Harvesting Reality

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Just a diary post tonight as James has turned up here at Lower Down to join us for the holidays this afternoon: Leo is working this week and joins us next weekend. Jane & I went to The White Horse for lunch again today: haddock & chips and pints of Clun Pale for me! Pictured, evidence that hay-gathering was much earlier this year than last: we were here in September then and they were still getting it in. James and I had a long and wide-ranging conversation this evening about things photographic, cinematic and the encroachment and influence of AI on them. The opening phrase of Susan Sontag's essay, "Plato's Cave" [from the collection "On Photography", 1979] came up: 'Mankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's Cave, still revelling, in its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth...' and the discussion turned to the extrapolation of this concept - she was of course talking of traditional, analogue, chemical-based photography in those days - to the modern obsessions of mobile devices and social media and the psychological and philosophical impact these and AI are having on the psyche of modern humans. That phrase is, in my opinion, simply one of the finest distillations of the truth that underlies the history of human image-making - in particular, since the advent of photography and later, cinematography - and discussing it again this evening put me in mind of a previous post I made last year on much the same topic. More later on that discussion after the hols: beer and food are this fortnight's priorities...

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