Remastered Classics

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

I like the one-at-a-time approach, that is, one song per podcast episode. We could put these on Bandcamp with a pay-what-you-want option and a special download code, which would be "buried" somewhere in the podcast. I like the podcast to be roughly on a topic related to the song's time period, perhaps with a segment discussing thoughts about the song and its development. We could have the other musicians in at this point! We could also play some songs that were influential in our creative decisions.

But, again, I'm getting hooked on this diegesis (and, really, exegesis) over mimesis idea. It's soooo satisfying to me, both classically and postmodernistically! Classically, we're avoiding being a cause of moral degeneration; postmodernistically, we're analyzing a story that was never written--so much cooler than actually writing the story.

Bret Easton Ellis

Do listen to one of those Bret Easton Ellis podcasts. I would recommend the 7/14/14 interview with Michael Tolkin on the topic of pragmatism in screenwriting. It starts with a moment in Hollywood's history in which the screenwriter almost became a novelist-caliber artist, and why that didn't happen. This American Life and The Moth, likewise, all diegesis. Mostly historical and autobiographical too.

We're better at intellectual discourse than we are at writing and acting out dramatic roles (you're better at that than I am).

As for the "album" idea, I still think a modest 5 songs is a better idea at this point. We could put in a gentle plug for people to help us, by paying more for each released song: the more successful we are this year the more likely we can do more next year. I mean, in a sense, the 5-song release is an album of sorts--an EP, really. And yes, the songs I chose don't have any strong thematic or narrative link that I am aware of, so I guess that would be a "greatest hits."

As we get more of these releases (assuming we keep this cycle up over a number of years), maybe we can come in and do a "box set" of "remastered" stuff. If we have some weak parts that have started to annoy us over time, we can fix them. We can sit down and talk through some ideas for "remastering."

You already know about my love affair with the box set.

I was also a huge fan of crop circles

As someone who came of age in the late 80's and early 90's, the box set of remastered classics was like what an LP would have been for kids of earlier decades. Opening that sucker up, flipping through the huge glossy book while blasting "Immigrant Song" or "Mountain Jam" on my parents' 6-disc CD player "carousel."

Enjoying all the high-contrast black-and-white photographs, the lyrics scribbled on hotel stationary or napkins, the liner notes written by some hanger-on...

Man, that was IT in the early 90's!

So another postmodernist thing is to never have recorded the real albums--just go straight for the box set of remastered classics! And write the story in the form of liner notes (what a grossly undervalued genre!). It'd be nice if we could have little "thumbnails" of the actual albums to include in the massive book. And is it time to start putting out a box set with 4 Compact Discs (yes, CDs) inside as a "collectors item." I think it is!

Well, this is all fantasy way beyond our next steps, so I'm going to stop!

Come-From-Behind Comic Victories

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

More thoughts about why artists and prostitutes don't fit in to the usual progression of aesthetic, ethical, religious.

Whenever a group takes away the religious sense and tries to reduce faith to an ethical proposition, it spawns artists, druggies (of the psychedelic, not hedonistic, variety), and prostitutes as a "4th sphere"--almost a kind of limbo.

That's exactly what the Pharisees did. That's exactly what Pentheus did. And thus, you have prostitutes and tax collectors trying to get beyond that wall by breaking its rules (not the ideal, normative way through, by the way!). A similar thing seems to have happened in our own day, but actually both the the religious and the ethical senses are being attacked, leaving nothing but the aesthetic. You're right that there are no "noble Romans" in our day. Fr. Bernard could be turned into one, but I don't think it would be edifying for anyone.

You should never harsh the Bacchants' mellow frenzy

This phenomenon is bound to funnel a lot of would-be mystics into various distorted paths. I think I enumerated some of them back in our meeting at the diner: psychedelic drug use, sexuality, cult membership, bacchic rites of music (think Jimi), insanity, etc. All of these would be characterized by an inarticulate longing for the ecstatic union of the religious sphere, a longing that Christ seems to have readily picked up on.

That is why you and I rightly (I think) have so much more admiration for a Marvin Gaye or a Gil Scott-Heron than we do for the guy who comes to church wearing his team's gear, goes down for donuts, and talks about yesterday's game. I know that God is a lot more merciful than us, by the way. But I have little patience for people who presume to judge why these artists suffered such an ignominious demise. "They should have never left the Shire!" is what these Chubs, Grubs, Boffins, and Brandybucks would say! No, they risked traveling a very high and narrow path, without the guidance and expertise that existed in past centuries, and therefore had a long way to fall.

Is it wisdom to stay close to Hell so your fall isn't as profound?

I hope that the one who "began a good work" in some of these Pancake Breakfast types "will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6). And that is one of the more beautiful things about our religion: it finds everyone where they are and comes up with some unlikely, miraculous, come-from-behind comic victories.

Womb-like Place

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

He isn't Tommy

"Womb-like place" makes sense.

I would bet that Arthur would pick up on his mother's issues as a teenager but like you said be fed by the charity. Kids trust their moms, and young Arthur wouldn't cause her much grief--she'd probably be affirmed in her works by the fact that her young son loves the Lord so much.

Incidentally, how could Lena make Will vow to make Arthur a star on her deathbed?

