A POETIC ONTOLOGY
The ontology underpinning this poetry is partly the postmodern view that space, time and most forms of social reality are human concepts and human constructions. The central mission of this poetry, based as it is on postmodern analysis, is to show the human hand that shapes thinking in the humanities and the physical and social sciences. All theories, all principles for judgment, all standards of excellence are set
by humans and benefit those who define and enforce them.1 No one escapes the intellectual and emotional field of their own culture to find and describe truth.
Truth or reality is a relative thing. There is an additional aspect of this poetic ontology, though, that is what philosophers call teleological. It involves a divine ordering and a belief in progress through providential control of the historical process. This aspect of the ontology of my poetry is not postmodern, for postmodernism is a type of thinking which tends to exclude Providence in the direct sense that is part of my poetic ontology.
My poetry is free of the historical pessimism, the contemptus mundi, that is part of much postmodern thinking. The ontological base of my poetry is rooted in a revitalizing elan that finds its expression, its psychology, its cosmogony in the Baha'i writings, and that restores, I believe, both the heavenly and the intellectual nature of the human being.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1R.T. Young, "The Archeology of Social Knowledge and the Drama of Human Understanding," T. R. Young, Internet, 12 November 2002; and 2Geoffrey Nash, The Phoenix and the Ashes, GR, Oxford, 1984, p.98.
No arbitrary and mythic eschatology
in abstruse language with sheep
and goats and cattle at Jericho;
no materialist axioms with some
economic man enshrined centre-stage;
rather a whole world-view framed
in broadly Aristotelian terms
with the image of a prophet
not unlike the philosopher-king
of Plato and Plotinus' theology.
This supreme theophany
centred on the term
manifestation of God,
a new vision, a fresh
prophetology,
theophanology,
that is not Christology,
Buddhology.
God-coeternal with the universe
and His Word the metaphysical link.1
1 See Juan Ricardo Cole, "The Concept of Manifestation in the Baha'i Writings," Baha'i Studies, Vol.9, p.8.
Ron Price
14 November 2000