THE GODFATHER PART III
And Our Ordinary Ordinariness

By some time in the late 1990s I had seen all three of the Godfather films. After I retired from FT(1999), PT(2003) and volunteer/casual teaching(2005), I wrote two prose-poems on each of the first two films in this trilogy. This prose-poem offers another personal perspective on these films, on the Mafia and on the religion, the system of thought, I have been associated with now for some six decades all juxtaposed in a strange and bewildering synchronicity which was as surprising as it was impossible to really understand, except in part and through a glass-darkly.

The script for The Godfather Part III begins in 1979, the year I returned to Tasmania in the midst of yet another episode of bipolar disorder and more than fifteen years into my pioneering life for the Canadian Baha'i community. This last film in the trilogy begins with a brief flashback on the life and family of the chief godfather in the film, Michael Corleone, a life going back to before WW2 in the entre deux guerres years and the Sicilian connections; the film ends with the death of Michael Corleone who dies alone, an old man who has paid a high price for his sins. Some time not specified but in the late 1990s just before I retired from my work as a full-time teacher the trilogy comes to a close. The story, the history, of the Sicilian Mafia and its American, its international connections, of course, goes on1 but, for the time being, no more godfather films are planned. -Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 April 2008; and 1 "The Modern Mafia In Italy," Wikipedia, 7 April 2008.

As I watched these three godfather films
again in this new millennium and read
about the Mafia which had always been
on the periphery, the far edges, of the
knowledge that I held in my personal
data-bank of memory for recall, I realized
that I belonged to an organization that had
a history more bloody than the one I had
just witnessed and viewed for my sensory
pleasure in a cool Tasmanian evening.

Yes, a movement far too long obscure that
went back to a routinization of charisma
and origins in another blood-stained story that was as obscure and tragic,asintensely dramatic, as secretive, with pity
and poems inadequate to the murder of so
many, as full of dire convulsions and real
terror, of debauchery and shame, extremes
of commitment, falling into history, anguish
often as incomprehensible as Auschwitz,
so often nameless and blood-soaked bodies,
only their image left to streak across our vision
in this cinematic trilogy and tumble endlessly
before history that cocky jaywalker which
succumbs to bullets, knives and fists on our
screen with a careless technicolour ease as
our own lives pass by always emerging in
their unscripted, flawed and plausible celluloid
safety and their immensely ordinary ordinariness.

Ron Price
7 April 2008