Quite a dreary view of today's architecture and society.

as empire decreases, telly viewing increases.

and if you use the analogy of the world wars being the "flood" wouldn't this refer to a post deluvian age? just wondering...

in his defense, floods are cyclic and he did say:
"as a new
dark heart of an age of transition
approached in the womb of our
travailing age which would require
yet another revolution in architecture
if another normalcy was to return again"

so ante....post...a matter of looking forward or backward.

i don't know whether a dark heart can be stomached, let alone enwombed. :)

"as a new
dark heart of an age of transition
approached in the womb of our
travailing age which would require
yet another revolution in architecture
if another normalcy was to return again"

Did he say,

"It was a dark and stormy night"?

;-)

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses and readings of my prose-poem. After 20 years(1981-2001) of trying to get my writing into a soft or hard cover with traditional publishers--and unsuccessfully--the internet developed and I retired from y job as a teacher. The responses to my poem here give me the feeling that, at least, some folks read my work. That is all a poet can expect. That is enough.

Whether readers agree with what I write, whether they understand it, indeed, whether I myself understand it--are yet other questions. One writes and then one gives the work to the world and each of the readers in that world sees the poem in their own way.

There is no one view of the poem and I thank you all for opening up thoughts and avenues for this writer for future work. -Ron Price, Tasmania

ante = before

anti = against

before the Flood (in the Bible); pertaining to the time before the Flood
Etymology: ante- + diluvium 'the deluge'

Atlantis: The Antideluvian World Mystery, Suspense, History, Gothic
--------------------------
The poet plays with the concept "before-and-after the flood." Is our time in the early 21st century "after the flood" of two wars and 1 billion dead from traumas in the 20th century? Or is our time "before the flood" of what is to come? Or, again, is our time somewhat like Atlantis and its "Antideluvian World of Mystery, Suspense, History, Gothic, inter alia." See the following:

Atlantis: The Antideluvian World Mystery, Suspense, History, Gothic, Literature, Books, Arts. www.pos1.info/7/7ataw.htm
--------------------------
Thanks for the enagement, the interest in the etymology. You have helped me gain more precision in my own poetic.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania

since the humanoid thing swung off its last branch, it has been haunted by a lingering feeling of the precarious and the fleeting: a rift in the mechanism of regaining balance. time migrated from the upper body to the lower body and left a nostalgic void in the between. since then its been all deluvial

perhaps this is why we think of a handy man as a positive man and a travelling man as a sad man. the woman's midbody is more complicated for such lubricated vice versa.

I'm getting more mileage out of this post than I ever could have imagined.....everyone here can now "advance 3 squares and pick a card." Good old Bob; he's been with me on my journey since the early 1960s. I'll post a piece here in memory and appreciation....Ron
-------------------------
IT’S THE MUSIC THAT MATTERS

As the decades have rolled by I have come to view the politics of Bob Dylan back in his heyday of the sixties as closer to my politics back in the sixties than at first I had imagined. Recent books on Dylan, like Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art by Mike Marqusee, 2003; Ron Jacob’s essay “The Politics of Bob Dylan,” Counterpunch, October 18th 2003 and a 3 ½ hour television documentary “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” screened on SBS TV, 10:00-11:50 p.m. November 8th and 15th 2005 all support the view that Dylan was always non-partisan. He was nobody’s spokesman. He wrote songs in order to play, in order to work out his feelings and thoughts. He wanted to be recognized and he wanted to influence. He wrote a content and in a style that was unique and he wrote a great deal. This had always been my aim, but music was not my main means of influence. Over the years other forms of influence came my way like gifts from some mysterious dispensation of Providence.

Dylan’s approach to politics was similar to the Baha’i non-partisan approach that I have espoused for nearly 50 years. In the same way that the Baha’i political position has been one in which issues are dealt with at the level of political theory and macro-systems rather than within the field of practical politics and political parties; in the same way that the Baha’i deals with issues by means of basic ideas and concepts not through existing partisan political approaches, Dylan places issues in the context of systems. The approach is, it seems to me, a more intellectual and philosophical one, but one which possesses its own particular punch or bite. Of course, there are differences between Dylan’s religio-politics, with its often seemingly fundamentalist Christian orientation and my Baha’i politics both now and back in the sixties-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 9th, 2005.

There was a symbiosis back then
between folk-singers and the Left.
The connection was invented
just as my pioneering life began
in ’62 and it was the ruling paradigm
for many a moon. It was taking its form
in ’59 at the first Newport Folk Festival—
the year I joined the Baha’i Faith.
I was still into baseball, hockey
and schoolwork in those early days
living in suburbia in my mid-teens
without a girlfriend and a cosmology
just scarcely formed, embryonic.

It would be thirty years, a hiatus
of more than three decades, before
the process of writing my feelings
and thoughts, wanting to influence,
could really take off. After more
setbacks than you can imagine,
after realizing that my expectations
were simply unrealistic, after moving
from one end of the earth to another,
I kept singing, as Dylan kept singing.

My triumphs and those of the Cause
I had been committed to, had been
associated with, now, for over 50 years,
had not been Dylan’s. We each had our
music, our message and it was this music
that mattered—he and we and I have been
saying this again and again all those years.(1)

(1) Peter Stone Brown, http://www.peterstonebrown.com

Ron Price
November 9th 2005
----------------------I insert the following from Wikipedia with some personal annotation....Ron Price, Australia--------------

August 2007 saw the unveiling of the award-winning film I'm Not There written and directed by Todd Haynes. By 2007, I was in my 60s and Dylan's religio-politics was again non-partisan and non-committed/affiliated. His music was, if anything, his religion. In a comment on Dylan's identity and why six actors were employed to portray different facets of Dylan's personality, Haynes wrote:

The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was. He's like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you'll surely get burned. Dylan's life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that's why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him - things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate.... Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.