RonPrice
Member
The History of Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause in TheThe Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998. Originally this article was a speech given at the National Parenting Conference in Boulder, Colorado, on September 25, 1997. I recommend this article.
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During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports, ethnographic reports and other documents that document what it must have felt like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the West, in literate and preliterate cultures.
In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.
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The 2nd historical "event" is a comment on history----as follows:
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REALITY
History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions like the potter's clay and has a genuine significance for our lives when its facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.
Here was a bit of history,
came across it the other day
in a bookshop: some letters,
letters written by Van Gogh.
He was writing about
his ultimate goal
and feeling that he was
on the right track---
firmly convinced he was---
so convinced that
he paid little attention
to what people said of him.
He painted what he felt
and felt what he painted.
This is my story, too, of poetry....
except that......
few people say anything about my poetry
and I never know if I am exactly on track,
if I write precisely the best, the most apt
that can be written.
But.....
I fit my emotions around my assumptions:
that this poetry is at the core of my life,
that it expresses my essential relationships
with all that I know and love--
and I write--this is my faith.
-Ron Price 14/3/02.
__________________
enough for now!
______________________
During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports, ethnographic reports and other documents that document what it must have felt like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the West, in literate and preliterate cultures.
In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.
______________________
The 2nd historical "event" is a comment on history----as follows:
___________________
REALITY
History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions like the potter's clay and has a genuine significance for our lives when its facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.
Here was a bit of history,
came across it the other day
in a bookshop: some letters,
letters written by Van Gogh.
He was writing about
his ultimate goal
and feeling that he was
on the right track---
firmly convinced he was---
so convinced that
he paid little attention
to what people said of him.
He painted what he felt
and felt what he painted.
This is my story, too, of poetry....
except that......
few people say anything about my poetry
and I never know if I am exactly on track,
if I write precisely the best, the most apt
that can be written.
But.....
I fit my emotions around my assumptions:
that this poetry is at the core of my life,
that it expresses my essential relationships
with all that I know and love--
and I write--this is my faith.
-Ron Price 14/3/02.
__________________
enough for now!
