Paul Klee in Hajo Duchting, Paul Klee: Painting Music.

RonPrice · Joined: 02 Nov 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Launceston

VOLUBILITY AMIDST SCRAPS OF PAPER

The artist Paul Klee tried to fuse the other worldly with the this worldly in his life and art. The more I have read about Klee(1879-1940), the more I find strong currents of comparison between themes in his life and a certain inner psychology in his approach to existence and in my own. Klee wrote in his diaries that: “colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always; I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter.”1 I could write the same thing, express the same sentiments about poetry and the Baha’i Faith, especially now in the evening of my life when I can devote myself to writing and not to earning a living, raising a family and engaging in a multitude of community activities.

My prose and journal, my diaries and poetry, like Klee’s diaries, show a persistent self-analysis. In my case I would add to this self-analysis a social analysis and an analysis of my religion. At the start of the Baha’i Seven Year Plan in 1937, Klee found “a new bout of vitality, a new burst of activity, which resulted in a stupendous creative period”2 until his death in 1940. —Ron Price with thanks to 1Paul Klee in Hajo Duchting, Paul Klee: Painting Music, Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2002, p. 26; and 2 “Paul Klee: The Observer, 25 May 2005, Swiss News, Swissinfo.ch Internet Site.

Volubility worried you and me,
Paul. This is no cranking out of
work, no thoughtless sideline---
but central to life with teaching
always an opportunity to try yet
again, to systematize thinking
about poetry and life and make
the world visible--reproduce
the world in words—yes, Paul.

The fruit of all this thinking
were hundreds of Notebooks
in my case and, for you, the
Pedagogical Sketchbook, the
foundation of your teaching
practice. Your natural space
were paper scraps 10 inches
wide---mine were 8”x 12”.

What was your definitive oeuvre?
What is mine? What is the shape
of a swarm of bees? The partisan
in politics did not interest you, nor
does it me. Like you, my life is quiet
now after all those years of teaching
and I take little part in action’s world.
But, unlike you, I had many emotional
crises. As you sought to transcend that
passionless, innate tepidity, I sought to
transcend a passionate, innate sensuality—
as we directed the genesis of our works,
defined more precisely our philosophy of
life and with thought and emotion formed
a whole out of which has grown something
deep down to secret keys and the universal.---5/11/’08