Bahaichap
Member
GREAT-GREAT GRANDFATHER OR GREATER
In the two dozen towns I have lived in as a pioneer, for I have felt somewhat like a pioneer, relationships with neighbours form an interesting dimension to the pioneer experience. "Not togetherness, but avoidance and separation," writes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, "have become major survival strategies in the contemporary megalopolis…Keeping the neighbours at arm's length"1 is what most people do most of the time in all of the places I have pioneered in Canada and Australia. Neighbours then become, for me and for most pioneers in western countries, a varied assortment of people who live all over the place: sometimes next door, as they were for me in Perth or in the same building as in Hamilton and Windsor; sometimes down the street as in Whyalla or Katherine; sometimes across the town, in the next town, the next state, the next country or halfway around the world. This is one way of expressing the world as your neighbourhood. These words of Bauman provide an accurate description of most of the relationships with (a) people next door, (b) people across the road, (c) nearby neighbours on the same street, in fact, most of the people who live in both the towns or the cities in which I lived. The very pervasiveness of what you might call wall-to-wall people raises fundamental questions about who is your neighbour and where is the best place for relationships to form. -Ron Price with thanks to Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, London, 1998, p.48.
We haven't all become nomads,
travellers, have we Zygmunt?
So many of my contemporaries,
the Canadian's and Australian's
I have known these many years,
are not locally tied, keep busy,
enjoy ostentatious elegance,
refined pleasures and splendours,
are high up, can travel,
doomed to a life of choice,
their flesh and blood.
So many can be pioneers.
Then there are the vagabonds,
dark vagrant involuntary tourists
reflecting bright tourist suns,
the world's waste, millions now.
Dedicated to tourist services
the world around plays
to their hearts' desires,
their irresistible attraction,
knows they won't stay long.
Green light for the tourists,
red for the vagabonds,
worrying polarization
and its restlessness, mobility,
its endless consumption,
uncertainty wrapping every choice,
adventure behind every pole,
such is their goal of choice.
And so they go on moving,
tourists and vagabonds
in a Gordian Knot, the schism
that can not be uncut, untied.
Then there is the pioneer,
here to untie that knot,
slow work, bringing it
together, into one whole.
Hard to see in daily round,
but spread over half a century
something emerges,
a slim gold thread,
some bricks for new buildings,
marble, pentilicon for pillars
and on the plain a mountain
green with gold on dome.
An immense, tremendous chair,
a seat for this new Throne
and Great-Great-Grandfather
or Greater still of these Days
is He, of dawn, the Ancestor. :arrow:
Ron Price
16 September 2002
In the two dozen towns I have lived in as a pioneer, for I have felt somewhat like a pioneer, relationships with neighbours form an interesting dimension to the pioneer experience. "Not togetherness, but avoidance and separation," writes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, "have become major survival strategies in the contemporary megalopolis…Keeping the neighbours at arm's length"1 is what most people do most of the time in all of the places I have pioneered in Canada and Australia. Neighbours then become, for me and for most pioneers in western countries, a varied assortment of people who live all over the place: sometimes next door, as they were for me in Perth or in the same building as in Hamilton and Windsor; sometimes down the street as in Whyalla or Katherine; sometimes across the town, in the next town, the next state, the next country or halfway around the world. This is one way of expressing the world as your neighbourhood. These words of Bauman provide an accurate description of most of the relationships with (a) people next door, (b) people across the road, (c) nearby neighbours on the same street, in fact, most of the people who live in both the towns or the cities in which I lived. The very pervasiveness of what you might call wall-to-wall people raises fundamental questions about who is your neighbour and where is the best place for relationships to form. -Ron Price with thanks to Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, London, 1998, p.48.
We haven't all become nomads,
travellers, have we Zygmunt?
So many of my contemporaries,
the Canadian's and Australian's
I have known these many years,
are not locally tied, keep busy,
enjoy ostentatious elegance,
refined pleasures and splendours,
are high up, can travel,
doomed to a life of choice,
their flesh and blood.
So many can be pioneers.
Then there are the vagabonds,
dark vagrant involuntary tourists
reflecting bright tourist suns,
the world's waste, millions now.
Dedicated to tourist services
the world around plays
to their hearts' desires,
their irresistible attraction,
knows they won't stay long.
Green light for the tourists,
red for the vagabonds,
worrying polarization
and its restlessness, mobility,
its endless consumption,
uncertainty wrapping every choice,
adventure behind every pole,
such is their goal of choice.
And so they go on moving,
tourists and vagabonds
in a Gordian Knot, the schism
that can not be uncut, untied.
Then there is the pioneer,
here to untie that knot,
slow work, bringing it
together, into one whole.
Hard to see in daily round,
but spread over half a century
something emerges,
a slim gold thread,
some bricks for new buildings,
marble, pentilicon for pillars
and on the plain a mountain
green with gold on dome.
An immense, tremendous chair,
a seat for this new Throne
and Great-Great-Grandfather
or Greater still of these Days
is He, of dawn, the Ancestor. :arrow:
Ron Price
16 September 2002
