# Who Cares?



## RonPrice (Aug 23, 2005)

WHO CARES?

Part 1:

The experience of a composer, an artist, someone in the creative or performing arts is, I find, often relevant to that experience of mine when I write-poetry or prose. Yet again, on Margaret Throsby's *ABC Radio National* program of interviews this morning,1 I am listening to a composer of contemporary classical music. In discussing composing he talked of: ignition, atmosphere, intensity, colour, intention, attention, family background, idiosyncratic experience, the ending of a piece, time involved in study, writing and reading, models: imitation and contrasts, inter alia. I did not catch the composer's name, tuning in half-way through the program, but I'm not sure it matters. The comparisons and contrasts between this composer's experience and mine as a writer were many.

But then, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "to have something to say is a question of sleepless nights, worry, the endless motivation of a writer and the endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice." On top of this is a writer's temperament which is "continuously making him do things he can never repair."2 Some of these things he would not want to repair and others he would like to eliminate totally.-Ron Price with thanks to 1*ABC Radio National,* September 23rd, 2005; and 2*F. Scott Fitzgerald: On Writing, *editor, Larry Phillips, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1985, pp.135-6.

Part 2:

There is a particular intensity
like cultivating your garden
in your own way, with your
own plants and vegetables,
shrubs and landscaping and
you need a certain energy,
clement weather, desire,
pleasure in the making,
in the results, even a pride
that you are part of a world
fraternity with longings
that are universal, that you
are not alone or isolated.

There is an arduousness
to the writing process
not unlike the duties of
a soldier in wartime;
there's silence, aloneness 
when you wonder if any 
of it matters, has any value, 
if anyone will read it. Then
you say to yourself: who cares?1

1 Scott Fitzgerald, *op.cit.*, p.81.

Ron Price
September 23rd 2005


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