Because she can't stand to see Arthur suffer and without realizing it puts her family's security ahead of her relationship with God. Her relationship is in so many ways about protecting the family. That's the issue that has to be worked off in Purgatory. And the oddest thing about Arthur in the family's eyes is that family doesn't seem like that big of a deal to him. That's partially because his eyes are on God, not his home, and partially because he loves everybody--even people who abuse him. Somehow this self-made immigrant family had a kid with seemingly no survival instincts at all! He's intensely generous but not philanthropic because worldly wealth is worthless to him, and he loves everyone but can barely communicate with anyone without music because his vision of reality is so different than everyone else's--there's very little common ground.

Still, he isn't Tommy or a high functioning autistic. He's a mystic.

I never made the connection between Augustine and Kierkegaard, but it makes a ton of sense. I'm not sure if the world we're creating has any of those noble Romans in it! But I do see how lots of people I would characterize as living in the moral are probably closet aesthetes. I've probably just let too many of my Catholic educational experiences harden my appreciation for the moral.

I think the most important thing we can do in Catholic education is lead kids to the Eucharist, but instead we work like crazy to mandate good behavior. The result seems to be a lot of kids who don't get caught doing bad things frequently and don't have much interest in a personal relationship with Christ. Parents want us to help raise good kids, but are terrified that we'll raise Jesus freaks. People fear the scandalous side of Christ. But I think there might be some adventure in following the scandalous Christ that would appeal to the aesthete.

"Catapulted" into the Religious Sphere

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

As for messages getting buried: That was one of the issues that I thought would get handled by taking the emphasis off mimesis and taking a diegetical approach--or at least more diegetical. We can talk about the story just like we do in our emails and, by extension, the blog. I was actually of the opinion we should go totally diegesis in our podcast. I think it lends itself to our strengths of telling not showing and it is a classical, Platonic solution to the problem of having the opposite of our desired, edifying effect on our audience.

Where is Jimi Hendrix located?

In deference to St. Augustine, I'm going to disagree that the ethical sphere is absurd and banal (I'm of the opinion that Kierkegaard got his ideas for the spheres of existence from Augustine's City of God). Augustine just betrays too much admiration for the highly ethical Romans he uses as examples of how close some pagans came to the kingdom. I would say that most churchgoers are actually in the aesthetic realm trying to work around or bargain with the ethical when absolutely necessary. The ethical realm is characterized by a willingness to die rather than to sin. I think ethical is rightly considered the realm from which one is "catapulted" into the religious sphere.

So where are Jimi and Arthur and prostitutes and Carlton Farthington located? It might be difficult to locate. But modern artists and would-be mystics might consider the ethical sphere impossible to stomach without the more complete revelation of the religious. They are different than the aesthetic types who just want to burn their eyes out on Netflix every weekend and buy a cottage someday.

For this reason, I also think Arthur would have picked up on the unnaturalness in Lena's charitable activities. The Sweet World is way bigger than that. It wouldn't feel as natural as breathing to him, but it might have been a womb-like place where he found some nourishment.

Buried Under the Plot Twists

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 4 August 2014.

Thomas Merton at his hermitage

So Arthur is a child in the embrace of his mother' Old World Catholicism which feeds him a rich supernatural view of the world, plus his mom obsessively serves the poor (although in a misguided way), which makes Arthur feel that service to the poor is as natural as breathing, which it is in the Sweet World.

Then Arthur is an adolescent in a post-Vatican II world that replaces the organs with acoustic guitars and pianos, flips the altar around, replaces oil paintings and stained glass with felt banners, the stone and marble with drywall and pine.

Then in his autumn years, the Church becomes an extension of people's right-wing political affiliations! Meanwhile, angels are singing the triumph of Christ, demons are fleeing in terror and trying to knock as many of us over as they can as they are rounded up, Jesus is inviting us to walk on water, etc!

I've been looking at the project in terms of what it should say to non-Catholics, but you have nailed what it should say to Catholics! So many of us are Will Witkowskis, viewing our faith like it's something we ought to do but not absolutely necessary to live good worldly lives, like saving 10% toward retirement, exercising, or flossing. We don't get that God is our life itself, not the bonus prize at the end of an esteemed career and well-funded retirement.

By the way, regarding this:

Maybe we visit Arthur in a small hermitage. Maybe he has even become a priest through some special dispensation (he wouldn't be able to get through any of the heavy theological study--I'm sure there is some example of this in history).

How about St. John Vianney, whose feast day is today?! We picked a good day to pray the daily readings!

So how do we keep these messages in the right places in the story so that they aren't buried under the the plot twists or spelled out by some lame chorus? I don't know that the messages peek out clearly in every podcast, but prolonged exposure should clarify them.

I'm inclined to say that Joe Lazarus, Sr. and Jr. are the mechanisms. That Joe Sr. is destroyed by his pursuit of God (as Arthur experiences Him) and that Joe Jr. is saved by it.

Also, Joe Jr.'s parents are inversions of Arthur's. Joe Sr. was an absentee dad where Stan was about moving heaven and earth for the misunderstood good of his family. Joe's mom is what Fr. Joe calls "The Frozen Chosen," where Arthur's mom is an activist.

I also think back to Kierkegaard. In some ways, the religious sphere is closer to the aesthetic sphere than the moral sphere. Maybe the story can reach people in the aesthetic who long for the truth and beauty only the religious sphere can offer. And maybe Will demonstrates the absurdity and banality of the moral sphere.

