Unhistoric Acts

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 21 June 2016.

The Death of King Arthur by James Archer

I read this today and can't help but share it.

I would like to bring back this focus to the George Eliot idea that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

Also, John D. Rosenberg's notion of Arthur as the “Female King,” who “triumphs over time by never having entered time.”

Also, Eliot L. Gilbert's statement that “history, simply by existing, exhausts possibilities, leaving its readers with a despairing sense of their own belatedness and impotence. And this despair in turn leads to anxious quests for novelty, to hectic avant-gardism, and in the end to an inescapable fin de siècle ennui.”

Gilbert's statement, probably 30 to 40 years old, and in reference to a time period more than a century ago, is even more true today, as the Mary Pilon article illustrates. As she puts it, "Taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, with or without a mug in the frame, is a way for all of us to become our own historians, grasping at tangible evidence of our time on the planet."

I also love the reference to the Susan Sontag essay on the topic, which I think I read back in college:

Sontag wrote that cameras were “predatory weapons,” that they are “fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” The camera, she said, was replacing the gun, “the hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture.”

Nick, the central anxiety in Arthur White then is not “an obscure death,” but rather the fear of being turned into an object, as with screaming characters near the end of Too Many Cooks who have been replaced by their chyrons.

So I love that word ahistorical on a number of levels. One level is the idea that many are, as Nick puts it, “fighting for a space in a world that has no allegiance to them nor their ideas.” As Nick points out,

The newest artist is the most interesting one. The unknown performer is the most sought after. These days, an ideology with the upper hand holds the loser's cards. Weakness is strength; the meek are now inheriting the earth.

The other, perhaps unrelated aspect of ahistoricity is the fact that our posts are made public weeks and even months after the fact, so, in a world of buzz feeds and hot takes, we are at least five subjects behind.

Historicity Destroys Legend

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 10 April 2016.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones

I love aphorisms. Nietzsche is particularly good to read as a collection of isolated aphorisms, most especially at The Nietzsche Family Circus. I also took some inspiration from Liza's cut-outs from The Believer article on the writing style of Roland Barthes. (Wow, that had a lot of subordinate phrases, but that's the reality—frames within frames!)

I've begun to think that it might be fun to do a bunch of aphorisms that are ostensibly taken from a full-fledged text that doesn't exist, such as The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas, or the seemingly more pamphlet-like “What is Knology?” I am especially proud of “Joseph Lazarus is not only the most complete guitarist of his generation, but also the most complete human being,” which is a rip off of Sartre's comments on Che Guevara. How would that have ever come up in the pamphlet (or treatise or interview or feature article) on Knology?

I would love some of the more philosophically trained among you (Allison? Joe?) to start trying to “connect the dots” as to what this philosophy actually is, kind of like what some have tried to do with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which is to try to systematize aspects of their philosophies after the fact due to the often oblique and evasive styles of writing.

Will, your “tons of likes” statement brings me back to an original strategy for the project. We've talked extensively about the significance and importance of likes, favorites, retweets, reposts, embeds, but, as we well know, we get nearly none of those things. And I understand the reason for that, namely, that the posts are too confusing to inspire anyone to mouse over and give us a thumbs up on anything. Not to say that what all of you have contributed hasn't been incredible—it has—it's just the way we frame it makes it hard to contextualize. Plus, we have so little actual existence in the “real” world.

Still, in accepting any of this as an excuse, we've lost sight of the critical aspect of the project, its fundamental and essential donnée.

The project is supposed to show how in our current age, the frame is more important than its contents, the proscenium is more important than the scenium, the smoke is more important than the fire, the echo is more important than the utterance. In fact, the project attempts to take this to the degree where those former things—the antecedents or referents—no longer exist. So many reasons for this that have been discussed ad nauseam and I don't want to get into it all over again.

Will, in addition to a central contributor to the project, you've been pretty much its only groupie. My main point in this email is that we may need more people willing to be groupies, to be frames, to be echo chambers. And I'm going to argue that this groupie-hood should not be based on any quality inherent in the content. It should be groupie-hood for the sake of groupie-hood. Call it groupidity. This is a central precept of Knology. Gotta get that on an inspirational meme soon.

I'm not saying that this should be any of you by the way. Honestly, I appreciate any likes you can give, but I don't want you to give them unless it makes any kind of sense to you. Perhaps, you have some better ideas of how we can cause this to flourish without attempting to endow any further reality to the original, which should remain shrouded in doubt.

Once this dynamic is established, I believe we begin to harness the power of infinite regress, the infinite series of receding images produced by two facing mirrors. I understand the argument that we should strive to make the primary as meaningful, sincere, relevant, interesting, entertaining, engaging, helpful, good, true, or beautiful as possible. But I also argue that's just what they'll be expecting us to do. More importantly, that's missing the whole point—the whole dynamism of the Female King, the Symbolism of Ophelia, the Wisdom of Silenus, the Tunnels within Tunnels, the Restaurant within a Restaurant, and so many others.

It goes back to the idea hinted at throughout Tennyson's Idylls of the King: that of Arthur and Camelot's nonexistence. It is this absence of historicity that makes Arthur—not Richard the Lionhearted—England's enduring image of king.

