What Happens After Iceland?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 March 2014.

"...they began to catch glimpses of a strange beast during their excursions"

We already know a lot about Will and Arthur. Actually, the scene at the end of "An Evening with Arthur White" shows their basic situation. Both of them are washed up, burned out, with little hope of redemption.

Iceland's eruption may have turned out to be a false alarm, not the cataclysmic event Farthington expected it would be.

The university pulled the plug on Farthington's "pilot program." Farthington was able keep his cult/program going by getting a job at a university library and meeting with his followers/students during off hours. After the Iceland fiasco, he continued looking for his subterranean entrance to the underworld in the steam tunnels beneath the school. As you can read in the Forward [sic] to The Principles, they began to catch glimpses a strange beast during their excursions into the earth. Although the university tried to cover it up, this was probably the thing that mauled all of them.

But, as I've mentioned, Farthington reemerges, mostly in an electronic capacity.

He was pretty messed up. I'm starting to imagine that he lost enough of his face/jaw to make talking impossible. He ends up on Topsail Island, North Carolina, and begins making tentative forays back toward his original mission, again using his credentials to secure a short-lived "speaking" (text-to-voice) engagement at the nearby community college.  I like to imagine that he is able to arrange doing this dressed as the school mascot in an exaggerated form of the avatar phenomenon or a modern-day Picture of Dorian Gray.

I would like the aforementioned cataclysmic moment to open the door to a new period that feels timeless in that Wes Anderson kind of way.  In some ways, I like the idea of Will working out his exacting timetable for the time period between 1968 and 1976, but after that, an asynchronistic paradigm takes over in which events can be rehearsed, revisited, revised, reversed, relived, and/or retracted.

So, for example, Farthington's emergence on the campus of Cape Fear Community College could have taken place in 1984 or 2014 or both or neither. He may or may not be the person in the suit or with the Google account. The catastrophe in Iceland could have happened in 1976, never happened, or is about to happen now. Strict timelines can be introduced, but they become less trustworthy as other alternate realities are considered.  Essentially, this opens the door to our competing narratives and creates a frame in which we never have to get it right, never have to put all our eggs in one basket, never have to sell ourselves out to a single storyline.

Why is this happening?

Two possible reasons that I can give:

1. It's all happening in Arthur's mind, which is now "unstuck"
2. It's the fulfillment of Farthington's prophesy about the "turbulent reversals"

P.S. Carlton wants you to leave messages on his machine ("About anything!" he says).  Call him at (910) 541-3466!