Saturday, August 27, 2011

Taum Santoski VIII

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

8. The subcreation of Middle-earth is done upon a course of realization, by artifact, word, and story. These are reducable into four types: the Completed Act, the Potential Act, the Initialized Act and the Concetual Act, each identified by a particular.


--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

1 comment:

Sarah said...

The subcreation of Middle-earth is done upon a course of realization, by artifact, word, and story. These are reducable into four types: the Completed Act, the Potential Act, the Initialized Act and the Concetual Act, each identified by a particular.

Hmm. Intriguing, but I'm not sure I'm following. Did Taum define these different Acts, or just label them.

I can follow a distinction between a Completed Act and a Potential Act. But how is a Potential Act distinguished from a Conceptual Act?

As a creator myself, and particularly as one building my own secondary world, I don't grasp a subjective difference between "potential" and "conceptual".

And "Intialized" sits out there dangling between "Conceptual" and "Completed".

Oh, so tantalizing a tid-bit!