What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 5 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

16. We liberate these demons through prayer. Andre (and Hasidism) knows whaddup. Prayer can rightfully mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people, of course, but to me prayer is a way of decisive living punctuated by constant inquiry. Am I acting lovingly and gratefully to everything I encounter today? Am I accepting, supportive, and patient in all of my interactions? Am I listening to all that's being communicated with me? Am I trying my best? Am I nurturing the uprooted and nourishing the firmly planted? Am I living the truth? In asking ourselves these questions and, ultimately, in being on the side of light and life, we are actively fighting our demons and offering a hand to our brothers and sisters in fighting their own. For what these demons desire and require from us in order to thrive is first and foremost oblivion. In resisting detection, it's unlikely to be challenged. If detected, the demon's aim is to lure us into a spiritual state so despondent that we stop seeing ourselves as the mystical body of Christ and instead see ourselves as in the image and likeness of the devil.

20. (Excuse my wonky numbering) However! to look upon this horror and utilize our repulsion to propel us closer to God is the most brutal form of attack against this demonic presence. And because I can't possibly stress it enough, the way in which we utilize this repulsion is through daily positive intent, humility, determination, patience, love, and personified prayer. Each failure to extend these virtues into our daily interactions is, of course, a victory for the devil, but each of these victories is squandered when reconfigured as a breadcrumb like blessing that guides us back to our path. I say (wrote) "All our lives it will be like this" because there is no earthly end; in place of an ending there are only endless opportunities for new beginnings. Cast off your disdain and you'll see that it's not the end, but only a disguise for a welcoming celebration (Rumi). We must, again, remember that life is a procession, that "to be" is "to grow," and the only way to grow (toward heaven) is to remain on our path or be in the process of making it back to the path. We are of one phase and of all phases. Evil propels us and reform of evil desire propels us.
21. God does not expect, nor does He desire, for us to come to Him with the answers. He merely asks for us to make ourselves worthy of receiving them someday by living our lives as learners, not as knowers. It's here that we again get a glimpse into the understanding that every struggle and failure is indeed a blessing. Our weaknesses, our sufferings, our impatience, our wandering—these are each, in their own little ways, our teachers, our guides from beyond. It's my belief that we make ourselves worthy not in a solemn and steady procession toward death, but rather in a joyful and hopeful procession through death. It's only in dying in this life that we can ever hope to find eternal life in the next one.
22. I've a letter's length to expound on "bringing religion to schools."

That, and more, up next! Liza

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon." - Mizuta Masahide

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 4 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

