FALLING INTO LIFE
What A Run Its All Been, Eh Clint?
Several days ago I watched a documentary Clint Eastwood: A Life in Film with its special emphasis on the movies he made and his philosophy of life and of making films. This French doco was screened on SBS in Australia on 6 October 2007 at 1:55 to 3:20 p.m. I made a few notes because I have seen many of Eastwoods films as an actor and as a director; I had also seen one or two docos about him in previous years and this was a new one for me. I printed out a Wikipedia(internet encyclopedia) outline of his life, gathered my notes from the TV program and after 80+ hours of quasi and semi-gestation I set about to write following prose-poem. -Ron Price, Section VIII Poetry, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 October 2007.
As you say, Clint, there is a certain
falling into life, fate if you like and
trying to make the parts of life come together may be, as you said in your
last lines, impossible. And yet we try.
We both got our first big breaks in 59:
you in the TV series Rawhide and me in the early stages of an emerging world religion that had been in Canada for just on 60 years with only 700 members back then in those my-halcyon days.
While you were becoming one of those instant international stars back in the 60s I was going to uni and trying to work out the enigmas of a bipolar disorder which had no name then just a lot of trouble, angst and a series of crises that threatened to arrest my lifes unfoldment and blast all hopes which my progress had engendered.
I was finishing my career teaching in high schools when Dirty Harry appeared and was settling down into Perth Western Australia when that series of four films finished in 1988.....and what a run those
years were for me, too, Clint, me too....
You had your Escape from Alcatraz in 79 about a real escape back in 62 when I began my pioneering life and my escape from the normalities of a middle class life. In 79 I began my escape from BPD, yes it was
a lifelong journey, yessireeebob....
You were redefining yourself as director
and I was redefining myself as a writer
and poet little by little beginning in the early 1970s. You achieved so much,
Clint. Ive got to take my hat off to you.
Way back to your first marriage in 1953
when the Kingdom of God was getting its kick-start in Chicago, I was in grade four and in love with Susan Gregory: what a run its all been, eh Clint, eh?..what a run??
Ron Price 10 October 2007