Arthur's "Solution"

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

If everything Arthur experiences is a distorted version of the antecedent will of God, then Iceland should have been his Patmos experience. The solution that Will comes up with is a religious stretch for him, but not for Arthur.

So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me empty,
but shall do what pleases me,
achieving the end for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11)

Being a good Catholic is not enough for Arthur; he is a type of Catholic that has been largely banished from both secular and religious circles. He's kind of like a Abba Joseph of the Desert Fathers or a St. Joseph Cupertino or a St. John the Apostle. It's also reminiscent of Thomas Merton, who spent his early conversion days teaching Harlem youth--clearly a good thing--but not where he belongs. He's a contemplative, a visionary, a mystic. The guy levitates, has fire come out of his fingers, alternates between visions of Heaven and Hell, and does very little that would work in the context of a K of C Pancake Breakfast.

Iceland is not where he belongs either, but it needs to be something on that level. This is the situation inside God's consequent will, which is patiently guiding Arthur's feet back making use of these broken elements.

Perhaps the happy ending can be conveyed in an epilogue-type thing, like at the end of Life of Pi. Maybe we visit Arthur in a small hermitage. Maybe he has even become a priest through some special dispensation (he wouldn't be able to get through any of the heavy theological study--I'm sure there is some example of this in history).

That's the final frontier for Catholics: being able to retreat from life altogether. But only priests who can confect the Eucharist can truly live this lifestyle. Maybe the hermitage is out back on some huge property that Will bought with the money from some successful endeavor--maybe even from making it big with Arthur White!

Will's solution is a neat and tidy one, but the point for me is that Arthur's "solution" no longer has any place in society--maybe it never did. The only fellow feeling he finds is in music world of the Jimi Hendrix-style druggie mystic and in the cult world of Carlton Farthington. It's not like either of those are necessarily closer to God's will, but I think this may be one of those areas in which “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you" (Mt. 21:31).

The people sitting in the pews--still trying to "win a game of ball in a cup," as you say--are so far removed from the reality of the kingdom. Who would convert more quickly were they to meet Jesus face to face: the former or the latter? I think what Jesus is saying is that the former, having unmoored themselves from any chance of success in the worldly sense, are so much more ready to embrace the kingdom. They already live in tents; once they see the column of flame, there's nothing to slow them down from following it through the desert.

So, the Catholic audience is chastened by this message, coaxed into laughing at Carlton Farthington and the cult, only later realizing that they need to get down to at least that level themselves--not in the context of the cult, of course, but in the context of their detachment from the world and seeking the kingdom first.

Last little bit: I've often wondered if the ring in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is something like this fervor that drives someone to burn out on psychedelic drugs or join a cult. It's nothing that the usual hobbits in the Shire would ever encounter because they're too comfortable, too averse to adventure. So, from that perspective, Bilbo, Frodo, and--yes--even Gollum can be considered closer to the kingdom than the hobbits back in Hobbiton. Yes, there are many dangers and pitfalls that beset the hobbits that come in contact with the magic of the ring (or of the adventure in general), but there is never any sense in which ordinary life back in Hobbiton would have been the better or more noble option.

Very Dangerous, Uninspired Silliness

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 4 August 2014.

Post-Farthington we have a less-focused message

I've been thinking about something that frequently overwhelms me with the project, which is its ever-expanding, all-form-engulfing nature. Don't get me wrong--that's also one of my favorite things about the project, but it makes the project a challenge.

I have to immerse myself into the world of podcasting, but it does seem like a podcast makes our lives a little easier by taking away most of the demands of visual production. It also allows us the freedom of dealing with the story in episodes, which frees us from having to pin down one central, official version of the story and communicate it in a fixed amount of time. It also allows us to deal with a destabilized narrative and multiple forms: we can do a show about the creation of the show, we can play the Witkowski brothers, we can play ourselves, we can bring in friends to play roles. We have a lot of options.  It also doesn't inhibit us from playing a show, running websites, etc.

You brought up the question of the moral education piece of the story, and I think we should discuss it.

I feel like we've lost our grip on it a bit, partially because of the dryness of my prayer life lately, and partially because of improvements in the story itself. Before Farthington, I had a fairly tight morality play in mind that could be told in a series of concerts. Post-Farthington, we have a much more interesting story, but a less-focused message, as far as I can tell. I'm curious how you would describe the message of the story--not because I don't think you have lost it, but because we haven't articulated it in a while.

In my eyes, the core message of the story still is and always has been that we are born to be and called to be saints, and every main character should in some way be an examination of the comic and tragic repercussions of our standing in the ways of our own and each other's sainthood, frequently on our quests to pursue our own fallen visions of sainthood.

Meanwhile, if we could somehow view our plight from God's perspective, we would see that God lavishes us with opportunities to be saints, one of which is each other, in the form of obstacles to sainthood! I don't have a great way to articulate this, but it would be like we are invited into Heaven, the cross jams open the gate for us, Jesus and all the angels and saints welcome us in to meet God, and we hold them off so we can watch a little more TV, get promotions at work, complain about the messes we need to clean up first, win a game of ball in a cup, etc. And then God says, well, if you really need to do all that, I'll help: here's the Holy Spirit and the Sacraments and all of our prayers. And then we say, great, but what we really need is a 14th season of Matlock, to close the McIntire account, a housecleaning robot, a shorter string.

I think postmodernism is a time of very dangerous, uninspired silliness, and the thinking person's response to that is a type of desperate seriousness, generally in the form of retweeting Huffington Post or salon.com articles, which are really more silliness. It seems like a great time to point an audience to the greater reality of God's love for us and our place within that love.