14. Onward to my next miscommunication. I did NOT in fact interpret "devil" to mean "enemy." Not by any means. I understand the demons of which you speak. I was merely trying to outline the preliminary steps in combating them: recognizability of their pervasiveness, perspective, patience, and love. Step 1, as I mentioned, is to recognize them in others. In recognizing them, my suggestion was to love these people nonetheless. The implication in my last letter was not that our enemies are the demons; I rather meant to imply the fluidity spectrum of ethical existence, as well as to bring light to the inherent connection weaving its way beneath us, above us, and through us on a constant loop. It's through this understanding that I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE AS YOU ARE ME AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER that we're able to humanize and love even the most corrupt and brutally inhumane. It's through this understanding that we take collective responsibility over our actions and our brothers'/sisters' actions with equal investment. Whether young or old, moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly, kind or cruel, intelligent or vapid, we must not only recognize the divine in our earthy brothers and sisters, but it's paramount that our simultaneous gaze is on the demonic and mortal within them, as well. This, of course, extends to ourselves, too. (Note: back to Ubuntuism). EVERY ATOM BELONGING TO OURSELVES AS GOOD, AS BAD BELONGS TO ALL OF US. THE HAND OF GOD IS THE PROMISE OF OUR OWN. THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS THE SPIRIT OF OUR OWN. ALL THE MEN EVER BORN ARE ALSO MY BROTHERS, AND THE WOMEN MY SISTERS AND LOVERS. AND THAT IS KELSON OF CREATION IS LOVE.
15. It's through Whitman's lens that our eyes may reveal to our hearts the understanding not only to guide us back toward our path but to become agents of guidance ourselves for the least of our brothers and sisters who mistook the earthly path we've paved ourselves with gold for the heavenly path that's been paved through the dirt for us from above.
16. Art, you mentioned in your last e-mail that the souls of Trump and Gilber are still in play, though you were referencing actual demons. The point I was attempting to make in my last letter and am now attempting to clarify in this letter is that these two, to me, are interchangeable; their souls have been darkened by this irredeemable devil you've referenced. Gilbert (so all of us) darkness, for instance, is personified by the presence of this inner-demon. Whether he surrendered the battle long ago from exhaustion, or whether he's been oblivious of its presence from the beginning, it's clear that Gilber does not have control over his demonic side. Rather, he is controlled by it. It's my understanding that we all have some sort of negative spirit or demon within us. (Side note: Have any of you read Martin Buber's On Hasidism and/or seen My Dinner with Andre? There's this point in the dinner conversation when Wally's just described acting alongside a Czech in a previous play. He explains the reverence with which this actor viewed the performance, as if it were a sacred event. This reverence extended past his individual role in the play, extending itself in the form of respect to each of his fellow actors. Andre, Wally's sole dinner companion, interjects and lays on the Buber: He relates this Czech man's personhood to the Hasidic idea that every moment is to be sacramentalized. You see, the Hasidics believe that there are spirits chained in everything. In you, in me, in the inanimate objects surrounding us. The act of praying, Buber writes (and Andre says), is how we liberate these spirits. This, Andre suggests, is why every action of ours ought to be lived as a prayer, a joyful sacrament. Andre opines this is an uncommon way of living because abstaining from such mindfulness is how we cope with our realities in the world, he says and I agree, that were most of us to confront our actions, we'd find our existences far too nauseating to endure.)

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 3 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

10. (Continued) You yearn for brotherly, for sisterly love. You yearn to love others and you yearn to fulfill your earthly potential, seeing it for what it truly is: a gift from the heavens. To yearn for these things, no matter at the moment, signifies, to me, that your path remains illuminated through your unrelenting faith. Having seen the path so clearly at all, you suffer from anguish each time you realize your actions, thoughts, as well as the corrective actions and thoughts of humanity, have again lead you and all of us away from it. (note: revisit Ubuntuism in next letter--"I am because you are.") I think the foundation and frequency of your self-judgments reveal how deeply your faith has seeped into your essence. To exist as a Catholic is to follow the rules through your actions because that's what you're told to do. Generally, these existences are founded and dictated on guilt, fear, and obligation; their existence as Catholics preceded their essence as Catholics. To be Catholic in essence (correction: your faith hasn't "seeped into your essence," it is your essence) is to organize your very being not around these "rules," but through them through you. It is to feel your faith, not just act out your faith. It is to suffer with mind, body, soul, to feel the failure so deeply that it becomes a part of you. This is a tremendous blessing, you see, but it is and can only remain a fruitful blessing when balanced with the following understanding: habitual failing does not define us as permanent failures. We must love both ourselves and one another in our successes and most importantly we must love both ourselves and one another through our failures. We must be kind; we must be patient. Though it's of great importance that we're always aligned with our path or in the process of making our way back toward it, it's perhaps of even greater importance that we acknowledge the impracticality of never stumbling at from it all. This sounds like a lazy and self-interested approach to personifying our faith, yes, but once again I will ask you to exercise your patience with me as I sift through this rubble I've created in search of a treasure worth sharing.
11. We must strive for perfection with all of our body and all of our soul, but we must do this with the understanding that we will never reach perfection on this earth. What is life if not a journey toward perfection? Take the Sanskrit root for "to be" for instance. bhū́ → भू. Did you know it's the same as the root of "to grow" and "to dwell on Earth (not in Heaven)"? Did you know that's the meaning of this life? I can't stress enough how much this being human is a process, and a trying one at that. Each of us is no more than a work in progress, or as my boy Rumi says, a guest house. And, like that, I've found my next point or rather it's found me. Why I say your faith is "unrelenting." Why I say you've seen the face of God and now you must live in separation from it.
12. So these "failures" to be patient, loving, and kind are agents of personal (and collective) growth. They're in our lives to illuminate our routes back to our paths. To revisit Rumi once more, EACH OF THESE FAILURES HAS BEEN SENT AS A GUIDE FROM BEYOND! Entertain them all. I was by NO means referring to you as a conservative, Art. Nor was I referring to myself as a radical. I found the essays meaningful, and thought they related nicely to something or other at the time. Sorry for the miscommunication though it seems as though you ultimately benefited from it by replacing the presumed periods with open-ended question marks. In Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Have you read/re-read it yet, Will?), he writes of how we all enter school as question marks and leave school as periods. I both love and despise this observation and it's through this love and through this hate that I welcome any moment that stirs us from the tranquil comfort of the period of thinking we have tried the answers. There's a danger in comfort→danja, danja, high voltage!