In other words, anyone looking for an underlying principle in any of this will be disappointed. There is no principle; there's only what comes after. That's why we're always dodging, refusing to go on record, why every narrator is untrustworthy, etc. We're hinting at an absence, a lack. We're trying to get people to stumble across the event horizon of a black hole.

This isn't to say that I don't love all the ideas. I love Liza's zine idea. (I wish we could somehow mass produce “Cartography of the Mind”!) I love Will's podcast idea. I love Nick's journalistic idea. I love the recording idea. I'd love to do as many of those things as possible. That said, I also love Joe's documentary-footage-on-a-dead-computer idea.

Because historicity destroys legend!

My Horn is Exalted

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 22 December 2015.



I'm picking up an old thread regarding achieving success and fame in the context of Christianity. Eschewing any false "prosperity gospel" perspectives, it seems that the Christian is exalted only IN GOD.

I'm looking at today's psalm:

My heart exalts in the LORD,
my horn is exalted in my God.
I have swallowed up my enemies.
I rejoice in my victory.

Only after one has been swallowed up IN GOD—or more precisely, had one's "horn" swallowed up IN GOD—is it exalted. I'm sorry, I've always thought "my horn is exalted" is pretty funny.

And maybe this is too sexual a way of looking at it, but is God the only environment in which we swell, become erect and strong and capable of projecting forth that fructifying seed? Only IN GOD can this life be nourished and flourish into its fullness. Paradoxically, is the point at which we, in turn, are able to swallow up the horns of our enemies? And I don't think this can be thought of a pre-Christian vanquishing of enemies, which would necessitate some malevolent mechanism, an abysmal or toxic womb, vagina dentata, etc. In other words, something antithetical and incoherent with the beneficence that has benefited us.

Yes, bows are broken and the tottering gird on strength, but neither of these mess up the phallic/yonic imagery. The arrows of our enemies remain unbroken and, well, the word gird.

So, we swallow up our enemies in some similarly benevolent sense, nourishing and nurturing them as it were. The victory consists in their enmity being dispersed, defused...made diffuse but allowed to flourish in its inner essence. In the Christian vision, wouldn't those horns also be exalted? Bows broken, but horns exalted. We swallow them up; they gird on strength.

So back to the axiom: my horn is exalted in my God. And this means only in God. This means total self-giving, no guardedness, no prophylactic constraint, no holding anything back. Thus, the watchwords for the Christian artist (or, more precisely, the artist) are prodigality, proliferation, profusion. We pour out the whole alabaster bottle of perfume, keeping none for ourselves, nor even for any charitable purposes (Matt 26:7).

In this environment, the desire for money and fame aren't destroyed, they are just increasingly diffuse, negligible. The desire for money and fame can only solidify in a falsely exalted, frozen state. True exaltation occurs only in an environment of ecstatic love, wherein all falseness melts.

On a somewhat related note, enjoy Klaus Nomi's performance of the aria from Purcell's King Arthur, "What Power Art Thou," in which the Cold Genius is awoken by Cupid and later is forced to acknowledge his power. Incidentally, this was Nomi's last performance before succumbing to AIDS.

What power art thou
Who from below
Hast made me rise
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow

See'st thou not how stiff
And wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold

I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath
I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath

Let me, let me,
Let me freeze again
Let me, let me
Freeze again to death
Let me, let me, let me
Freeze again to death...

The Paralysis of Perfectionism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 14 November 2015.

"Edyrn with His Lady and Dwarf Journey to Arthur's Court" by Gustave Doré

As to the project's trajectory, I agree with everything you've said.

Like you, I want to avoid the paralysis of perfectionism. I want to do what we can do. We're doing that now by emailing like this. But we need to do that with music. I don't want to put too many unnecessary obstacles in our path.

The only thing I would add to your "getting the music out to people as quickly as possible" idea is that I want it to be you, Max, and Father hammering it out instrumentally. For several reasons that we've talked about ad nauseam, I want to recede from all instrumentality, defined as "the fact or quality of serving as an instrument or means to an end." John the Baptist's I must decrease, King Arthur and Camelot's implied nonexistence, etc. I really would like Father to take over on keyboards and have him or John Paul play bass.

I want to facilitate that process so Arthur White can just be the voice crying out.

As I've thought about it some more, I'm open to the July 4, 2016 Joe Lazarus album still. But my openness stems from the idea that it will be you, Max, Father and ideally John Paul at the fore, learning, polishing, and recording the songs. I don't think I'm being a diva in saying I think it behooves the project to have Arthur White remain on the fringes of anything instrumental or otherwise project driven.

So, what I'm thinking of doing is creating that same type of linked set list for the Joe Lazarus album. Then ask Father to learn and develop keyboard parts. I'm not sure you can approach John Paul about participating. I'll try to record a non-drum version (click track at beginning) for you since you can't use Garage Band anymore.

Another part of my openness comes from the thematic material of these songs. I think "Selling My Gold" is especially prescient. The other ones likewise seem to be gaining greater prophetic heft by the day.

Finally and most importantly, we need to keep praying.

