A Polylogic Epistolary Novel

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 13 April 2015.

Christ on the Cross with Mary, John and Mary Magdalene

Allison,

I'm looking forward to reading your thesis. Thanks for sharing that!

I concur with Will that you should structure things whatever way you want. One of the preoccupations of the project is a McLuhanish concept of how different modes of communication influence the message ("the medium is the message," but not quite as much of an equation in our case). For me, my communications have included

• Emails with Will
• Voice-to-text transcriptions of messages left on Farthington's voicemail
• Text-to-voice transcriptions of The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas
• mp3s of song fragments
• YouTube videos of song ideas (one while eating a bowl of cereal)
• Open letters to Philip Glass and Iceland (the latter in Icelandic as rendered by Google Translate)
• Google+ Hangouts with Will

Like you, I think I "understand it for the most part," and I strive to communicate my understanding inside each of these modes of communication. The effort involved in trying to explain myself to others is salutary, both to the project and to me personally. I choose the one that seems to get me closest to expressing the truth, a collision between the facts of my current situation and the transcendent vision I imagine. Actually for a while there, my main mode of expression was Farthington's voicemail, calling on my way home from work or while walking around with Francis. While that medium might not have made for the most exciting blog posts, it did deepen my understanding of the project.

Of course, we can also take into account all sorts of human considerations: insecurities, perplexity, compulsivity, constraints--all of these influence the mode of communication. There are times when I can't play music, times when I can't sit down at the computer, times when something is broken, times when I don't have time, times when I force the issue. Going along with the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return (The Return of Arthur White, after all!), I've tried to wall myself up in those moments and circumstances and not go out to some transcendent horizon where I will have all the tools at my disposal. I think we try to make whatever utterance we are capable of making, communicating with one another the best we can. Trying to make it as good and coherent as possible, of course, but not waiting for anything like clarity.

And I can't quite wrap my words around what I'm saying here...but with all due reverence...this is how the project can in some way participate in the mystery of the cross.

I'm thinking along the lines of the seven last words of Christ: continuing to speak words of that strive at meaning, recognizing but never acquiescing or capitulating the limits it encounters. Something in the collision of those two antitheticals is the "goal" of the project. I think this is not unlike what you discovered in writing your thesis: "I wrote the piece not unlike the blog as a reflection of my own grappling with my identity and significance, which I eventually concluded is inherently meaningful in its own end."

Another critical aspect of the project is that it is dialogic.

The Principles of Theory was written as a series of emails between me and my friend at U of M, [NAME REDACTED]. It wasn't until I reconnected with Will again that the project came back into existence. It does not exist as a monologue. I say that we're working on a kind of postmodern epistolary novel. And now we're moving from it being a dialogic epistolary novel to it being a polylogic epistolary novel.

As far as your audience, that's just us for the most part. But I think you can imagine other audiences...more in that transcendent dimension that refuses to acquiesce to limits it encounters. For example, my Twitter account is basically where I have been trying to engage the people of Iceland, following them and tweeting at them and using the hashtag #Iceland and #ConcertforIceland. This is still very much in its early stages because I haven't had much time to devote to it. To fully engage that audience serves as a counterfeit of communication, one of several abysses into which our varied characters can fall.