Saturday, January 5, 2008

December 13, 2007 WGA Theater

Day 2 Part 1/3

10 comments:

Scott Ellington said...

Until this evening, I'd never noticed the striking resemblance that the passage David read bears to the quality of mercy speech that would be written fifteen centuries later, ringing like a parallel bell. Now I'm forced to consider Hitler's oratorical power and the ability of "content to test and verify the implicit assumptions of form"...and BLESS you for posting these inspiring hours!

Paul said...

A question on the "ability of content to test and verify the implicit assumptions of form":

Is the word "form" here as applied to Paul's passage used in a diachronic sense - available to us as "story", occurring in the flow of time (use of thirds, oppositions, etc).

And is the "content" the symbolic representation (synchrony) crystallized and available to us only after the form has been presented, only after we have submitted ourselves to the experience of form?

Is it in this way that, only after the form has been experienced, we are able to test and verify with content the implicit assumptions of form?

If the answer to these are 'yes', then Hitler's content succeeded precisely because people were carried away by form and did not test and verify its assumptions.

Lynne said...

Ingmar Bergmas was also inspired by Corinthians 13: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961), FACE TO FACE (1976)

Scott Ellington said...

spyre-
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

"Logic kills faith." but "Conscience doth make cowards of us all (who have an ego-based agenda)."
That's just my answer. Perhaps a better one will come along.

Paul said...

Scott--nice ones.

"All men are created equal before God," and yes, I venture to imply from this that all men contain God/Buddha/Brama/whatever within them, and possess an inner portal which connects them to eternal creation.

Your quotes & Big Phil's lectures together remind me of my favorite passage from The Brother's Karamozov, in the "Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima,":

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and saved them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

The end of the passage is another description of Kierkegaardian despair... so true and truly inspired.

Scott Ellington said...

spyre -
Thank you, but I meant to cite moving form that is critical of a document that proclaims the self-evident Truth that all men (and no women) are created equal (with a great many notable exceptions).
I'd hoped to learn more about the afflicted subject/object relationship of author and audience. And more about the role of intellectual property ownership (by middle men) as it bears on the singularly restorative process of making and taking art.

Paul said...

Sounds like you know a great deal already. Not sure I can offer you much help with that line of enquiry though.

But the benefit I took away from these talks is how the author is really the audience of his own subjectivity.

Seen in this relation, both the author's own editorial ego as well as any middlemen/distribution channels in the material world act as a conduit between two subjectivities - on one end, the author's raw gift (the faith and creative source) and on the other, the audience's subjectivity - the heart into which they take the story. The promise of the internet is a disintermediation between the authorial subjectivity and the receptive subjectivity.

In despair, lost in worldly things, the poet turns and repents before the mystery of his own creativity. His ego becomes a carbuncle on the altar of this joyful relation - he serves his talent as a priest serves the Deity. After all, if the priest is truly devout, "it ain't about him". Or her.

Any successful imaginative connection that survives and crosses the bridge of fancy between the author and audience member's subjectivity can itself spawn a conversation between audience and author. Closing the hermaneutic circle. And then he takes notes, wash rinse repeat, when do we all get paid?

Daniel said...

Here's some more quotes that speak to Mr. Milch's process:

"I am trying to be a spirit present inside and outside the moment so I can feel it and render it. I feel there is a part of myself that I must hide. I must neutralize it so I am conscious of the process."

This one basically echoes, in less detail, Milch's methods:

"In terms of my work I have just come to trust the process of the active imagination. It entails suppression of the Ego. I am able to develop exercises where I can suppress that quickly. I am able to get to the work faster every day. I don’t linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control – don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process. I just get to that – I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be – content to not know where I am going."

Scott Ellington said...

rhett -
This venue seems like as good a place as any for sharing linkographies:

http://mitworld.mit(dot)edu/video/383/

and

http://goinside(dot)com/02/5/milch.html

Daniel said...

Thanks, Scott. I posted one of the same links under another video, as well as that New Yorker article 'The Misfit' from a few years back. But throw anything you feel like my way, in case I missed it. I'll take all the illumination I can get.