A nice spot of recursion for a Thursday evening..

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008

A clip from Out of Africa, which I guess would be generally considered to be his masterpiece, although my favourite of his movies was The Yakuza, with Robert Mitchum and Takakura Ken, which I saw as a teenager and which planted the seed of a desperate desire to travel to Japan, a whole decade before I would eventually get the chance to do so..

( I’m listening to John Barry’s gorgeous Out of Africa main theme, and remembering that I always subconsciously referred to it as ‘Free Born’ , for reasons that I assume are obvious..)

Carving or modelling?..

Haven’t had any Adam Phillips on here for a while. Let’s rectify that right now..

“… Denis Donohue, in Thieves of Fire, used the distinction between carving and modelling to illustrate what he called the Promethean imagination; which, he says, ’starts with an incorrigible sense of its own power, and seeks in nature only the means of its own fulfilment’. ‘In carving,’ he writes,

the artist assumes that the block of stone contains within itself the form invented for it by nature; the artist’s desire is merely to liberate that form, to disclose its hidden face… In modelling, on the other hand, the artist gives the stone his own truth, or what he insists is his own truth; the truth of the stone as a different truth is not acknowledged.

… In one kind of creative experience the artist uses his art to elaborate, to expose, to fashion himself. In the other kind of experience the animating intention of the artist is to reveal something other, something separate, something aside or apart from the self; not to fuse with object, but to differentiate it. The sacramental poet, the carver, forgets himself; the erotic poet, the Promethean, the modeller, endorses himself. In one version the self is the instrument, in the other it is the obstacle… At one extreme of this strange dualistic vision there is the cult of personality, the artist as the emperor of egotism; and at the other extreme there is a cult of the object, of a world whose virtue and substance resides in the fact that it resists manipulation. Creative experience is either self-promotion or self-surrender. The moral and aesthetic question becomes: do I value something because I can make it mine, or because I can’t?…”

(From ‘Side Effects’ by Adam Phillips)