Bahaichap
Member
DRIFTING: A WIDENING SPECULATION :arrow:
Anthony Hopkins, in an interview I watched after a second viewing of the ending of his Silence of the Lambs, said that good actors should not be afraid to beg, borrow or steal ideas, skills, talents or the abilities of others to improve their performance. As T.S. Eliot put the same idea in another context: a great poet should feel free to beg, borrow or steal the words and ideas of others and use them in his poetry. Certainly, the prose-poems that have occupied my attention for the last ten years, 1992-2002, have drawn extensively on the works of others. Hopkins also said, in commenting on his early life in south Wales, that he had been a restless youth who 'drifted' over time into acting. I was certainly restless in the years 1962 to 1966, from the age of eighteen to twenty-two, and I 'drifted' into my first pioneering experiences, as part of my efforts to complete my high school and university education then, after 1966, with less sense of drift and more sense of direction as a professional teacher first in Canada and then in Australia. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Hopkins, "Interview," 12:00-12:15 am, 3 November 2002. :arrow:
There is some quality of affection
that has carved a trace in the mind,
in these years, like footsteps on sand,
even a diligent indolence,
a wise passiveness, a drifting,
calculated toward a great whole:
a calmness now
after so much frenetic angst
and a knowledge that eases
the heat and fever and helps
a widening speculation
at the border of mystery.1
Intensity, too, and beauty
with a sense of the heart
being in the right place--
most of the time--
for always there is some burthen,
as Wordsworth called it,
amidst our affinities, potencies
and endless relatedness.2
1 Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self, Secker and Warburg, London, 1955, pp.28-30.
2 Kathleen Raine, Coomaraswamy in the Inner Journey of the Poet and Other Papers, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1982, p.66.
Ron Price
3 November 2002
Anthony Hopkins, in an interview I watched after a second viewing of the ending of his Silence of the Lambs, said that good actors should not be afraid to beg, borrow or steal ideas, skills, talents or the abilities of others to improve their performance. As T.S. Eliot put the same idea in another context: a great poet should feel free to beg, borrow or steal the words and ideas of others and use them in his poetry. Certainly, the prose-poems that have occupied my attention for the last ten years, 1992-2002, have drawn extensively on the works of others. Hopkins also said, in commenting on his early life in south Wales, that he had been a restless youth who 'drifted' over time into acting. I was certainly restless in the years 1962 to 1966, from the age of eighteen to twenty-two, and I 'drifted' into my first pioneering experiences, as part of my efforts to complete my high school and university education then, after 1966, with less sense of drift and more sense of direction as a professional teacher first in Canada and then in Australia. -Ron Price with thanks to Anthony Hopkins, "Interview," 12:00-12:15 am, 3 November 2002. :arrow:
There is some quality of affection
that has carved a trace in the mind,
in these years, like footsteps on sand,
even a diligent indolence,
a wise passiveness, a drifting,
calculated toward a great whole:
a calmness now
after so much frenetic angst
and a knowledge that eases
the heat and fever and helps
a widening speculation
at the border of mystery.1
Intensity, too, and beauty
with a sense of the heart
being in the right place--
most of the time--
for always there is some burthen,
as Wordsworth called it,
amidst our affinities, potencies
and endless relatedness.2
1 Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self, Secker and Warburg, London, 1955, pp.28-30.
2 Kathleen Raine, Coomaraswamy in the Inner Journey of the Poet and Other Papers, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1982, p.66.
Ron Price
3 November 2002