A Terrible Beauty

The following is an excerpt of a 28 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at the April in Paris Ball 1957

Will:

I guess another way of putting my concern is that I want the story to be beautiful and uplifting.

Art:

I understand that, but this probably goes along with my Aristotelian/Millerian preference for tragedy. I find works with a clear moral valence—or, worse, an "inspirational" intent—NOT beautiful. Isn't the human being endeavoring against the black backdrop, against impossible odds, beautiful enough? Isn't it the case that the black backdrop provides the occasion for his beauty to shine forth? Isn't this the most inspiring of all pictures, the one that calls us forth out from complacency, blinking in the cold wind of the world? 

I see you as the protagonist, trying to assert your story, to build your foundationless castle. It's like what King Arthur tried to do. But we've found that it only exists as "once" and "future." It only exists in the telling or, better yet, the singing of it. I'm the one who provides that black backdrop most of the time, the chorus roaring moira. You're the hero who needs to keep building, believing, setting things aright, even as you sink down into the morass.

Will:

In your version of Miller, I think Biff has cancer from smoking without his shirt on, got raped in jail, and had his leg ripped off by a vengeful cow and is ashamed of his homemade robotic prosthesis.

Art:

That's so much better than Death of a Salesman. Hold the presses!

Will:

Another way of putting it—Yeats called tragedy a terrible beauty, not terror. The struggle against the black backdrop unites the hero to truth, hopefully...not terror. Good comes from the hero's fall, a messenger survives to tell the tale, and order is restored to the kingdom. If people just get stabbed in the neck no matter what they do, the message is that the universe is blind terror, and Aristotle denounces the art. The movie O comes to mind, in which the writer and director messed with Othello a little too much, undermined the tragic conventions, and created nihilism instead of tragedy.

The Saline Avenger (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 20 September 2015.

Arthur and Mordred by William Hatherell

I'm knocked out by all the brilliant stuff!

I've also been prepping for the Kairos retreat I'm directing starting tomorrow. Please forgive my gap in communication!

So, if the vengeful angel is Will's son, we end up with Will as a dark distortion of King Arthur and his bastard son, Mordred?

If we run with a character as disturbing as you've described, I think we would need a figure of a God 's love in the story who reflects the grace of God more strongly than the vengeful angel reflects Puritanical justice.

That character should probably be Arthur, which I think is a tough move for you, given your relationship with the character. I think I've written all of the miraculous stuff into his character, and you've written all of his foibles! In so many ways, you are nicer to Farthington than you are to Arthur, which I get from playing Will. I can put my shortcomings into Will, but I still don't feel like he's that much like me. I'm not entrepreneurial, brash, or patriotic. You may have a little Puritan modesty going on, which might really be self-deprecation, since anything that makes Arthur an impressive figure might be read as a reflection of you.

What the Lord Hath Made Crooked (Part 6 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.

Hand cramp. Let's give this beast another college try:
In the following passage, Dorothy is writing in response to discouragement: both that og which she finds roots internally and that which finds roots externally. The only thin is to be oblivious, as Peter is, and go right on. And so on I go...

Upon rationalizing general grievances regarding the cleanliness of the communities served by the Catholic workers, Dorothy suspends (or, perhaps detracts/) her thought. In correction, she writes,

"But what am I talking about? Why am I justifying myself and my family? I am ashamed of myself for getting indignant at such criticism. It just goes to show how much pride and self love I have. But it has been hard lately. Not only outside grumbling, but grumbling from within, the criticism, the complaints, the self doubting and questioning, the insidious discontent spread around by a few *- these trials are hard to bear. However, the thing is to bear these trials, these unavoidable trials. Patiently, to take them lightly, not to let them interfere with the work. The very fact that it is hard shows how weak I am. I should be happy, however, to think that God believes in me strong enough to bear these trials, otherwise I would not be having them. Father Lallemant says that we must beware when things are going too smoothly. That is the time when no progress is made.

Oh dear, I am reminded of St. Teresa, who said, "The devil sends me so offensive a bad spirit of temper that at times I think I could eat people up."

"The best thing for being [discouraged]," replied Merlyn "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails you. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."

- (taking a page out of Art's book) The Once and Future King, T.H. White 

Yah Mo Be There

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 27 July 2015.



I have a few more questions that I feel are somewhat final or definitive.

One of the main questions that I've had with the project is whether it is acceptable to introduce yet another rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject to the stage? And, if so, under what conditions is that acceptable or appropriate?

The old struggle against the black backdrop, whether that blackness be oblivion or an actual nonwhite, nonmale cast of thousands. And the recent gambit of "humiliated thought" is a poor excuse for letting another one up on stage. Sartre and Camus were able to get a lot of mileage out of that one (not to mention hooking up with a lot of women way more attractive than they--which may, after all, be the whole point, cf. the whole history of rock and roll).

Is it not rather the case that he should vacate the stage?

He who has supposedly always known his own name and patrilineage, yet has strangely needed to appropriate everyone else's identity as his backdrop and basis.

Have we unconsciously reincarnated this wandering mongrel?

Is this just the old Aristotelian formula that requires the hero to be of a noble or illustrious family, the reason being that it "universalizes" the horror?

