RonPrice

After watching The Grand Tour with Kevin McLeod(1), British designer, writer and TV presenter in this episode of a 4 part series, I could not help but reflect on another type of grand tour. Kevin seeks out the inspiration for this part of the historic Grand Tour behind Christopher Wren's design for St Paul's Cathedral. He travels firstly to Florence and Brunelleschi's spectacular Il Duomo, and then on to the Pantheon in Rome. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC1, 9:30-10:30, 5 December 2011.

The following are two personal reflections, two prose-poems, on another grand tour.
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THE NEW GRAND TOUR

Travel writings, in this case the writings of an international pioneer, entail the construction and interpretation of particular myths, visions and fantasies, as well as the voicing of particular desires, demands and aspirations.(1) Such writings are also concerned with the ordering of the knowledge of one's world. This poetry, my poetry, is concerned with my imaginative topography, my geography, the vision of travel on what one might call the Grand Tour that is travel teaching and international pioneering.

My poetic idiom focuses on the pleasure and pain of the experience of traveling in a pioneering mode; on the concept of pioneering as a critical determinant in the teaching and consolidation process; on pioneering as a form of personal adventure, education and experience; on pioneering intertwined with work and business as a part of its MO, its raison d'etre; on pioneering as a form of sacrificial act in the first generation of pioneers under the aegis of the Universal House of Justice.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, Manchester UP, NY, 1999, Introduction; and (2) The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, Wilmette, 1969, p.153.

This Grand Tour, too,
could be compared to
the journey of life1
with its adventure,
its education & with
experience through so
many worlds-places.

This divinely propelled
and long-promised
development of the
very pattern & sinews
of world order, this life
process, this rhythm,
with its crises and victories
we must come to understand.

And now, after forty years
of this pioneering venture,
in so many towns and places,
I have moved on to new
delicacies and curiosities,2
new forms of service to
this growing order of life.

1 Conyers Middleton, Letter From Rome(1729).
2 Gilbert Burnet, Some Letters(1686)

Ron Price
26 June 2002 to 7 December 2011
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MORE THAN CEASELESS AVIDITY

In the old Grand Tour to the high points of classical civilization certain special sights gave order to the experience of the foreign. The Grand Tour was structured as a sequence of noteworthy places and objects. Some of the locations were accorded the status of wonders and extreme singularity. Travellers paid deference to established itineraries and suggested their own revisions of these itineraries to give the Tour its special flavor and individuality.

It was important that the topography of the Tour was not so radically different from the familiar places of home for the Tour to become too difficult to understand and to assimilate. James Howell and others went so far as to suggest that one year well-employed abroad on the Grand Tour "by one of mature judgement"(1) was worth more than three in a university.2 -Ron Price with thanks to (1)James Howell, Instructions and Directions, London, 1650, Vol.1, p.77; and (2)Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, Manchester UP, NY, 1999, p.22.

This1 was more than novelty,
more than some temporary
attachment, more than some
easily satisfied appetite,
more than some giddiness
and restlessness which
runs quickly over things
and soon exhausts the
world's variety, with its
ceaseless avidity.2

This was more than
that Grand Tour,
more than some
wondrous itinerary,
extreme singularity.

This was the first stirrings
of a spiritual revolution
in the hands of a little,
as yet unnoticed, band
of pioneers, which will
culminate in a Golden Age
and the establishment of a
permanent, a world Order.3

1 International Pioneering
2 Edmund Burke, Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757)
3 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, 1965, Wilmette, p.27.

Ron Price
26 June 2002 to 7 December 2011

cire perdue

I saw Florence first at the age of 19 and climbed the Duomo with an college art history teacher. I went again directly after Pilgrimage in '05 to Rome, Florence, and Naples. I climbed the Duomo again and the bell tower this time. I just read BRUNELLESHI'S DOME again (It's wonderful and I recc'd it). I have another bought in Firenze, BRUNELLESCHI'S CUPOLA, which is more technical. I believe the dome that the Guardian had Mason Remey design for the House of Worship in Haifa will be constructed like the Duomo.

I am so grateful that I have gotten to see London, Paris, Rome, and Istanbul. However the heart of the world is in Akka an Haifa. I am blessed to have that perspective. It is what I think you are expressing, a perspective. It is not the knowing of things that is enough, it is to place these things in a perspective that makes sense of them to come up with a greater synthesis of understanding.