I want to reach people who are tired of trudging through the sludge of irony.

Is This Even a "Thing"?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 July 2014.

The Moth

So could we do something like The Moth, with each of us coming up and sharing stories, conjuring images of these happenings without worrying about any spectacle (costuming, sets, props)? And maybe just talking out loud about story ideas or how it might be approached or what are some of the implications or morals of the story, just like we do in our emails. And then, when we've explained "where we're coming from" (telling not showing), alternate that with songs.

Or even have an interviewer ask us questions about the story (on stage or in a podcast format) as ourselves. I'm not quite grasping what that show would look like, but it seems like it could be hilariously funny and extremely interesting. Or totally boring and dumb. The funny thing is being interviewed as an admitted nobody who has no credentials or reason to be interviewed, except that we are in possession of this amazingly outsized story. And it's totally bathetic in that the reality is so utterly far removed from that grandiose vision.

And then the frame inside of that is it's about Arthur White and Will Witkowski, who are also borderline in terms of credentials.

Essentially, we are being interviewed about the story that we would like to tell. And the irony is that the interview becomes the story. And the story maybe never happens in its full-fledged sense.

Why would that work at all?

I think it's the audacity of basically going up there "naked," with no pretenses whatsoever. And I could play songs on whatever keyboard and you can bring a snare drum or whatever, because we're not pretending that we're from any particular era, we're just trying to conjure up this story from nothing (or perhaps admitting that we won't be able to conjure up the story mimetically, so we're just going to tell you what we were thinking about doing).

And if we did ever get some costuming for one of us, but not for the other, we could just go ahead and have one of these shows and it would be this conspicuous thing where we don't pretend like we're seeing Will Witkowski, but we evaluate the costume and talk about what we were going for, where we fell short, the implications of pretending, etc. And if we want to talk about religion, we can just talk about it. We bring a list of what we'd like to talk about.

I actually love this idea. I'm not sure it would work. We wouldn't really even need an interviewer, we could just talk amongst ourselves. But an interviewer would be cool in that they could go out to the audience bringing the microphone around to people with questions. And even if the conversations are compelling, there's this nagging question: what the hell are we even doing? Is this even "a thing"?

I think a critical determining factor is whether we can find that slightest of motives or frames. With Drunk History, it's the drunk part. How do you create the context for people to understand what is happening? Start with a song? Then have our interviewer come up?

"Wow, that was great, guys. Okay, for the people out there who don't know, who is Arthur White? And who is Will Witkowski?"

Some Micro Ideas

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 31 July 2014.

Here are some micro ideas.

T.S. Eliot

Remember that our original scheme was push marketing: the story was a way to create self-perpetuating marketing. Then we added a Catholic message. Then the thing became a gigantic epic devouring everything in its path!  It has become like a T.S. Eliot piece in that it absorbs everything that came before it, but it is postmodern in the sense of the instability of the narrative. Mimesis and diegesis both make sense.

Really, the story has absorbed us as well.

I initially didn't dream very far beyond a simple morality play told through 5-10 performances, some records, and a comeback documentary originally. Really, when you came to my house to jam for the first time, I thought we were going to do some rap!

Regarding "An Evening with Arthur White," it wasn't intended to be a closed piece. The idea was that the whole would lead to moral education and spiritual catharsis--not that one night.

Fr. Walter Ong

I do feel, however, like we've lost a grip, though not completely or irrevocably, on the moral and spiritual thrust of the story.

I don't think that a such a thrust is anathema to postmodern story telling, though. I'd hold up several of Don DeLillo's books or the philosophy of McLuhan or Ong as road maps. It will be a challenge to lead people to a moving resolution that educates without being cliché.  Postmodernism tends to be better at pointing snarky fingers at endings. The Power and the Glory has a satisfying ending that verges on the postmodern.

Mimesis Not Diegesis Effecting Catharsis!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 July 2014.

Apollo and Socrates (at the Academy of Athens)

I am also interested in bringing up a new topic, that of mimesis vs. diegesis. I began thinking along these lines when you brought up Drunk History, which is a pretty unalloyed modern example of diegesis, although the actors, of course, engage in (deliberately pitiful) mimesis. It must be first admitted that the writers of Drunk History would--without the slightest doubt--be forcibly and immediately expelled from the Republic, because their narration does absolutely nothing to promote values and virtues of youth.

That said, the only poets who would be allowed to remain in the Republic were the diegetical ones; mimesis is considered unacceptable because, among other things, "human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one part only" (The Republic, Book III). I don't have a fully formed idea here, but there seems to be an intersection between this and the idea of multiple identities that occur after the turbulent reversals. Actually, it seems to intersect in a lot of ways, but I haven't figured them all out.

Socrates would reject what we are doing in imitating our characters. And it doesn't help matters that most of the characters we imitate in this drama are not ones of a praiseworthy sort. Also, some of our characters do the same thing as we do, usurping the identity of others. Finally, we have the more overarching sense in which we all--to a greater or lesser extent--fashion multiple identities for ourselves in this age of avatars.

