A Useful Idea To Artists--And Caregivers

A TWILIGHT ZONE

To be useful to an artist a general idea must be capable of including the most contradictory experiences, and of the most subtle variations and ironic interpretations. The politician...finds...subtlety and irony drawbacks. -W.H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings: 1927-1939, editor: Edward Mendelson, Faber and Faber, London, 1977, p.404.


Uncertainty and doubt are found here,
no simple infallibility and certitude.
One does find here totality of response
with ‘perhaps’ fully entrenched,
with principles being their normally
creative, dangerous selves
with plentiful helpings of ‘iffyness’:
for diverse points of view are
interdependent, enigmatic,
lie along a linking line
and speak of yearning, triumph
and a double-lensed burning glass.

This artistic self-abandonment
finds its home in powerlessness,
vulnerability as crimson astonishment
leaps in its veins and the soul flies
with the mind twisting, endlessly twisting
beyond this climate of noncommitment
and defensiveness where we all have lived
so long in a twilight zone.

Ron Price
2 July 1995