Of Course!

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


"Eric Garner Protest Chicago Dec 4 2014" by Samantha Lotti - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Probably going to lay off a little with everything happening in the news lately.

I was honestly confused about the whole Ferguson thing, but this Eric Garner thing has got me messed up. Seems pretty tone deaf to be a couple white guys singing about Iceland. This stuff is turning me into a prolife liberal, two things that belong on the same side of the ideological spectrum (#blacklivesmatter). With all due respect to our police, our country still can't help but show its true character. Maybe the more educated among us are better at covering it up. But collectively are we still channeling the spirit of the slave owner, the klansman, etc? At the very least we are living inside some powerful narratives.

And here we are: a couple white guys singing about Iceland. But is our message at all relevant to any of these particulars happening in the world today? I'm not doing this out of a sense of guilt so much as a desire to engage a conversation of consequence. Like Marvin Gaye sang, What's going on? What's happening brother? What's been shaking up and down the line?

Like Yeats' "Easter 1916," I'm not interested in writing rallying cries for some movement, however valid that movement may be.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.

I want life in all its richness and complexity. But the project can become involuted.

Does it matter that Arthur White's name is White? Does it matter that he's attempting to play black music? Does it matter that we invoke the history of Detroit, its industries, its white flight, its riots? Does it matter that Stan paved over Blackbottom?

And do any of these things reflect on the current state of America today?

Like Heart of Darkness pre-Chinua Achebe, we've primarily interpreted this story through an archetypal/psychoanalytic lens (Nietzschean, Jungian, Campbellian, etc.). Our non-white, non-male characters have been underdeveloped at best. I'm honestly not sure what they are at worst--I'm sure Chinua Achebe could tell us.

But is the Iceland fantasy some kind of definitive white flight?

Is Arthur White postcolonial literature?!

As a country, we see ourselves bringing human rights to the people of the world. But how can we do that on the foundation we've built, paving over people and cultures in the process?

As Claudius prays in Hamlet:

My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder...
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?

Can we be pardoned when we are still the beneficiaries of our crime? Of course we'll stop doing it once we've accomplished the goal--taking over the land and becoming the world's superpower.

We are still "possessed of those effects."

I think I have a pretty good idea about what Chinua Achebe would say about Carlton Farthington, the Burmese-born, Oxford-educated, Dionysian figure! He's Arthur's encounter with that inarticulate wildness, of course! He helps Arthur get in touch with his own inarticulate wildness, of course! And break free from the whitewashed, Apollonian tomb represented by Will Witkowski, Western Civilization, the American Dream, Manifest Destiny, of course!

And helps him see the fiery heart of that iced-over reality, of course! And descend into the primordial abyss past prehistoric monsters, of course!

It's the only way Arthur can face up to these realities, of course!

And meanwhile, people are dying in the streets of America, of course.

Of course!