J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Lecture, 2003.

In his acceptance speech Coetzee mused: “And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?” Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize! I would run to her. "That's wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold,” and Mother responds. “Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?” Coetzee concludes with a question we might all ask in our own way. –Ron Price with thanks to J. M. Coetzee at Nobelprize.org, December 7th 2003.

The words would not flow,
I remember oh so well, but
by degrees they came out
from their corners, their burrows,
their nooks and crannies behind
my stiff and reluctant fingers.

Some quiescent, nascent, existence
in the twilight of imagination,
on the vestibule of consciousness,
always on the edge doing some
other job: playing baseball, trying
to kiss the girls--without much luck—
and then my wife without much luck,
teaching Inuit, Aborigines and all
those kids from 3 to 83 and going to
a million meetings to discuss with tea,
it seems, the same thing every time.

But gradually an undisturbed, direct
flow, like Goethe’s sleep-walker, arose
and the river at last went down to the sea
past all the lights and houses, the boats,
the trees and mountains, the garden island,
and that unreality I had known for years
acquired the vividness of the real.

Yes, it was for mother that I did all this.
She had gone to that Undiscovered Country
and was in a sphere of her own, sanctified
from time and place but mingling she did
with my world in my receptive poetic state,
my literary earthquake, my dreams, my moonlit
verge. And now I mused that, perchance,
it was the bidding of that Ideal King Who
through some pure leaven leavened my world
of being and furnished the power through
which the world’s arts and wonders were
at last manifest from within and without.

Ron Price
30/1/'06 to 26/6/'15.