A New Order

[RonPrice]

A SYMPHONY, A DEFINABLE EVENT

D. H. Lawrence(1885-1930) was very conscious of the death of an old order, that we needed to awaken ourselves to a new consciousness of the profound crisis of our time and our responsibility in it. He also felt our time was a time for a new saviour, a new orientation of values. His writing, he hoped, would speak a new clarity, a new directness, navigating the ship toward a possible rainbow of hope and the human soul to maturity and wisdom. -Ron Price with thanks to Tom Marshall, The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Heinemann, London, 1970.

A new Order was forming back then,1
infinitessimal, like the egg and sperm,
a corporate body
having continuous existence
into the future for a 1000 years:
and it wasn't the third Reich!

It was part of a grand design,
taking form in an age of death,
offspring of an interpretive mind,
out of a certain chaos, the crucible
of transformation as a community
was forged, the genetic structure,
the blueprints, the detailed plans
for the building, the indispensable,
the sine qua non, the design,
the bricks and the mortar
were all there taking
their mysterious form,
waves of energy,
nodes of melody
forming a symphony,
an architecture in fine detail,
not mere substance, but event,
not just fleeting patterns,
but defineable entity:
made it past those vulnerable
early foetal weeks surrounded
by a sea of death and destruction.

Ron Price
25 October 1998

1 1909 to 1930: the years of Lawrence's poetic opus; and 1931-1945, the years just after Lawrence died. One could argue that the administrative Order was solidly in place by the end of WW2.