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Death Self
The poems of Death Self were
started in 1993 when V.B. Price was in his 52nd year. Fifty two
was the age his great grandfather, the American tragedian Lawrence
Patrick Barrett, died in 1891. It was the age at which his mother,
the American stage actress Edith Barrett Price, had always feared
she would die. Edith Barrett, in fact, lived to the age 73 and
died in Albuquerque after a long career on Broadway, in films,
television, and the California stage. In 1993, V.B. Price decided
to shake off whatever ghost fears might be stirring in his imagination
and make friends with his own death. He was helped in that happy
task by Rini Price's robust recovery from cancer and by the German
poet Rainer Maria Rilke's perspective on the inevitably private
and unique nature of each person's death. The title Death
Self comes from Price's intuition that what we were before
we were born and what we are after we die are of the same stuff
as who we are when we're alive, or at least part of the same
flow or essential spectrum.
Twenty years earlier, in 1974, V.B. Price's appendix perforated.
As he was being wheeled into the operating room for emergency
surgery, he realized, to his astonishment, that he was completely
without fear of death. This unexpected response to a potentially
fatal emergency, Price reasoned gratefully, must be rooted in
his conviction, gained from his father and mother, that the life
experience, the universe, and the divine, were all in the realm
of the good, the fair, the just, and the forgiving. In Rini Price's
odyssey from multiple operations for cancer to her refusal to
submit to faulty and dangerous prognoses, V.B. Price saw that
making friends with one's death is really all about making friends
with one's life, as it actually is.
Some 15 years later, in Chaco
Canyon, working on a book called Chaco Body, with photographer
Kirk Gittings, Price experienced another gift of liberation in
which he felt that the world, and anything that might happen
in it, and to him in it, was beyond the realm of fear or worry
or "wrongness."
The Death Self poems are
recollections of encounters V.B. Price sought out with his death
self, as well as of conversations he had with that part of himself
which is happier and wiser and full of more humor than he has
ever been without it, without the society of his life before
birth and after death.
The paintings of Death Self
arose in Rini Price during the months that the Death Self
poems were being written and read to her. The paintings are not
responses to specific poems, and are not illustrations of them,
but the process of death-self thinking, long familiar to her,
released in her these images in spontaneous ways, following another
near Rilkean outpouring of 27 paintings the year before which
were referred to as "the angries" until they received
their more formal title from Rini's father-in-law-"In Your
Face"-a short time before he died.
Rini Price holds that "whatever
is is OK because that's where you start from. It's got to be
OK because that's what is. What you do with it, how you approach
it, is what matters." Both Prices ascribe to the view expressed
in Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning that
the only freedom that can never been taken away from a person
is the freedom to interpret and give meaning to what is happening
to them.
Death Self is Rini Price's and V.B. Price's first
formal artistic collaboration in 36 years of marriage, although
many of V.B. Price's books have been designed, and their covers
conceived and carried out, by Rini Price. The exhibition of these
paintings and poems, along with a printed book, was in process
during the last weeks of the life of S. Jack Rini, Rini Price's
father, beloved by his family, and a master at living, and dying,
with attentiveness, generosity, and a loving good will. S. Jack
was the principle investor in Century magazine in the
early 1980s in New Mexico, a collaboration among Rini, her two
siblings, Jim Rini and Jacki Fuqua, and V.B. Price.
V.B. Price and Rini Price
Albuquerque, New Mexico
January 2005
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