Or is this just another aspect of the turbulent reversals? That it isn't appropriate for a hero with no background or basis to be up on stage. In music we've talked about this at length: from Michael McDonald to Justin Timberlake, we've agreed that this is at the very least problematic. We don't need another Oedipus, even if he, like Camus, is able to bear the horror rather than blind himself. We don't need another Hamlet, another Kurtz, another Willy, another Meursault. Screw all of them, myself included.

By seeking to become everything, these figures have become nothing.

I guess a related question would be, do we need to formalize his departure toward Avalon, his disappearance, his entrance into oblivion?

My knee jerk answer is no, he should just leave.

This figure has not built his "castle in the air;" he has built it on the subjugation and objectification of others, on the appropriation of riches--first material, then cultural. Ironically, and as Liza has pointed out somewhere, this has caused him to diminish, to dwindle away to nothing like Kurtz. I would argue that it has paradoxically strengthened the identities of those who have had their cultures subjugated, devalued, usurped, appropriated, and suppressed, such that we are on the cusp of a massive reversal, one which McLuhan (white male--sorry) feared might be violently and overtly suppressed.

We have to look at what we're doing here. Will, you've said you want us to sharpen the clichés and I think it's safe to say that we've not only sharpened them, but also narrowed the field of clichés down to the most essential ones. That's why we're arriving at King Arthur, at Detroit and Iceland, at Dan Gilbert and the Savage Sisters, at the Underachieving Detroit Hipster Guy. That's why our gaze has been drawn inexorably toward black holes, lodestones, hearts of whiteness.

We are brewing up something that should soon be recognizably apocalyptic. We're slouching toward Bethlehem, straining toward Armageddon.

Straining to be worthy of some summit or summative statement: Is is what's being? But is that straining toward summation, that need to unify and universalize all the data of existence, itself the weapon with which Western man has used to subjugate the whole world?

Or is this all just, as Baudrillard might say, the final strategy, that of effacing oneself before the other in order to resuscitate and universalize one's own moribund, degenerate principles (in this case, those of liberalism)?

A Distinctly Feminine Attack on History

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 6 June 2015.

La Liberté Guidant le Peuple by Eugène Delacroix

Regarding social media, I agree with everything that you all have said. I'm not so worried about it anymore.

Reminds me a little of that passage from Walden, where he talks about what's the use of a big, fancy house when the inside hasn't been improved. Of course, our project satirizes this exact phenomenon, the fact that--to a greater and greater extent--this is how we all live our lives, especially now in cyberspace. That the great mass of us are red giants with no inner integrity, all ready to collapse at any moment. Something about that goes along with David Brooks's favorite sociological study (cited in his book The Narcissism Epidemic):

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves a "very important person?" Twelve percent said yes.  By 1990, that number had jumped to a whopping 80% who said, “Yes, in fact I am a very important person.”

I might argue that the number has actually come down in the last 5 years, although I don't have the data for that.

The bottom line is, as with all things in the project, it will happen if the Nietzschean dammed-up lake reaches the requisite depth. What I was doing was flowing away to some imagined destination, longing for Camusian suicide.

On a similar note, I continue to be interested by George Eliot's statement that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts" (cited in "The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse").

As Eliot L. Gilbert goes on to explain,

Such a conclusion follows inevitably from the idea that history, simply by existing, exhausts possibilities, leaving its readers with a despairing sense of their own belatedness and impotence. And this despair in turn leads to anxious quests for novelty, to hectic avant-gardism, and in the end to an inescapable fin de siecle ennui.

The Female King is a solution to this in that he "triumphs over time by never having entered time" (Rosenberg, "Tennyson and the Passing of Arthur"). His "abdication" of the traditional kingly role, his passivity and emasculation invites and initiates a kind of female misrule, a distinctly feminine "massive and very deliberate attack on history," symbolized most strikingly by Delacroix's bare breasted Liberty, "striding triumphantly over the bodies of half-naked dead men" (Gilbert, 58, 70):

The Dionysian guillotine haunted the imagination of Europe; a mechanical vagina dentata, it produced, with its endless emasculation, an unstoppable blood flow, an unhealing menstual wound curiously like the one suffered by the maimed king in the story of the Grail.

Our project considers this sense of impotence and belatedness, and examines the modern notion that oblivion and un-historical acts (suicide?) might be the best gift we can give to our world. In recent decades this has been the subtle (not so subtle?) message of the environmental movement as well. And yet, our faith tells us that we are ends in ourselves, that God loves us for our own sake. And that, far from winding down or being exhausted, our universe seems to be accelerating, drawing energy from some unidentified and limitless source.

It's interesting to me that Arthur White was conceived at a time when emasculated indie bands were de rigueur, and that, inspired in part by the large-group awareness training organization I was in, I said screw that. And that, in a related development--unlike my kingly namesake--I have sired a veritable quiver-full of children, leaving an unapologetically large patrilineal footprint and singlehandedly melting the country of Iceland.

So I see how Arthur both is a manifestation of this feminizing tendency and its opposite.

The Living Arrow

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 28 May 2015.



I love the idea of Arthur as the "living arrow" in the sisters' quiver.