This same Book III talks about the importance of engendering courage in youth. And the blame is placed on even the poet Socrates revered--Homer--for perpetuating ideas of the afterlife that were contrary to nurturing this all-important virture. The main issue is making it look like everyone--with the exception of maybe Teiresias--has a shitty afterlife, and thus that death is to be avoided at all costs. They've got a point about that one passage in The Odyssey in which the fearless demigod Achilles says he would rather be alive as the basest slave than king of the dead. It's almost as if he regrets the valor that put him constantly in harm's way.

This aspect seems to have a connection to our focus on the underworld and Hell. In some ways, Farthington is doing what Socrates would have him do, that is, make that realm more desireable or palatable, and make life as we know it a thing of lesser value and passing worth, thus engendering courage in his followers. But the followers of Farthington are well on their way to becoming shades, to entering into the anonymous and ignominious part of Hell. More and more, they live the life of a disembodied shade, seeking only to drink blood on the rare occasion it becomes available. Perhaps Farthington thinks that, by leading them into the underworld willingly and while still alive, he is making them kings of that world, himself being the high king.

There is also the issue of exile, the fate which all mimetic poets would suffer in Plato's Republic. Is Arthur and Farthington's trip to Iceland an experience of exile? It sure bears a distinct resemblance to St. John's exile on the island of Patmos and capitalizes on that visionary tradition. I think it is an exile in the sense that neither of them have any place in modern civilization. They have been expelled by Nietzsche's hated Socratic man, who sees rationality, science, and mechanistic thinking as perfectly capable of fathoming the depths of reality.

Apollo and Marsyas

Arthur and Farthington turn this all its head by enacting their modern mythmaking, co-opting the symbols and concepts of empiricism/positivism (think dinosaurs), and allowing the Dionysian to regain superiority.

Arthur is likely from the upstart musical tradition of Marsyas, not Apollo, and is, in some sense flayed alive (or is just among those musicians and poets expelled in The Republic).

Your idea about podcasting also brings up the whole diegesis/mimesis idea. As long as it's just us talking about the characters and the story, we might last longer in a republic ruled by the Socratic man. Of course, I guess that's sort of what we've been doing with the blog as well.

Now with all this hating on Socrates in our story, it's interesting that, in some ways, he also gives voice to its happy ending:

our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession--the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind? 

This seems to be an apt ending for any divine comedy, if we replace "freedom" with "virtue" and "State" with "Church."

A major criticism of our approach is that we delve so deeply into baseness--to an extent that can our work even be considered Christian? Did anyone who attended "An Evening with Arthur White" feel strengthened in their faith? Did anyone feel "encouraged" or "equipped"? And if so, what is the mechanism that allows someone to profit from this? Obviously, Socrates sees no benefit in this approach; I think a whole lot of Christians see no benefit in this approach either--they too have roundly expelled these kinds of poets (just keep that dial locked on Family Life Radio!).

Or is it, as Aristotle says, "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions"?

In other words, mimesis not diegesis effecting catharsis!

Updated Business Plan

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 July 2014.

Pasiphaë and Daedalus

Okay, when July starts drawing to a close, it's time to take stock. Not much else is going to get accomplished. I'm not even going to go over what I hoped to have accomplished by August 31. I'm just going to explain what the plan looks like to me now.

Bear in mind this is an artist's business plan. Which is not really a business plan.

Blogging

I have gotten into the habit of blogging.

I'd like to add the "Follow" buttons to the page and send out the responsive email by the end of the summer. I personally don't think copyrighting makes sense in this case. The copyrighting era righted some wrongs that had been occurring up to that point, but I think it has also stifled the free flow of ideas, so critical to the development of culture. Nor do I think total obscurity makes sense. And I don't want to stop doing the blog, because I think it could play a role later on.

Honestly, I don't think anyone is going to take anything. If we suddenly see a television series that bears a remarkable resemblance to the characters, plots, and themes we've been fleshing out, then we have 3 courses of action: (1) take legal action, (2) kick ourselves, or (3) praise God and retire to a life of prayer and austerity. But anything published online is considered copyrighted.

Music

I don't see a lot happening here. But here's my attitude at this point.

I'm continuing to write the material for Concert for Iceland. I am getting a kick out of the idea of not sharing it with anyone (including you) until it's time to do the Concert. I don't think it's time to do the Concert. So I like it to exist in the future. I'm not exactly sure why. I just like to keep stuffing it down and preventing its emergence. Maybe it's a volcanic thing. Maybe it's a neurotic thing. But it is one of the central motifs: the empty frame. Did the Concert ever happen? Are there any songs at all? The idea of virtuality replacing reality after the turbulent reversals.

Aside from all that, if at any point you feel compelled to record or play a show, I'm up for it. I think this is another one of the reasons I don't want to do the Concert for Iceland material: we have a lot of other material to play. Just an observation, but I think your band fully occupies your time at this point--even to the point where you seem overextended and may need to scale back.

That's not surprising or disappointing really, but there is some frustration for me.

I'm having trouble understanding God's will in all of this, because I feel like I'm back to square one by myself again. The blog seems borne out of bearing these frustrations. It seems to be a place that I exercise the supernatural virtues of faith and hope in that it's where I wait on the Lord vis-à-vis this project. I've definitely progressed in some direction, even though it doesn't seem to be in any worldly direction.

I'm beginning to think that certain thoughts I have had are prophetic.

