Cataclysmic Changes (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 April 2014.

I was thinking about the idea of cataclysmic changes and the Concert for Iceland while watching a documentary about backup singers that had some reflections on the Concert for Bangladesh.

I started thinking about Farthington, and it dawned on me that maybe he isn't just using Arthur for his talent, but for his spiritual gifts...that maybe the number one thing he wants is to somehow siphon Arthur's power from him.  Whether that can actually be done is unclear to me and I don't want to put anything rooted in magic rather than Catholicism out there, but I wonder about a few possibilities:

1. Is it not just the electroshock, but some sort of power-siphoning that damages Arthur?
2. Do the cataclysmic changes happen on some level?  Does Farthington somehow use Arthur's power to bring about some horrible power that shapes the 80's?  Some sort of void?  Maybe something electronic?
3. If so, does Arthur know?  Does he feel guilt?

I worry about Arthur coming off as too much of a vegetable.  He may appear to be one at times, but his interior life should nearly always be far more dramatic than any other character's.

His natural state should be life in the Sweet World--joy in God's garden with Mary--but being torn from that Garden, seduced away from it, weaving in and out of it, being convinced that it isn't the highest reality of his experiences, all of these things and more should be sources of inexplicable drama.

Arthur should be inexplicable because he is tied into the inexplicable.  The appeal of both Will and Farthington--the American dream and cultish psychospiritual babble--is that both offer some order to the inexplicable.

Will reduces reality to a very simple code, and Farthington offers answers, even if they are grounded in nothing.  The appeal of both Joe Lazaruses is their ability to catch glimpses of the Sweet World that Arthur lives in, to share in that beauty on even a small level with Arthur as friends, and to help communicate what Arthur sees to the rest of the world.