In-der-Blog-sein

Northwestlaw's Weblog goes out for some ballet, and notes an excellent interview with Twyla Tharp.

She then starts interviewing the interviewer and asks him why he does it. He responds by saying that there is something profound in art that makes it the province of philosophers, citing Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others. Tharp then says that she thinks of her work as pre-Socratic. After some brief discussion back and forth she says “turn that thing off so we can have a serious talk” and the tape is instantly over.

Tharp thinking of herself as pre-Socratic fascinates me. (what I would give to have heard the ensuing talk.) She like to thin of herself as coming form a time before Plato had inflicted a sense of rigid and perfect system of ideal “thing,” which morphed into the gnostic notion that the ideal, true reality, is someplace else and our lives a spent with shadows within a cave. Aristotle of course was able to lay a rigid system of taxonomy and categorization on this dim world of shadows so that everything had a place. Then he imposed a system of logic to enable us to trudge among the categories. Tharp sees herself as before all that when the world was full of mystery, explained by myth and metaphor.

  ¶ 10:18 PM