Namely the idea that Arthur White would never exist but in a reunion capacity. I smiled once or twice at the thought of this being a project I pursue in retirement, and that the next 20 years or so is preparation: songwriting, working on my chops, etc. But I've also had the thought that this is like Hjalmar's "life lie" in Ibsen's The Wild Duck: the tragic idea that this project is the fantasy world that impoverishes my true reality. Essentially, that I'm a walking Willy Loman. I give the good stockings to my fantasy world, while my wife makes do with frayed ones in the real world.

I'm also wondering if I'm more of a King Minos figure, who was given the sign from the god (in his case, Poseidon), but held onto it for his own self-interest. And, so, following the Campbellian exegesis, I can only create a counterfeit of the hero's journey: an involuted labyrinth with the perverse offspring of the hoarded gift. But the unwillingness to sacrifice the gift, to give it back, to maintain an outward, outgoing, evolving orientation is the sin that is its own punishment. Does that make you Pasiphaë, Theseus, an Athenian youth, Ariadne, Daedalus, Icarus, or the Minotaur?

Maybe, like Daedalus, you escape and, when I finally track you down, you and your new friends kill me by pouring boiling water on me.

How's that for a business plan?

A Revelation More Complete

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

Joseph Campbell

I was reading over Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces today and it surprised me how much it resonated with what you had said about our story needing to be comic. Modern man, according to Campbell, seems to have much greater difficulty accessing the "deeper truth" of comedy, having largely jettisoned (suppressed?) the idea of a "happily ever after":

Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within...the realistic, intimate, and variously interesting tragedy of democracy, where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.

...too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after cannot be taken seriously; it belongs the never-never land of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into night--which sober, modern Occidental judgment is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete.

This modern miasma explains our preference for bleak, unremitting tragedy on the one hand and shallow, insipid comedy on the other. Our lack of faith is evidenced by our need to steer all our plots toward unconvincingly happy or irredeemably tragic endings. If God doesn't exist and a full, beautiful, comic revelation is not possible, then these are the two options available to us. I would go as far to say that, having largely killed a living God from our collective consciousness, even our religious utterances ring in one of those two ways.

I like what you said about "flipping the script." In some ways, that puts the denouement for this plot in God's hands. To tell you the truth, most of the things that you and I have come up with for an ending have felt like committing suicide. Deus ex Machina is only a problem when it's us who are the ones pulling the strings, trying to save ourselves. Flipping the script means bringing God these sundry elements of disintegration, asking Him for the redemption only He can give, for the comedy that only He can imagine. Because, though this whole story is just a story, I have a lot of true-to-life, life-or-death, salvation-or-damnation questions at stake. Maybe what makes a postmodern work of literature religious is that it takes that attitude of prayer, that offering of a broken self, that lifting of these discordant elements to God in prayer.

I think I read something by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa where he explains the idea of prayer by likening it to how we talk to ourselves when we are alone.

And in modern/postmodern times, this conversation is usually cacophonous; that's just the nature of the modern world and the modern mind as a product of that world. Prayer is when we take that same internal dialogue and instead dialogue with God.

Postmodern works will, by their very nature, have a cacophonous, circular, self-referential, uncertain quality. But religious artists will bring God into the midst of that cacophony or, perhaps, more appropriately, raise it up in prayer. No pat tragic/comic solutions should be our standard inside this aesthetic: nothing unearned or preemptive, the literary equivalent of suicide. Letting God have the last word. The atheistic postmodern standard seems to be no easy answers, but how many of those artists actually commit suicide in either the comic or tragic way? What other choice do they have?

After all, the satisfying resolution should still at least be entertained as a possibility, right? Committing suicide--comically or tragically--is for people who believe God is dead. Shouldn't the truly religious writer be more able to fully plumb the postmodern depths?

I guess what I'm saying is that postmodernism isn't a new thing.

And that--once all its internal inconsistencies have been ironed out--it is not anything Catholicism can't comprehend within its all-comprehending schema. In fact, I'd say that Catholicism set the stage for this in the same way that it set the stage for modern science, the university, and so many other "progressive" developments. That many of its proponents style themselves as antagonistic to belief systems that posit truth claims is irrelevant. But perhaps we get some chastening out of the deal: we are so much more that a set of truth claims to be believed.

Thus, the John Henry Cardinal Newman prayer: "in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him...He knows what He is about." Postmodernism is about perplexity. Our job is not to pave over perplexity out of preemption or a false sense of piety, but to let our perplexity serve him.

The Commodiousness of that Frame

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 July 2014.

That move that the Oxford movement made back toward orthodoxy in religious matters did not seem to hinder them in being active participants in modernism. But they did not try to create religious art. Many, like Graham Greene, rejected that description.

T.S. Eliot

The word "art" comes from a root meaning "to fit together, to join." In that word, we hear the collective wisdom of the ages denoting art as something that attempts to make coherent the miscellanea of its raw materials. Churches are now, at the risk of sounding irreverent, mere ingredients of that miscellaneous mass. That statement seems to run afoul of something you warned against at an earlier point: "postmodernism triumphing over Catholicism."

I assert that Catholicism will continue to be the most comprehensive, most overarching frame.

"Catholic" means "universal" or "according to the whole." Unlike most insipid, ill-conceived Christian art and music, Catholicism comprehends everything, admits anything as datum, believes fully in the eschatological reality of God as "All in All." The bottom line is that I don't consider there to be a war between modernism/ postmodernism and Catholicism.

Rather, I believe that Catholicism itself opened the door to these developments.