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 2 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

5. But, of course, we frequently feel called to explain our beliefs, for we exist in a civilization in which existence is characterized by disbelief, skepticism, cynicism, ironic self-detachment, and so on. To that, I write this: To believe in something fiercely enough to defend it in the face of persecution, laughter, and cruel judgment is half the battle's triumph already. But that's only the good news. The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news is that the other half of the battle is far more grueling; this half will be plagued by constant failure, punctuated with frequent doubts, and will wound us beyond recognition. It's this half of the battle in which we must transmute our internal into the external realities of our day to day lives.
6. Let's lighten the tone a bit, shall we? Moving onto this next Roman numerated point hints at progress already, though not because the murky waters are behind us. Rather because the murky waters are all around us, yet here we still are paddling on nonetheless. We've not yet drowned, and I assure you of our safety in staying afloat as long as we each remember: none of us are perfect, nor will we ever be.
7. There will, of course, be many times in which our actions veer from the path made straight by our beliefs. And Art, you're absolutely right. Burning bridges, habitual impatience, the inability to personify the values our beliefs set forth for us are all, indeed, wayward of our path. However, I included the "Life in the Womb" excerpt in my last note in hopes of emphasizing this point exactly. (key words: in hopes). Yes. We will fail my friends. Yes, at times we will act in discordance with our beliefs. Yes, we will most certainly sin during this lifetime despite our greatest efforts not to. Yet, what matters most, we must try all the same. In remembering our earthly imperfections, we must renew our hope through the understanding that we will never fail nor fall to depths too deep to ascend. The path will always be waiting to welcome us back to our motorized home upon it, so long as our beliefs resist eviction from their permanent home within.
8. I can't stress enough how much this being human is a process, and a trying one at that. Each of us is no more than a work in progress, or as my boy Rumi says, a guest house. And, like that, I've found my next point or rather it's found me. Why I say your faith is "unrelenting." Why I say you've seen the face of God and now you must live in separation from it.
9. I say the above no because in O'Connor's words you "lead a holy life." I say this instead to highlight how cognizant you are that you do not. You don't claim to be a saint. You remain grounded in humility because you recognize the struggles. And what is more, you recognize the frequent failures within these struggles. I say this because you see your failures as failures and you yearn to make them right. You yearn for God's love.

In Atlas's globe: 

Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably.

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 1 of 10)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

