INTERPRETATION

An interpretive act is above all else a deed and is done to and for the future. It is a process through which isolating foreignness is overcome. It is a process that is made necessary by virtue of human differences. It does not destroy, but harmonizes, these differences. The act of interpretation is the psychic substance of solidarity; it turns an indifferent collection into real community, into cohesion and intimacy. Interpretation creates relations that the interpreter loves; it demands response and makes the purest forms of love for community possible. Interpretation is a community-making act of the greatest possible satisfaction. -Ron Price with thanks to Josiah Royce(1855-1916) in Modernist Quartet, Frank Lentricchia, Cambridge UP, 1994.

The whole thing is multitudinous
beyond imagination, tangled, muddy,
painful, perplexing, adjacent hetero-
geneity, cacophony, diffusion, an
infinite number of eaches, a multitude
of overarching meta-narratives seeking
synthesis, stories interlacing, interlocking,
intertwining: emergent transcendence

A universe of many editions, mental,
spiritual, where our thoughts are cells
in a cosmic mind and the miracles of
one millennia become the basics of the
next, astrology to astronomy, mind into
spirit and mortal, perhaps, to Immortal.

Ron Price
31 May 1997