The reason why 20th-century attempts at Catholic liturgical and ecclesial art did not "work" (and I'm not speaking of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Green, T.S. Eliot, et al) is because those "artists" latched onto the seeming content of those movements, without understanding that the breakthrough was a growing disinterest in content. The orthodox development to me is an acceptance of the fact of right relationship with God--not wanting that to be anything different, just contemplating things as they are (not unlike Paul's admonition in 1 Corinthians 7).

Realizing that the mind of God is contained in none of these accidents, contrivances, or novelties, but is instead something that comprehends them all--as in an outermost frame. It is the commodiousness of that frame that encouraged true artists, religious and secular alike, to go beyond the focus on content and toward a consideration of the frame in which content arises and becomes coherent.

In some ways, the artists who were able to make this leap were the ones who had the greater faith. Insipidity comes from an unwillingness to go into the desert--or the wasteland.

This Battle-Tent Mentality

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 21 July 2014.

Anyway, America was not like England.


Where England basically fell apart in the 20th century, America was on the rise.

The very forces that the aforementioned writers predicted would destroy England seemed propel America toward greatness. England's Oxford Movement of the late 1800s, and the writers who were directly or indirectly inspired by it, found strength in returning to Catholicism as much as their Anglicanism would allow. But America was rooted in the values of England's 18th and 19th century: scientific growth, mechanization, keeping God at a safe distance from everyday life.

These values weren't compatible with Catholicism.

And neither was revival-meeting Christianity: it rejected reason as a mode of knowing God. Culturally speaking, Catholicism was a dirty word, bringing up connotations of unwashed masses and the grime of old-world ideologies that could only clog the gears of modernism. So what were Catholics to do? Well, let's look at how three Catholic immigrant groups dealt with asserting a Catholic identity in the face of American modernism.

St. Anthony of Padua Church in South Rockford, Illinois

The Italians, contrary to popular mythology, did not generally come to America with the hope of renouncing their Italian citizenship and becoming modern Americans. Really, most came to this country to make money quickly to either send or bring back home. The intent wasn't to stay in America and become American; it was to go back home and remain Italian. Two things interfered with that plan. One was that the discrimination against Italians made making money very difficult. The other was that when Italians figured out how to make money against the odds, it was a challenge to return home and give up that wealth. The next best thing to returning home in these cases was to try to make little pockets of America as much like Italy as possible. There wasn't a desire to synthesize Old World Italian culture with modern American culture; the idea was to stay Old World as much as possible, which we see in Italian-American church design.

The Germans and the Irish generally came to America hoping to stay.

St. Mary's in Indianapolis, Indiana

The Germans tended to assimilate into American culture much more easily than the Irish did, though. Germans had two strategies: in the midwest and the west, Germans could just set up German communities around their farms which evolved into towns. No neighbors meant no need to assimilate. Just about everybody in Ann Arbor, I hear, spoke German up until WWI, when they realized that they needed to prove how American they were. The strategy in cities tended to be assimilation. Germans came to America with much more of a stake than the Irish. The Irish fled poverty and generally could only dream of returning to Ireland. The Germans had better means and were attracted by the promise of cheap land: more bang for their buck in American than in Germany.

What does all this have to do with Catholic architecture? America was openly antagonistic to the Irish, who generally felt they could only protect themselves through numbers. America was not as antagonistic toward Germans, as Germans tended to either keep to themselves or assimilate and had the money to help grow America's economy. Plus, WASPs understood on some level that the British royal family was German, which gave Germans a bit of a pass.

St. Brigid's in Manhattan, NY

Anyway, the tendency of the Irish was to put up as many churches as they could, regardless of whether or not they could afford them. Churches were a piece of home, places of spiritual comfort, and also big middle fingers to all the oppressors. Lots of Irish churches closed down because the parishes couldn't support them. The attitude was just get them up. The German parishes tended to close down less often because the Germans were thoughtful about money and placement. They would build one church to serve five hundred people instead of five churches to serve a hundred people each, and then they would put money into altar pieces and architecture.

Still, between the poverty of the Irish and the frugality of the Germans, plus the low population density of farm country, most parishes were happy to have a nice little building that looked churchy--they weren't out to create masterpieces. Only the big cities had cathedrals, and anti-Catholic sentiment must have played some role in keeping those cathedrals traditional. I would also speculate that in cities where wealthy Catholics were competing against post-Oxford Movement Anglicans, Catholics may have been trying to out-Catholic the Anglicans! In the small towns, though, I would say that churches were erected quickly and cheaply; they were tents on the battlefield, not castles or palaces.

21st century Midwestern American Catholics inherited a bleak view of Catholic architecture because of this battle-tent mentality.

Our view has been further damaged by growing up after Vatican II--that weird age in which people who hadn't even studied Vatican II used it as an excuse to tear out the organs, remove all the statues, hang up felt banners, and sing "Peace is Flowing Like a River" on acoustic guitar. I think that spirit crippled Catholic architecture in a lot of ways.

Just when Catholics had the means and cultural stability to build castles, we decided both that tents were preferable and that the existing tents were too ornate and old fashioned!

So for the most part, we worshipped in dry wall.

St. Owen

I was fortunate in that I grew up in a wealthy area. My home parish of St. Owen in Franklin, Michigan, is both modern and architecturally interesting. It is definitely a tent, though, by design--a big concrete tent to reflect the nomadic days of Jews and Christians. So it's interesting to me that these wealthy Catholics in a fairly small town (Franklin calls itself "The town that time forgot") created an ultra-modern and expensive church, but one that simultaneously said "we're just sojourners in an alien land."