Probably unrelated, but I picked up The Once and Future King this morning and turned to this exchange between Lancelot and Arthur:

"We don't see many arrows thrilling in people's hearts nowadays," remarked Lancelot one afternoon at the archery butts.

"Thrilling!" exclaimed Arthur. "What a splendid word to describe an arrow vibrating, just after it has hit!" Lancelot said: "I heard it in a ballad." They went away and sat in an arbour, from which they could watch the young people practising their shots.

"It is true," said the King gloomily. "We don't get much of the old fighting in these decadent days."

I also like the arrow verses at the end of Kahlil Gibran's "Your Children":

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I think what you wrote could be a key to the puzzle: "To [the Savage Sisters], this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.  To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game."

ECT, originally intended to make Arthur more shallow and thus more profitable, ended up turning him back into a child. This is God's unlikely triumph and perhaps a model for how a decadent society will not just incrementally improve (i.e. "the pendulum swinging back") but be utterly transformed by grace. And the reason why this victory is so unexpected and definitive is that it utilizes on the enemy's own arsenal. Just as he gloats over Christ crucified, the king of this world doesn't realize that--in crushing humanity's soul--he unwittingly catapulted it into definitive glory.

The Savage Sisters (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to the group on 23 May 2015.

Diana, The Huntress by Guillaume Seignac

I like them being friendly with Arthur. Like maybe he stumbled onto their 100s of acres compound in Detroit, which usually means immediate death or disappearance. But just as the Savage Sisters are drawing their bows, Steffi calls them off since Arthur, though himself allied with Farthington at one point, really had no idea what was going on.

Could we have her dispatch some of her Savage Sisters as bodyguards against Dan Gilbert, who sees the catatonic Arthur as his key to claiming the lodestone for himself and his own adopted city, Cleveland (which, as we all know, wishes it were Rock City). All part of the immortal, apocalyptic battle between Michigan (the best state ever) and Ohio (the worst state ever).

I love the idea of a straight-show with the band surrounded by 4 or 5 Savage Sisters looking distrustfully out at the audience for the entire time with bows and arrows at the ready.

In some ways this is looking a lot like the episode from Morte d'Arthur in which Lancelot gets shot in the buttock by the huntress:

...a lady dwelt in that forest, and she was a great huntress, and daily she used to hunt, and ever she bare her bow with her; and no men went never with her, but always women...So it happed this lady the huntress had abated her dog for the bow at a barren hind, and so this barren hind took the flight over hedges and woods.  And ever this lady and part of her women costed the hind, and checked it by the noise of the hounds, to have met with the hind at some water; and so it happed, the hind came to the well whereas Sir Launcelot was sleeping and slumbering.  And so when the hind came to the well, for heat she went to soil, and there she lay a great while; and the dog came after, and umbecast about, for she had lost the very perfect feute of the hind.  Right so came that lady the huntress, that knew by the dog that she had, that the hind was at the soil in that well; and there she came stiffly and found the hind, and she put a broad arrow in her bow, and shot at the hind, and over-shot the hind; and so by misfortune the arrow smote Sir Launcelot in the thick of the buttock, over the barbs.  When Sir Launcelot felt himself so hurt, he hurled up woodly, and saw the lady that had smitten him.  And when he saw she was a woman, he said thus: Lady or damosel, what that thou be, in an evil time bear ye a bow; the devil made you a shooter.

Creepypasta

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 19 May 2015.

Let the children... by Victor-Surge on DeviantArt

Incidentally, our story has a lot of potentially creepypasta fare embedded in it. The whole summer pilot program venturing down into the steam tunnels, reading drafts of Yeats's "Second Coming," catching glimpses the terrible beast Farthington had warned about,

sometimes swaggering in the distance up ahead of us in the dim intermittent rays of our flashlights, sometimes turning around suddenly to face us, its human physiognomy smiling to reveal a terrifying array of lion's teeth.

See the original post here.

Also, the idea of Carlton/Steffi inside the Sea Devil suit. Jawless or not?

As with creepypasta in general, I'd love for our story to eventually encourage the type of underground fan fiction, fanart, and cosplay that tend to proliferate around these threadbare stories. I don't know how all that starts, but it's almost like too much involvement by the initiating artist can actually inhibit its growth. This, of course, is the open source paradigm in a nutshell. Also that of King Arthur, whose legend grows as his reality recedes from view.

I just remembered and looked up the Slender Man meme, which was started as a thread on the Something Awful Internet forum, namely, a contest to doctor everyday photos to look terrifying. It relies on the exact same dynamism as our project.

As the author of the linked article states,

Slenderman highlights the strength and weaknesses of the Internet simultaneously...Of course when Victor Surge first created him, he was just a creepy picture with minimal back story. Now he is a cultural phenomenon and terrorises the dreams and thoughts of many.  What makes Slenderman a fascinating study is that he is the the personification of how modern myths work. At the core of Slenderman, most of us know he is created. You can trace back his history to specific posts and websites. The Internet ruins the myth but at the same time, the Internet gives it an authenticity and connectivity that continually builds upon it. 

