THE BALLAST OF SUCCESS is my prose-poetic review/personal overvew of Clint Eastwood movies which keep poping into my life because I own a TV and got hooked on his visual packages some 40 years ago.
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I've enjoyed Clint Eastwood movies. A superhero with the answers, double cool, self-sufficient, existing without society, without anyone's help, quiet, a man of few words, few ideas, but lots of action: this was the Eastwood persona. It was partly the real person too. Such was the character of Dirty Harry in the 1973 movie Magnum Force. With this movie Eastwood had became "the undisputed top movie star in the world."(1) As I read the book(1) I came to appreciate a man with some fine qualities and a man with his own particular weaknesses. He certainly did not enjoy his celebrity status. It made him uncomfortable.

In 1973 I had moved into a type of celebrity status in my own little world as a high school teacher in South Australia. It was a status I enjoyed as a teacher, off and on, until 1999. If a biography was ever to be written about my life it would reveal, as it did of Eastwood, a man of strengths and weaknesses. I found the celebrity status, the endless talking and listening both in schools and in my private life, wore me out by century's end. My persona, my personality, my road to success, was the opposite of Eastwood's: people in community, a man of many ideas and words, wall to wall for years. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, Robson Books, London, 1992, p.142.

You made your millions, Clint,
while I got through my career
after a somewhat shakey start.

Your quiet self, superhero persona,
man of action par excellence took you
to the top of the movie tree, while this
man of many ideas and words, endless
words, produced poetry and print with
millions of phrases and sentences on
pages and in relationships enough to
sink that proverbial ship.

My ship's ballast, the ballast of my
creativity, was not the great
Hollywood engine, but an emerging
world religion, the centre of a psychic-
intellectual life which drove me over time
eventually, it seems, to find poetry every
where, anywhere, here and there, Clint.

Ron Price
16 November 2001
(updated for the internet site:
"Poetry in Colour" 5/9/'08)