The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 4 July 2016.
Hello!
Having descended through an entirely uninhabited, dark section of the tunnels, I thought I might share some of my reflections on the state of the project.
Incidentally, I'm not in the tunnels anymore. Somehow, I ended up in these overgrown yew shrubs outside the hospital. I'm staring into the glowing embers of my makeshift computer “screen,” using up the last pennies of my cyber money. People are walking in and out of the building and I keep scooching my feet back under myself. I'd look ridiculous were anyone to see me: grown man crouched in the bushes like this. People would think I'm trying to set the shrubs on fire. My clothes are absolutely filthy. I must have been bleeding from some wound on my head or face. I'm going to wait for the cover of night to get out of here. Still, I'm in surprisingly good spirits. I keep giggling at the sheer absurdity it all. For some reason, I feel exhilarated, “fully alive” as they say. Anyway, it's been fun. Kind of like being a double agent or the target of some manhunt.
I guess I'd better start working through some of the more troubling developments before the embers cool.
One of the big topics right now is that of identity. Liza has been focusing on that in her Cartography. She's been wondering about the identity of the Benefactor: is (s)he a beneficent or malevolent entity? And, more importantly, what is (s)he? Recent developments have rendered that question somewhat moot, no? But all of that unfolded rather rapidly and, being 5 subjects behind all the time, we weren't poised to see it coming, much less how to craft our response.
Turns out that (s)he may have tried to contact us several times over the summer and once or twice in the winter, but all those messages went into spam. And then, like a lot of people, I just “Select All” and delete those. I don't know, maybe they had some kind of self-destruct mechanism. Not to say we would have let him/her have any influence over the project, but I would have liked to see what (s)he had to say.
Now that we have no money (I'm using up the last of it as I type), I would have liked to see what (s)he could have offered. But I'm convinced that a lot of those emails just get triggered when you hover over some banner or sidebar. Still, the money wouldn't hurt. Everything is grinding to a halt. Money is like a lubricant: the gears get all locked up without it.
Rustyy Kryyyyyyzztyylzz keeps complaining that we've stopped adding y's and z's to his name. He's stuck at an even number of both, and apparently that's a problem. He said he'd like to get up to an odd number so that they don't just “cancel out.” Ideally, he says, he wants prime numbers, because the square root of a prime number is irrational. I say to him, why square root? Why not cube root? I mean it seems so arbitrary so much of this stuff. But he insists that it's no better than having his “normal name.” I say to him, why can't you just add as many as you want? He says it doesn't count. It reminds me of when Carlton was campaigning to have the IEC power symbol added to Unicode so he could use it in place of o's.
I've told him that he should go back to Beefoven, maybe do a reunion tour (funny, I typed ruinion!).
And now, of course, the Benefactor is famous. Well, not him/her exactly, but this notion of indefinitude is taking over. And it's a little mind-blowing how uncritically people were willing to buy into this idea. I mean there are a lot of good reasons. Peace and prosperity gets old. People get antsy. I think it was completely fair when (s)he said that we couldn't really pretend to have an enemy, like just inventing one out of thin air. Honestly, I was surprised that (s)he admitted that. I think (s)he was entirely forthright on that count.
His/her choice of the scab metaphor was also apt. I mean, when you pick off a scab you often feel smooth. There are usually edges, yes, but most of us could agree with that basic idea: when you pick a scab you feel smooth. But then of course it comes back and a lot of times it's worse, it's gained even more “territory” as (s)he put it. Kind of mixing metaphors a little, but I get it: transitioning into this idea of how wars are fought and won at this point in our history. But when you pick off a scab you feel smooth, like a sea ray. But it's a false smoothness, like how a sea ray thinks it looks awesome when it launches out of the water, flaps its “wings,” but really it looks best in the water, much more graceful. But what if we could give the sea ray real wings? It kind of got a little hard to follow at this point, honestly, but I knew basically what (s)he was saying. And then (s)he started talking about the new Star Wars trilogy and I lost interest.
(S)he apparently likes the new movie a lot. Can't stop talking about it. Personally, I can't get past Kylo Ren: what a whiny, poor excuse for a villain. I mean everything has this feeling of being a knock off of the originals. And then what's-her-name just like, what, hands over the keys to the Death Star? Just stupid. If they keep this all going, it'll be some schmuck has to walk into a room and feel around for light switch and then the Death Star explodes.
I think (s)he likes the sucking the life out of a star part. Although impractical, it's a lot more nefarious than just cruising around through space shooting things. I mean we need to take this Lucasian/Campbellian cosmology through to its logical consequence, right? The Death Star and the Lodestone are purely parasitic. In future installments of the franchise, they will create small Death Stars that fly around in the night like vampire bats, biting people in their sleep. And then some guy will come in and just spray them all with some Raid, and they all die because—surprise!—they were allergic to Raid.
Eventually, we'll get down to the level of genetic code, just swapping genomes around and creating monsters. It will really just be like episodes of a television show at that point. The crack team will have the brainstorming session with the clear glass dry-erase board. And then someone will have some eureka moment watching someone get mustard juice all over their hot dog: “I always forget to shake it up.”
“That's it! We just need to shake it up!” And then they go out and vanquish the monster, whatever it is, by shaking it up. You get the idea. I mean, everything is just getting so atomized.
Wish me luck!