The strength of this meme comes from its ambiguity, which has been part of the reason why I have been so reluctant to go on record with a lot of specific details we sketch out on the blog. At times, this kind of clarifying impulse seems to trespass on the minds of would-be co-creators. Interestingly, I've always seen our performances as running a similar risk, especially when characters lose their indefinitude. I don't think it needs to be that way; our attempts to justify our invariably less than ideal configurations (e.g. like Friday, making an inexplicably young J.J. Lazarus into Joseph Lazarus III) allows us to avoid painting ourselves into an ontological corner.

A City Built to Music

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 11 May 2015.



Liza,

Awesome.

I'm glad that made sense.

More notes, none of which can be full fledged at this point. I'm articulating a lot of these ideas inside Arthurian legend and theory right now.

This idea that Arthur is "The Once and Future King," suggests that he exists in the past and the future, but not the present; that there is a postscenium and a proscenium, but potentially no scenium, that is, no stage and/or nothing happening on stage. I can't remember what critic said it right now, but one idea hinted at in Tennyson's Idylls is that of Arthur's nonexistence.

This kind of existence (existing only in the past and in the future) is central to the idea of the turbulent reversals.

What happens in the Information Age is that these two entities begin to predominate. Nothing is new; everything is a reference, a remix, a a response, resound, a repost, a retweet, etc. Indeed, Will and I shaped this story by cobbling together other stories, explaining it in terms of ideas, people, stories, and situations that have already come and gone. Although that process has sometimes resulted in a clearer picture (okay, maybe not), that clarity is always clarity about the future, about how we will do this or will do that. Nothing materializes in the present--with the exception of one thing:

Music.

In his prose notes for the Idylls, Tennyson writes of Camelot as a "city built to music." Notice how the city itself is a waking dream:

And the day was one of driving showers: & as they drew near to Camelot sometimes the city gleam'd out at top while the rest of it was hidden, sometimes only the middle of it was seen, sometimes only the great gate of Arthur at the bottom & sometimes it disappeared altogether.

And the two that were with Gareth were amazed & said to him Lo now my lord let us go no further for we have heard that this is a city of enchanters & was built by Fairy Kings and Queens.

And the other said There is no such city: it is a vision.

But Gareth brought them to the great Gate: & there was no gate like it under heaven: for the deeds of Arthur were sculptured there in strange types & old & new was mingled together so that it made a man dizzy to look at it.

And there came a blast of music from the town & the three started back & now they have been frightened with this music nor care to go in.

They are greeted by Merlin, who states

...for truly O son this city was built by a fairy king & many fairy Queens & they came from out of the cleft of a mountain toward the sunrise; & they built it to the sound of their harps & as thou sayst it is enchanted & nothing in it is what it seems, saving the King & many hold the city is real & the King is unreal; & take thou of him for if thou pass under this gateway thou wilt become subject to this enchantment...for the city is built to music, & therefore not built at all, & therefore built for ever

...which, I think, is the basis for the Starship song.

An Object Incapable of Development

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 6 April 2015.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones

We've recognized the importance of making some careful choices regarding instruments.

Were money no object, we would just buy all the era-specific gear and bring it out for the appropriate performances. But there are plenty of reasons for embracing the swaddled/crucified existence instead. The main one is that I don't want to conjure comparisons to all the people who played those organs: Frank Rodriguez, Alan Price, Garth Hudson, Steve Winwood, Matthew Fisher, or even Father for that matter.

Instead of this, I might want to deliberately choose the cheaper route: getting the most basic, MIDI-ready, serviceable late 90's keyboard available. While this might at first seem to our audience a puzzling anachronism, it is ultimately the better choice on a few different levels.

Firstly, it's way more practical. I can record in MIDI, which creates sheet music so I don't forget the songs. Plus, it's portable and doesn't break on the way to shows.

Secondly, it's a commentary on the elitism that has permeated this genre or scene in music. One, we're not going to win that arms race; two, who wants to impress those a-holes anyway?

Thirdly, it allows the idea of Arthur White to flourish more fully. I've been reading a lot about King Arthur (you should expect a deluge of ideas from Arthurian legend and scholarship soon). An essay I read last night was "The Image of Arthur and the Idea of King" wherein the author, Mark Allen, explains that Arthur's majesty and mystery and the grandeur of his court creates "a sense of extension--a presence that embraces all of these figures [individual members of his court and their adventures] and is greater than their sum." Allen writes, "One of the curiosities of [Arthur's] tradition is that the romances have, in relative terms, little to do with Arthur himself, concentrating on his knights instead. We get the strong sense that the king is not one who does, but one who has others do for him."

I've talked about this before: the idea that Arthur's diminution is paradoxically the key to his greatness. Obviously, this has a slightly different, more royal flavor. In order to be exalted as having the great symbolic significance that others seem to see in him, he needs to never be fully attached to, grounded in, or associated with any mundane reality, including any of the many stories that continually accrue to him. Arguably, it is Arthur's ambiguity itself that encourages the proliferation and accumulation of stories. It is the sine qua non of his ongoing splendor and majesty. Ground him in too many specifics, too many measurables, too many details that place him in a certain place or time or tradition, and that all goes away.

Additionally, the MIDI concept is interesting in a similar way. It creates a track that has all the basic information but which will ideally be buried by better instruments at some point and resurrected in a "glorified" form.

