A Wounded Name

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 March 2016.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

Honestly, the last few months of relative silence has kind of sapped my enthusiasm for the project. We were having that deep conversation about how could social media possibly prepare one for the “Profound Aloneness,” and had some deep answers to that question, but the answer seems to be quite a bit more mundane: you get used to a certain amount of interaction and excitement and the affirmation that comes from that, and when it dries up you feel more alone and depressed than you did before. It's just the simple mechanism of addiction and withdrawal. No big whoop.

Yeah, it's “circus animals desertion” time for me. I've got nothing for this project. I don't see its purpose and my goal at this point is to see it through to its end. Liza's incredible illuminated book will air in April, mostly Farthington's voicemail and my own unanswered emails to the group in May and June, and then a trickle of voicemails with a final one on July 4, 2016.

The end.

Back in college, I took on the task of transcribing the Civil War journal of my great-great-great-great uncle, Augustus Cochran MacKenzie, who was a doctor on a boat participating in the blockade of the South. I don't remember much about the first half of his journal, just getting used to the idea that his f's were actually s's. There was some entry about shooting at fish and going ashore to “find some woman to make love to.” At the very end of the journal, he seems to have gone nuts. He had some of his recipes for medicine, but just before that he had some scrawlings like “GOT THE THING BY THE THROAT” and a couple other such things. He ended up spending the latter part of the war in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the same hospital where I was born some hundred years later. Somehow he pulled himself together enough to go up to Negaunee and become one of the early doctors of the UP.

And of course, all of those transcriptions are on a dead PC in a landfill somewhere. I think the journal is still over at my parents' place, but I'm not sure where.

Anyway, this journal has apparently influenced me profoundly, because for some reason I feel that this is the way that books are meant to end. I've never finished anything, never gotten past the preliminaries of any full-fledged project. And yet--on some deeper level--I feel that, in accomplishing nothing, I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to accomplish. Like my great-great-great-great uncle, I don't even get to the halfway point, leave the second half blank, and scrawl a little insanity at the end (perhaps with some preliminary notes about the next project). I'm just hoping that someone will happen upon this years later and find it vaguely unsettling. Same thing with The Principles of Theory: some vague sketches of something bad happening and a disturbing epilogue.

Perhaps this is one of the problems with fame is that it fills in too many of the blanks, provides too much historicity and not enough mystery. Most of my favorite writers seem to have a good amount of mystery surrounding them. Sometimes I feel like I would root for Emily Dickinson to have successfully burned all her poems.

As George Eliot put it, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts.”

That desire for impotence, for emasculation, for passivity, for misrule, for ahistoricity, for oblivion is part and parcel of the Female King idea. Nietzsche's Hamlet “understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate…he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”

Maybe one can do better than that, better than Arthur, better than Ophelia, as in these lines from Hamlet:

Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again… 

Being thus benetted round with villanies,
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down;
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.

Perhaps one who has gone out over the waters, who has groped his way through the dark, who has his sea-gown scarfed around him, can return to his room again and write it fair. In order to do that one needs to both come to grips with oblivion and then pull himself together enough to devise a new commission, to write it fair.

Contrast this with Ophelia, who sounds a little more like us (me?):

When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Although I think it's true that Ophelia does provide the model and criterion for Hamlet's heroism, she nonetheless demonstrates some flaws that are hammered out by Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet's sea-gown is scarfed around him, Ophelia's tattered land clothing is what drags her down to muddy death. Whereas Hamlet finds it in him to devise a new commission and write it fair, Ophelia only musters snatches of old tunes. Both of them have the sea within and the sea without, but with differences that only the subtleties of symbolism can express.

Hamlet gets it right. But no one gets out alive, no one gets out without a wounded name.

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.

I'm Turning Myself to a Demon

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 12 August 2015.

Emily Dickinson

But seriously, I guess it's that old Dickinson tack of "tell the truth but tell it slant."

Art needs to approach these things obliquely (and I don't mean Art Art, just art). As Oedipus says, "When the stealthy plotter moves on me, I must be quick with my counterplot." I always think that I'm closing in on the murderer, but the artist and mystic realizes that he too is possessed by this same murderous spirit. I can try to rationalize myself to higher ground, distance myself from the demon as it were.

But I can't name it until I've fully seen it in myself, that I am "the accursed defiler of this land." That may be the religious reason for identifying myself with Farthington. After the collapse of "old polar schema," to what extent does reflecting "the devil we are possessed by" necessitate identifying with that devil?

How tempting to fall back into the old polarities!

So, it's been weird because sometimes I feel like I am the demon, that I simulate and dissimulate like a demon, that I sound demonic. But then again, to what extent does this approach partake in the cunning used by Christ: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21).

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
by Fleet Foxes  

Dear shadow, alive and well
How can the body die?
You tell me everything
Anything true 

Jessie, I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself into a demon
I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself to a demon

Art Art