1. I keep a notebook with me at all times. I keep it close for a variety of reasons, but mostly I carry it with me so that I may be all the more able to immerse myself in moments through momentary separation from them. Understanding comes most freely to me when I participate through observance, which means my writing process can most accurately be described as a whirlwind of quick scrawls and a headache of long decodings once my notebooks have been filled. I tell you this only to document the end of my Keweenaw notebook, and in documenting its ending shine a ray of light onto this letter's beginning. For upon browsing through my notebook this morning, I noticed that 8 of its pages are filled with wayward trains of thought that are each, in their own disconnected ways, fragmented responses to your most recent messages. Another discovery of note: I return to school, both as student and teacher in 7 days. On this discovery I'll not now elaborate, for I know all to well my teardrops' effects on black fountain pen ink.
2. I preface (begin?) my letter this way as I currently sit sagging in a haze of confusion, dread, and discouragement, etc. etc. How to impose linear order on my notebook's web of chaos? How to make a peaceful exodus from the stillness of the inner garden and imminently reacclimate to the surrounding distractions and mechanical realities of life in Detroit? How am I to be a creative agent, to resist adaptation to this environment in favor of changing it? (More on this artivism + Louise Glück's poetry in my next letter)
3. Secondary (or perhaps tertiary) explanation for divulging this information: clarification only comes through explanation, communication, conversation, and expression. The advice I most frequently share with my students is to pick up the nearest utensil, put it to the nearest (*appropriate) surface, and see what happens. "There's no wrong way to make," I say. So, I suppose I'll take my own advice now and begin writing to see what I make. I suppose I've already begun.
4. Regarding an explanation or a rationalization for belief: I think it's perfectly acceptable to believe in our feelings, bankrupt of reasoning as they may be; an inability to articulate our reasoning does not cheapen our beliefs, but in effect strengthens them. I frequently can't transmute my feelings into thoughts & I've slowly learned it's often best this way. To me, these feelings that can't be explained away  are those rooted deepest in our souls and therefore those requiring least explanation. Why? The language of the soul is spoken in a tongue indecipherable to the mind, untranslatable to words even.

Read First

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with  the original photo. The best way to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

This letter has been finished since the first week in September, but the return to school has put a lull in the finishing touches I wanted to put on it prior to sending it off.

Finishing touches = COLOR HIGHLIGHT & SKETCH SHARPENING. The important stuff.

Last night, while beginning a new letter in response to these most recent e-mails, I wrote briefly about the WABI-SABI aesthetic in the context of technological detoxes, or sabbaths as they've come to be call. Wabi-sabi = in short, the Japanese art of flawed beauty, simplicity, nature's profundity. There I sat at my desk—anxious at best, stressed at worst—beginning a new letter before finishing the previous letter. Anxious and stressed, that is, until my questioning illuminated the answer at the heart of ZEN = ZAZEN.

I've decided to bring these principles to my letter writing predicament. Though far from finished in design and though I feel physical pain at the thought of sharing something pre-completion and pre-manifestation of vision, I am sharing it all the same.

Such is the wabi-sabi way, finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete.

Microcosmic of the transiency of this whole being human thing and frequently mentioned in this second most recent letter, I now grant you permission to have a fragmentary glimpse at something long after it was finished for you but far before it was ready for you.

Squirming in unease though I grow nonetheless,

Liza

P.S. I'm feeling increasingly squirmish at the thought of not adding color to this note, or of not erasing my pencil marks, at not finishing my drawing. The struggle is reality.

2-Year Plan

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to Will on 7 September 2015.

I do think I came up with something for "Old Habits Die Hard." If you can, send me the lyrics again and I should be able to put it together.

My year is shaping up to be quite a bit busier than expected. I wanted to float the following idea: start the recording July 4, 2016. Have someone take high contrast black-and-white photos, film everything. In short, get as many artifacts out of it as possible.

I want our core group to be totally ready to play the songs well at that point. I may want to just use what I've recorded on keyboard as a spine and have you guys record your parts, then me come in and do the vocals.

At any rate, that's not the main point. The main point is that I don't want what we do next year to be the finished product. I want to take that raw recording and meditate on it for the following year. Then, I'd like to find the remaining pieces and return to the studio in summer 2017. At that point, we'd have identified lead guitarists, background vocalists, keyboardists, horn sections, etc. to add the finishing touches.

Now, we could put out whatever we do summer 2016, saying it was the raw unfinished takes from that Joe Lazarus collaboration--the Joe Lazarus tapes. And now, with the permission of the Arthur White estate and/or Joseph Lazarus III, we're trying to fully realize those recordings. Actually, that might facilitate some actual participation via the blog and social media--inviting feedback, suggestions. Would-be collaborators could upload videos of guitar solos, etc.