So, I'm not saying here that the humbled state is the final word. What I'm saying is that it encourages this phenomenon of development, proliferation, accumulation, grandeur, and majesty. I say that just as Richard the Lionhearted has too much known about him to become the iconic legend Arthur is, so too does grounding Arthur White's identity in mundane actions, conditions, ingredients, possessions, and/or paraphernalia paradoxically turn him into an object incapable of development.

So what might a later, more developed state look like? Well, maybe later Arthur White performances do have him surrounded by a band that does have all those expensive, era-specific instruments and outfits. The thing is, the stories of his knights can be safely developed to whatever extent! We can have a Vox Continental or B3 organ player, a Rickenbacker or Fender Precision bass player, so on and so forth.

But I say that we can't have many of these things adhere to Arthur without endangering his transcendence.

Farthington's Voicemail: literal lipstick

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.

4/4/15 1:16 PM 5 weeks ago

Alright, so the context. I'm going back to this idea. Legends and going back to this idea that You know you're not gonna hold our feet to the here of some sort of modern literacy literal lipstick, literate, understanding, of history, that we are higher above that I think is another very interesting thing to mine and to start setting up that as our Frank and and. I think this is something that you can help out a lot with are actually not you, but will can help out a lot width is this idea of returning kind of like. Returning to. And the or role, culture having Ben, I'll literate culture sense. Good numbered. And you know. Returning 2 and orel culture, and I was. The Cohen writes about in The Gooden bird galaxy, and I think that would be an interesting text a look at. Especially since King Lear is one of the members of that line. British Kings, and I let up Arthur. And that is kind of the centerpiece of the Gooden bird Galaxy is his discussion of King Lear, so there's some content they're, and I think there's also a very very very empower in contacts that we should hold on 2 I think pretty much from here on now. The idea that we are returning to anymore, Orel, understanding. Which has, some definite consequences. As far as You know our consciousness Of, this story. If we are understanding this from anymore, literate consciousness. Well, it breaks down fairly quickly. You know, It's just a matter of kind of setting up your time line or whatever else you know your character chart, and then realize I got a certain point that There is somebody pair can do so many contradictions. So many in possibility so many inequities does that. This just does not pass monster if we say, instead, that we are coming from anymore. Orel and verbal, consciousness then We don't have any of those problems in the same way that I need to kinda walk around, with this new incentive bye bye and that I really don't have recourse to any a lot of.

Farthington's Voicemail: Not going to get Prozac with it

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.

So anyways. Very interesting possibilities there. I was out if you're aware of any of this probably not. You know, as we've mentioned the 4 he's pretty much aware of a totally different level of reality. But it is much. As he is at the end of this long. Lainey, it's that traces itself all the way back to price. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. By the way we have extended back that far, and we are now in Detroit maybe he's unaware of what he's doing. And yet other people, possibly with their own Ideas, begin noticing. Some things and. Wondering. Whether or not. He Is this of filming is return of Arthur, and and You know, kind of. 3. Establishment, of There with the rain. You know that rain whatever it is associated with. The load stone with Leif Ericson with or Syrian legend. With. I need a SIM through this and Rome and Troy. And so this is all. Some of the content that I would like us to mine. It would really like us to think about You know the whole heart of white nice idea. Is. I think you which in this context and. What, are, what are we doing here. I mean, I mean, I'm not sure. I think that there is there's definitely some commentary here. I'm not gonna not impose any, crotchety on it right now. Not going to get Prozac with it, gonna let it be. And kind of like see where it all leads. But I think it intersects with so much of our content, and and what I'd like to move on to next. So I'm gonna get cut off again is the contacts that this idea of legends, provides I think as a very important context. In one that we should adopt. When questions arise about the apparent contradictions the An accurate is homes. The because historical problems that come up. In and as our answer to that to recontact July's to read frame.

Farthington's Voicemail: young American cellphone

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.


4/4/15 1:08 PM 6 weeks ago

Okay, so whatever they might be You know this whole blue eyed so which interestingly is right about the time, so if David Bowie right about the same time. He starts getting interested. I mean he starts doing blue eyed soul. And probably most notably on the young American cellphone. He shifts years and moved into this. In White Duke face and I wonder if this is the kind of strategy We're, by kind of by appropriate in the wide of the way that white bands. 10. Two appropriate black music and profit from it, that this is any way of you serpentine line coming back in the power. If you can use ripping out in coming back to power. So. Is that the strategy is that the way. In a post modern age that You know, dominance is re established. And you know, maybe most notably through the person of them and them. Maybe that's what it maybe that is when. That whole strategy reached reaches it's full fruition. Is that the representative of Detroit is a blonde hair, blue eyes, bye. And that is just. Kinda crazy when you think about it, that Detroit You know, would, black bottom and all the wonderful culture that is come out of come out of Detroit and then you know paid over and kind of suppressed and me and and in many different ways. That The. This Renaissance that is happening is actually headed up, by a blond haired blue eyed person So. This is. Is this some kind of strategies this kind of some cuts it kind of a return of Arthur and I wouldn't be surprised to said 1976 David Bowie. It was a supporter. Arthur that he discovered Arthur, and was determined to bring him 2. White at this time and then you kind of comes back down from being all messed up on drugs and he just about everything. Kind of in the rocks against races says that there is racism concert and and all that sort of thing that happened afterwards. Where. Kinda came down really hard on Eric Clapton.

