Will Will

The following is an excerpt of an October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

In all our messing with nomenclature and in all my years living with my own name, we've never thought of "Will" as a future helping verb.

Art:

How about when Farthington can't control Will he creates a clone of him called Will Will (helping and main verb). Maybe this is what is in Steffi's womb, although I'd always imagined that one being female (perhaps male/female monozygotic twins?). Maybe this is another reason a raging Will follows Farthington into the tunnels. Modernity enthrones the enfeebled will at the center of its moral law. 

Will should only be a helping verb; modernity tries to make it both helping and main verb. 

One of the twins dies. Does the other become the inarticulate monster?

Will:

So, I am conflicted on the saline avenger. 

My pro is that terrible topics are important to cover, especially in a project that seems to be a mock grand unifying theory of postmodernisty. 

My con is that for some reason, I have never lost my faith in the idea that at some point, this story will actually take some conventional narrative form and be told, and at that point, the saline avenger, if we aren't completely past the tipping point of holding an audience already, completely dumps us over. I know I've always said I want to work within the influence of a morality play, but I still like shaded, complex, mimetic characters. I worry that we keep flattening out everybody. 

Who knows. But there's no reason why Will Will can't just be a girl, who I suppose leaves the cryptic message "WILL WILL" in blood on walls.

Art:

Pulled in two opposite directions then... 

You want our narrative to take a more conventional form (a flattening, rationalizing, dehumanizing impulse). Your original, Everyman-inspired allegorical impulses might be classed with this as well. Deus ex machina too. 

But you also want nuanced, mimetic, irreducible characters (a deepening, irrationalizing, humanizing impulse). 

We've defined postmodernism the synthesis of these two. One way we've conceptualized it is clear, straightforward narratives told by unreliable narrators! 

Is that scaffolding robust enough? 

Carrie, the Stephen King movie, is great for this. All the nuance of modernity is finally judged by a pre-modern God, who is PISSED OFF. It's one of the most dialectically satisfying moments in film. Similar to the tension in Antigone between the younger Olympian gods of Creon and the older chthonic gods of Antigone. Hilarity ensues when the older gods wake up from their slumber and get pissed off by all the silly modern antics for which they have no context, understanding, or compassion! 

Although it's a piss-poor movie, the scene in Prometheus where the Weyland wakes up the engineer gives a similar pleasure: old gods waking up and KILLING EVERYONE!!!