Leonardoda Vinci's Notebooks: Inspiration

[Bahaichap]

In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519. His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made from the age of 37 to 67.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October 31st, 2004.

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Some may regard me as a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”1 ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t enumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949-1950 in kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1.

 

I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s. Most of these notes are: (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (:hihi: from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” © from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my notes comes from the quarter century, 1981 to 2006. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of The History of the Baha’i Faith in the NT: 1947-1997; many were given to my colleagues when I left the teaching profession in 1999; many were thrown out when I reorganized my Notebooks on retiring from teaching in 1999 and retired from casual and volunteer teaching by mid-2004.

 

What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five year period, 1981 to 2006, from the age of 37 to 62.2 The collection of alia, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and, to a far lesser extent, my observations and experiences. There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i) journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines /topics in 300(ca) Notebooks in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files, inter alia.

 

I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have also added additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping. I should add, too, that there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories of Notebooks that I have in my study twenty-five years after I began to keep notes that became the collection that now exists.3

 

New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry. They are scattered like seeds on page after page and sometimes they fall on the right soil and grow into poems, essays or chapters of a book.

 

There are now 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.4

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1 Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.

2 My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1984, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first notes from the period 1984 to 2004 come from January 19th 1984, a journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.

3 Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 by which time I was in grade 4 and nine years old.

4 Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs. –2004 to 2006.

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UNPRECEDENTED DIGNITY AND EASE

 

It is by a continual effort that I can create....My deepest, most certain leaning is toward silence and everyday activity. It has taken me years of perseverance to escape from distractions....It is how I despair and how I cure myself of despair.-Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, Penguin, 1970, p.276.

 

I tend toward ‘the work’ every minute

and can sit vacant staring at the garden

or some inane bit of TV or some vacuous

act for only so long without a feeling of

great emptiness invading which I must fill

with my ‘planned program’.* If this cannot

be done, I fill my own mind with my own

thoughts or some Passage. But, generally,

in a chaos of reading, silence and creation

I keep out a distracted, frenetic passivity

and a mountainous world of trivia as far

away as I can until necessity intervenes.

 

And then, then.... some holy simplicity,

some rest, plain mysterium, a feeling of

the numinous, a nothingness, an idiosyncratic

something that is incommunicable, gliding on

a sea of faith with reason resting in the wings,

the burning desire to seek enjoying a low

flame, quietly flickering, in a free zone

of some unprecedented dignity and ease.

 

12 January 1996

MY TRIBUTARY

 

Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.

 

There’s been a stream, scented,

I’ve been drinking from since

before I came of age. The waters

have been sweet and deep, with

periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry

and the blackest soil filled my soul

with fear, disorder and dessication.

 

My own tributary of this stream

only began to run in my middle years.

Inspiration has run with a force

that I barely understand, nor can withstand

its roving eye and hand like an interwoven

carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.

 

Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed

my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,

more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve

in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary

of a great and thundering river whose waters will

flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:

 

as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;

I know many who have not

the will that will not will belief.

The mood will not strike them here below:

I know not why?

 

12 January 1996

MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS

 

...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee....-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.

 

To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.

 

It was not all risk, though;

some of it was simply pure

surprise and wonder: like

the two exploding stars colliding

17 million light years from Earth

and taking, according to one astrophysicist,

1200 years to do their colliding;

shooting out gas in all directions

at 36 million kilometres per hour,

creating a supernova,

a brilliant light show, in a place,

a galaxy, where six supernovas

have been produced

since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His

Tablets of the Divine Plan.

 

And me, defining myself,

my sense of nothingness,

in the face of that immensity.

 

Ron Price

14 June 1997

NOT QUITE ME

 

It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams

 

Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last thing the poet would ever say-like a will. -Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.

 

Every once in a while I go

to some plush joint on the

sixteenth floor and get a view

of the big smoke, or eat a lunch

in the finest restaurant in town

and discuss the state of the world,

or travel in the fast lane for an afternoon

with dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car

for the day; it’s a dip into another world for

an instant in time, a world that belongs to

someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for

a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new

desires, significations, to savour, like a dream,

vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.