Working on My Frontman Swag!

The following is an excerpt of a 19 December 2012 email sent from Art to Will.

Joe Lazarus intersects with all of this in that he simply sees the makings of a great documentary.  

Maybe he represents the ethical sphere.  He is definitely beyond Will in that he has some social consciousness and wants to draw out some comprehensible message or moral.  Maybe he sees it as a simple triumph-of-the-human-spirit-type story.  

Now that Arthur has been turned into a 2001-type catalyst for existential/religious evolution, however, Joe  is going to get a lot more than he bargained for.  Arthur isn't going to give him anything that can be clearly articulated or comprehended within the ethical sphere.

He'll have to evolve or turn back.

I also see Will's character through the Nietzschean lens, as representing the Apollonian impulse to control, rationalize, and package the formless Dionysian horror that Arthur represents.  If we are to baptize Nietzsche, that formless horror is akin to your Catholic parents' utter horror of mysticism, of the religious sphere, of sainthood, of ecstatic visions, of dark nights, etc.  

This is a good impulse on Will's part, because a lot of people with this disposition tend to stick with things that are easily packaged, or that are already packaged in some sense.  Will recognizes the necessity of the Dionysian and he's going to get as close to the event horizon of the black hole without getting sucked in.  Like Willy Loman, he's going to reach into the darkness and pull out a diamond!

Incidentally, I want to, as Covey puts it, "value the differences" here.

Apollonian and Dionysian are like oil and water.  But without the other they produce nothing.  Pitted against each other they produce the great works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ibsen, and Wagner.  I don't want to say that you and I represent one more than the other, but I do think some of the creative tension we are experiencing now is a good sign.

Hegel would think so too.

Anyway, I hope that doesn't sound too arrogant and self-centered again.  I am, after all, working on my frontman swag!