Science: In Autobiography and Poetry Back To Cicero

[RonPrice]

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while I was writing this autobiography, science was turning away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more fragmented, more chaotic phenomena. So, too, in the study of the writing of autobiography there was an increasing consciousness of its complexity, ambiguity, indeed, its chaotic content. There is certainly an element of the fragmented, of the chaotic in my own life. Sometimes the feeling of fragmentation is pervasive and sometimes it is short-lived, momentary. Rather than seeing form, literary or physical, as something divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now is often regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of pattern and repetition, elements that are at the core of structure, any structure. At one end of the continmuum we find extreme order, pattern and traditional forms and at the other end we find gibberish, chaos and disorder. Fragmentation is something we all experience and it is found between life’s extremes. Fractal autobiography works in the ground between these extremes of life. Digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity, then, are part of the normal world of autobiography. Fractal comes form the Latin for fragmented or broken: hence the term fractal autobiography.

As architect Nigel Reading writes, "Pure Newtonian causality is an incorrect, a finite view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete uncertainty and infinite chance." The nature of reality now is somewhere in between. One writer called this interplay between chance and causality, a dynamical symmetry. It occurs to me that this shift in focus from a simple, a polarized view of life to a more dynamic, more complex, more chaotic view is something that is expressed in, can be found in, literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry, the autobiography, I am calling fractal shares many defining traits with that contested term: postmodern. Some contemporary poetries and genres of autobiography show an allegiance to romantic, confessional or formalist traditions. Fractal poetry, fractal aesthetics, fractal autobiography describe one feature of my literary topography. When poets and autobiographers address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views.

But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them. In postmodernism one read, watched, listened, as one had done for decades before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.

Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as the self, myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is reality and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form.

Postmodernists saw the eclipse of grand narratives and pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity. This new world is monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded. I outline briefly the shift from postmodernism to pseudomodernism which has occurred in the time I have been writing this memoir because my writing is, to some extent, a reflection of this change. But I do not want to go beyond these few, these brief remarks.

Conversion and a religious conversation prevails in my poetry. It is part of an archtypal pattern because it represents part of a maturing process and a move toward self-discovery. It is part and parcel of this autobiography, unavoidably, I find. It is part of a personal life, which Anais Nin says, if it is lived deeply moves beyond the personal.1-Ron Price with thanks to Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, MacMillan, 1994, p.6; and 1Anais Nin in ibid.,p.171.

CICERO(106-43 BC)

A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds realized (in Auden’s work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41.

Cicero came long ago,
at a critical juncture,
he urged his combative peers
to end their recriminative posture,
political moralist who saw the
value of philosphy in politics,
an idealist in an age of extremes,
complex personality
who saw kindness as a means to
justice, the goal of society.
The main branches of society must
work together, love each other
for this is the foundation of law
which holds society together.

Popular Assemblies, like today,
no longer expressed the will of the people,
no longer aspired to higher culture,
honesty, propriety: for real politics
was a way of life.

Ron Price
10 June 1995

Source S.E. Smethurst, “Politics and Morality in Cicero”, The Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121.