To do that in concrete is very interesting and may have some connection to the Witkowskis.  I still grew up with the felt banners and the hippie guitars, but I think the church was interesting enough architecturally that I didn't lose faith in the ability of Catholicism to create meaningful and postmodern architecture.  But I find most post-Vatican II American churches uninspiring compared to the great European cathedrals. Maybe I need to see if Monaghan has built anything interesting. I guess that would be the other thing: most wealthy Americans think they have amazing taste. The Medicis, as arrogant as they were, knew to hire the best artists they could.

Sharpening the Clichés

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 21 July 2014.

Our project is more overtly religious than, say, The Great Gatsby, Don Quixote, or A Good Man is Hard to Find, potentially as overtly religious as  Greene's The Power and the Glory or Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and less overtly religious than Everyman.  I don't think we're burying Catholic things, but we are resisting two-dimensionality.

My hope is that the project will draw people closer to God.

I think the question of how overtly Catholic the project works across a spectrum; it's not binary. It might depend on the audience, too. Max's brother complimented us after the show, saying that it took guts to make such overtly Catholic art.  He's an atheist, but he thought the Catholic approach was punk. My aunt, on the other hand, who is a lifelong Catholic, barely caught on to any of the Catholic themes in the performance.

J.R.R. Tolkein

When I think about Greene and Chesterton, I think of the context that created them. They were living in an age when the Anglican church was splitting in two directions: one toward modernism, reducing Christianity to a philosophy and an assertion of Britishness; and the other toward the Oxford Movement, reclaiming the Catholic elements the Church of England had tried to obliterate and pushing toward Christian orthodoxy. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and T.S. Eliot were informed by this tension.

They saw the looming threat of modernism and the ageless beauty of orthodox Christianity and fled to the latter while, for the most part, creating work rooted in the aesthetics of the former. Tolkien tried to root his aesthetic in ancient England, but that wouldn't have happened without modernism's influence. Chesterton's writing style leans toward the Victorian, but I see a lot of modernism in his use of absurdity in The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Man Who Was Thursday.  Even Orwell, who was not religious, went halfway, cataloging the latent horrors of modernism. But England was an old country; even "modern" London was built during America's colonial days.

These writers saw a grand old country on the brink of collapse.

Consequently, they felt assured in the "master craftsmen" who revitalized the Church of England with an infusion of medieval Catholicism, both of the philosophical and architectural sorts. But in their own art, they broke a lot of new ground; I would call it art rather than craft.  I do think they found very innovative ways to sharpen the clichés of the ways people think about faith and the modes writers use to spur such thought. It seems paradoxical that the architecture of sacred buildings moved toward medieval craftsmanship while Catholic and High Anglican artists managed a number of innovations as writers. Eliot especially is generally considered the greatest poet of modernism.

In an ideal world, I'd like to pull off Chesterton's whimsy, Graham Greene's sense of the modern spiritual desert, and Eliot's ability to create thoroughly Christian art using the language of his age.

A Modern Sistine Chapel

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 July 2014.

Why isn't the project overtly religious?

Not because we don't believe in God, but because we do believe more and more in a God-with-us. In past centuries, the religious topics were a fitting challenge for art. In our age, they are a cop out.

How so?

Why is a Cathedral, fresco, statue, or stained-glass window no longer the opportunity for a great work of art? While I rejoice at the renewal of orthodox concepts in Catholic architecture, sculpture, iconography, stained glass, these no longer provide a fitting frame for great art.

A religious theme used to be a mind-blowing opportunity for an artist. The whole world showed up to see. It was a frame ready-made for universal significance.

Now, people are generally more aware of the frame, the conceit, the motive, the contrived occasion or excuse for a work of creation. People are focused on that moment when a work of art hollows out the space it will occupy.

Why is a Cathedral, fresco, statue, or stained-glass window almost certainly not going to be an opportunity for breaking new ground? Is it due to our shortcoming or our strength that we no longer look to find art in those places? Would a modern Sistine Chapel--were such a thing possible--help us or hold us back spiritually? It now seems that a modesty of artistic ambitions is appropriate for a sacred space.

And one of the first gestures of that modesty is eschewing the term "artist." The best modern churches would be made by master craftsmen, not artists. I believe there is such thing as a sacred craftsman; I'm not sure I believe in the possibility of a sacred artist, one who works within an overtly religious or liturgical frame. I don't know why that is yet...it just seems to be the way things are. Is God slowly weaning us of graven images? Are we more able to worship "in spirit and in truth"? Or am I unwittingly giving voice to latent Puritanical proclivities I possess as an American?

If sacred art can no longer happen in a sacred space, where does it happen?

Is there any metaphor for leaving the cool confines of the Church and going out into the wilderness, coming back with something prophetic? Yes, the Eucharist is "the source and summit of the Christian life," but so much of what is arrayed around our altars is either a decent approximation of what has come before, or mediocre, or just awful. None of it is art. And ironically, much of it is awful in direct proportion to its ambition to be great.

I would go as far to say that John Paul II's "Letter to Artists" is not addressed to people making even the best of these aesthetical works. Obviously, musical and visual works still enliven our liturgies, but I wouldn't say it's art, at least in the sense that I understand that concept. What am I missing?

And where does our project fit in?