So I'm liking that 2-year plan, and now that I'm thinking about it, it might be a perfect opportunity to finally allow our audiences to participate in something: the 2016-to-2017 process of working up the songs.

And maybe we could use that as a way to earn some money for that next session. Make it available on Bandcamp for "whatever you want to pay" and by buying the 2016 tracks on Bandcamp, you've preordered your copy of the 2017 album.

Old Habits Die Hard

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 7 September 2015.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, 10 May 1813

Here are the words to "Old Habits."

As always, feel free to change them. The only thing essential to the song is the idea that the song is cyclical--it needs to end where it begins. I can't remember if I told you, but it seems especially fitting now--the lyrics are based on a chain email that went around a lot during the Bush years. I'm not sure why it's less popular under Obama, but I'm sure it's his fault. Thanks, Obama.

Anyway, it's based on a cool theory that has been misattributed since the days of print. I've attached a Snopes article on it; they seem to have cut their research into the history of the piece's publication beyond the last few decades. It seems fitting in the context of the album and the project that the song features the wisdom of a made-up person that has been passed down for at least two hundred years without ever properly citing any sources. Ostensibly, it gets passed down because people remember that one newspaper article they read, which turns into that one radio story they heard, which becomes that one magazine article they can't find, etc. Maybe Slender Man wrote it originally.

Here's another exposé with more of the older history.

Old Habits Die Hard

Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray
Found the strength
To break free
Forged a path
Of liberty
Grew our home
Our way of life
Forgot the days
Of pain and strife
When others fell
We let them be
They didn’t work
As hard as we

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

And then the bills
Kept rolling in
We’d lost our sense
Of discipline
We looked for help
At any price
Easily
Absorbed advice

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

For anything
We’d get for free
Relinquished our
Autonomy
Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray

Old habits die hard. x 4

We Go Medieval on the Seventies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.

Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.

Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.

We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."

Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.

At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.

Geographically Confused

The following is an attachment sent from Liza to the group on 4 September 2015.

Our Ongoing Occupation for Eternity

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 4 September 2015.

I actually mentioned this way back when about how Instagram is really a Baudrillardian phenomenon in which we simulate bygone eras indefinitely (McLuhan would say that we "caress" them). We create digital photos that look like the ones in our parents' photo albums.

I have to first of all say thanks Liza for sharing your Keweenaw adventure. I have to admit I started to feel some severe Baudrillardian vertigo when I saw that picture that you posted of your parents basically looking exactly the same as you and Connor. In fact, I thought it was you two until I scrolled down to the caption. I think I was already experiencing that vertigo as you posted so many pictures that looked like they came from the 60's or 70's—but somehow better and realer than any "authentic" photos from that era (some of the pictures of the sky for instance). Add to this that all your reading materials and sentiments seemed to fit the bill as well, and the simulation was complete. Also add to this the fact that many of the photos themselves involved reflections, photos within photos, or duplications of earlier photos.

And then I thought about the project and why we all are doing this. The Baudrillardian answer is pretty bleak: something to the effect that we are more comfortable resuscitating moribund time periods, experiences, movements, principles, and sentiments than we are experiencing our own. We get to simulate an encounter with reality that is long gone and that has been gutted of its essence, its inarticulate horror, its immediacy and danger (not saying that's what you're doing, by the way, more the project).

I'm reminded of a passage from Heart of Darkness:

When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks.

According to the passage, the formless horror is still there beneath the surface. Or have we permanently extinguished the horror of immediacy and survival, suffocating it under layers of these densely knit pixels? I've heard that certain tribes refuse to have their pictures taken, believing the camera will steal their souls. What happens when we take pictures of everything?

Another question that comes up is the opposite: what happens when we renounce the satellite, eschew social media, and just "live"? McLuhan says the satellite provides a new environment wherein we will "sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form." Would we even have consciousness of our world and experience and being as art without the perspective of the satellite? It might be impossible to know, but it's interesting that people sometimes go on social media fasts or partial social media fasts. Liza, I think you went on a partial fast, but it may not have been enough to answer the question. Arguably, the Instagram satellite—and a little of the gmail satellite—provided you the requisite perspective to make art of the terrestrial artifact.

