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Advice From W.H. Auden
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
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I am a Canadian who has been living in Australia for 36 years. I am married to a Tasmanian and have been for 33 years after 8 years in a first marriage. We have three children aged 40, 35 and 28(in 2006). I am retired and at 64 spend most of my time writing. I have been a Baha'i for 50 years.
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