Farthington's Voicemail: a bitter building for ourselves

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.


4/4/15 1:03 PM 6 weeks ago

So I was. I was saying, 1976 kind of an interesting year. And then this is the momen the possibly a bitter building for ourselves. This is that the time, way in. David Bowie and some other musicians that I'm not as big of a fan of like Eric Clapton start getting interested in an idea. And this ideas gaining traction in England. Just kind of an anti immigration, message, Lotte concerned about British purity. If whatever that means and and kind of. Some of the beginning to center around the earth Area, legend. And David Bowie says that the time is pretty much just about everything that he said at that time, because when I was doing is Stan White Duke face and that was very much. This. Anglo over Minch kind of character I rooster crap and round about that time he so he does about everything. Having you know it was way into drugs and all sorts of things he really got in the Arthur at this type of times and I think a lot of the other people who were advocates of this movement were looking to Him. You know, maybe mostly probably in a symbolic way, some people in a real way because there's always this idea that he'll return as Savior and You know basically expel I'll be in taters like you did with the sections. So here's before. So, I. I like that idea that around this time. Now what. How does that connect to Detroit. Well, Detroit. If you know. Arguably What is this I don't know. Jule of white Enterprise and you know you have some of these just Titanic figures You know, history. White History, basically who. I have kind of a I don't know what you'd say it ambiguous legacy. But anyways, they. They are kinda held up as this example and and it all happened and you can detract and then you have The rights which we talked and talked about and that that should figure significantly, in two are story in some ways in the house basically, white. Flight and. You Know Why, it's, better leave or our kind of forcibly force.

Farthington's Voicemail: Avalon could be iPhones

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.



4/4/15 12:54 PM 6 weeks ago

But I was saying he goes 2 Avalon the isle of Avalon, which. We don't know where it is but its to the west, okay because most of his You know the places where he was, said to have, held Corrigan and It is whereabouts for mostly and whales, west of england and he the lease for the ill of Avalon to have is ones treated. We don't know actually in Jeffries account. We don't know whether he died or not and So there's this interesting, open and the best to the narrative there. And it It's not too I don't think it's 2 far-fetched to think that maybe Avalon could be iPhones. That is to the west. I mean, it's quite a ways West. Cross quite a bit of ocean. But to be treated for those ones that I mean but potentially Morrell words. Would we need the help of something supernatural state like the load Stone. And so he goes to. Thanks, 1, which is Avalon and maybe that's like scribes all error. Actually, I think that that's, that's not 2 far beyond the realm of ability to think that somewhere. In transcribing use a lot. I'll be lawn is someone. My does. Ms wrote that are miss understood that. To be iPhones, or vice versa. And he's treated for his was there and. There is some connection between him. And the Vikings in lease. Eric's and then You know all these people who're kind of arriving at that point. It interestingly, at Saint Gregory, the great great after our if you're kind of leaves the scene has sent singing. Custin 2, go on a Christian nation to the British. I, also. Arthur kind of skirts that part of history. He goes to ice. Flinton. And he's kind of surrounded by these Vikings. Perhaps I don't know if that's contemporary probably. I think it is somewhere around that time. At any rate, there's some sort of hand off and a curse. And, I really don't know the car out at all. So, we have to come and take a look at that. But anyways, there is some sort of passing the torch so to speak. With. Leif Ericson Is it is busy the same person Is he. One of those Prachi, somewhere down.

Farthington's Voicemail: a direct line of dissent

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.

4/4/15 12:41 PM 6 weeks ago

Very very rough catch. It's what I wanna buy for the content, but I'm interested in 19 this idea. First of all the theme of Purity, and purification. And the authenticity. All those ideas which we've been Talking about recently. That it is always a big concern when you're talking about. Someone who is so emblem attic of a people like Arthur, became and, I think you see this in that. Pretty much with anyone who's on some start country that is trying to establish itself or assert itself, tries to trace back its origins is something that is already been established something. That had a similar status, at an earlier point. So, Rome has. The story of in the S coming from. The Trojan War and establishing Rome, and similarly in Clinton. Jeffrey of Monmouth has, I need a says great grandson brewed S coming to Britain And And setting up. I'll be in settled by migrating Trojans. And then there's a whole series of six-ish just reins from the 12th century, P. C. All the way basically all the way down to Arthur and and beyond. And it also includes King Lear, which is pretty interesting, and, I think we can 9 that for a million different connections. Because, of course the clue and was pretty interested in King Lear. So. There's this whole series of rain. It on down through. Arthur and establishing That connection between Troy, and then Rome. And then the King's a Britain, have a direct line of dissent from that a glorious past. So, there's that. And then at the end of the Arthur's rain. He's going on. His, italic campaigns, leaving his nephew more Trade, with his wife. You have to come back portrait is turns in to Trader, proponents of keying in persuasions quite a very to a live in adult 3 with him, and he has to go back and killed more driven and he's very badly wounded in the process. And then he goes.