the heel press

January 15, 2008 - 02:26 AM

DISTANT GARDENS

The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern-an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race. -Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73.

The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen experienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experience of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109.

And so it is universal and will go on

being so down the halls of time,

enriching and intensifying the

experience of those who are willing

to share in its beauty, to experience

it as something new, something mine,

to which I give the meaning, reordering

colour and shape in relation to myself,

to experience delight and overcome the

inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid,

fearful, conventional, routine through

some expansion, intensification, fullness:

ordering matter through form, on this journey

to these far places, distant gardens.

Ron Price

23 December 1995