Education is really trying to push this environment now. Instead of telling kids to "turn it in," we're supposed to say "publish it" i.e. to their blog, tumblr, eportfolio, etc. I read one thing that struck me as somewhat shocking. Paraphrasing here, but the person said that if something isn't published online, it didn't happen. I'm taking it out of context somewhat, making it sound a lot more malevolent than it was intended, but that still sounds pretty weird.

It makes me wonder about people like Emily Dickinson, who expressly ordered her sister to burn all her poems. Her sister didn't, but what if she had? Would those poems have been any less precious? Would my own trip to the U.P. have been any less precious if I had walled it up in total silence instead of documenting it extensively through Instagram and Facebook, that is, if I had lived entirely in the utter perspectival collapse of a human relationship, a relationship with nature, a relationship with God?

Would it, taking the perspective of my vaguely remembered photo-phobic tribes, have been spiritually better? Because it seems like we should still have things that are just between us and other, us and nature, us and God. When our dying draws that curtain between us and our fellows and family, will we be ready for that profound aloneness? Will the transcendent dimension of the satellite have prepared us for that encounter? Does the satellite help us to live and love more or less soulfully?

In a world without God, it would seem that we would need to create our own transcendent dimension from which to make sense of our lives. Right now, our transcendent environment is that of the satellite, which allows us to become conscious of ourselves and the content of our lives as art. So the goal is not to get out of the cave toward some definitive light, but to continually be "getting behind" the current content, giving ourselves the environment whence to caress, mold, and pattern it.

In the absence of God, that "getting behind" might need to be our ongoing occupation for eternity.

Chinatown

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 August 2015.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

Art:

What a great movie. I'd never seen it before and I was interested in it because Baudrillard was interested in it. But I started watching it from the standpoint of some of the things we've discussed in the project.  

What I liked about it was how J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is such the epitome of that cocky, rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject, and how the vaguely exotic "Chinatown"—though never visited until the final scene—plays the stereotypical role of the inarticulate, fathomless backdrop against which he suffers.  

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a modern Ophelia of sorts, one who has fully plumbed the depths of the formless horror, demonstrated by the fact that she has multiple Chinese servants and a daughter through an apparently consensual act of incest with her father. 

Interestingly, she also has a Oedipal hole in her iris (later, through her eye). Gittes' memories of his own time in Chinatown suggest that he witnessed something—both within and without—that he has since tried to forget. Gittes has tried to "uncollapse" that experience; Evelyn lives within that collapse. 

In short, it's another Nietzschean/Baudrillardian tragedy. And J.J. Gittes reminds me a lot of Will Witkowski.

Will:

Crazy! I just started watching it on Netflix for the first time the other day! Unfortunately, I put it on at 3:30 a.m. and fell asleep while watching it. Time to watch it again! 

Come to think of it, from what I saw, there is also a parallel in the backdrop of at least the beginning, which is that a major metropolis will face total collapse (lack of water). You know, it's San Francisco instead of Detroit, so the crisis is more direct and less interesting than Detroit's looming threat (the lodestone), but still. 

You are right that young Will must have been like Gittes. I wonder what failure after failure would turn Gittes into. 

I think about the idea that the Witkowski family is so vastly important, and that all human beings are so vastly important that Jesus dies for all of us. But then we get all this Horatio Algerian rah-rah pablum all the time about following our dreams and being anything we want and determine your own fate and be a self-made man B.S. and we see ourselves as important for all the wrong reasons and abandon our rightful posts as agents of God's light and wander off into Palookaville with our bindles like we're hot stuff and think we're so important when we're just Goofy slipping on a banana peel. 

And meanwhile, God is still working with us where we're at and we're still so important, even though we're Billy Madison coming down late for dinner after getting into a fight with shampoo and conditioner bottles in the bathtub.