Brainstorming of Boundaries

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 17 July 2014.

Johnny Bee Badanjek

That's an interesting idea with the podcast. I do like a lot of those influences you mentioned and have been a fan of the podcast genre generally. We actually got a good condenser mic at one point, thinking we might do a podcast on Catholic marriage, family, culture, etc.

I guess my concern is that podcasting actually does take a lot of work: coming up with content, lining up interviewees (actors?), and producing it to the level heard on most of the popular ones. It's definitely a step down from Hollywood, but it's still quite a step up from what we're currently doing.

But I'm not saying it's impossible...I guess I just need to visualize the logistics. What would a typical episode consist of? Who would need to be rounded up in order to conduct "interviews" and how would we prep them?

Many podcasts actually use something like a blog as a placeholder on the web, with the primary interface being iTunes. That being the case, I think I could keep going with the blog and post a podcast there and on iTunes whenever we have one complete. Maybe we'll find that the podcast finally hijacks the blog and takes it over, such that the other stuff becomes "extras," which many of those podcast websites try to furnish as well.

It might be cool to show up at something real, like the rebuilding of I-375, and ask some impertinent questions related to the project, like, "Will there be any attempt that that point to exhume the bodies of those buried?" and "Do the Detroit police plan on reopening the case?" or some other questions that blend reality with myth. It would be cool to corner some actual official and ask him or her a bunch of questions about our project. We could do this with them "in the know," or sort of like an Ali G approach, where he interviews legitimate cultural commentators who seem to have no idea that the show is a farce.

I guess we could spend some time brainstorming real people who should have known something about Arthur White (if Arthur White had indeed existed) like Johnny Bee Badanjek, a retired nun from a school he went to, etc. At some point, I'm feeling a little guilty about misrepresenting ourselves, but we could do a little ethical brainstorming of boundaries that will nonetheless allow those interviews to be edgy.

A Sandbox and a Pendulum

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 16 July 2014.

A scene from Drunk History

Here's a quick prelude to some thoughts I've been having.

Recently a few things have been making me reflect on Arthur White. One is JPII's letter (more on that another time) and the role of artists. Another is Steve Miller's book Detroit Rock City, which got me thinking a lot about the DIY thing that made Detroit rock so great and also more or less kept it off the national radar, since it was so feral in Californian terms. The final thing is a few things: NPR storytelling shows, Maron, and Drunk History.

Back to Detroit. When I thought of the idea of working on a screenplay or teleplay, the idea was rooted in actually putting on shows and getting footage onto the internet. An Evening with Arthur White is so natural to the way I work.

I was talking about it with my sister, who is an outstanding photographer. She was talking about how I was a good photographer before she was, and it's true: I had a 100% in photography class and won the book award for the class. But when I took the class, there was some weird physics experiment involving a sandbox and a pendulum that was more or less in the darkroom, and, as a result, I always had scratched negatives from all the sand in the room. And really, that's become my aesthetic--sand in the negatives, which is in many ways like the swaddled existence. Everything is so punk and lo-fi and duct taped together, and hopefully the ideas transcend the materials that produced them. With my moving, though, I pretty much killed our ability to take that approach, and it was difficult even when I was in town. Too many moving parts and no real way to deal fairly with all the people we'd need.

So the screenplay idea made sense: get the ideas on paper and let a network fund everything. We could get as wild as we wanted and if we won the lottery odds-wise, we would have a really polished, professional product with great marketing potential. Plus, we could take our time and handle the work. At the same time, though, the odds of getting signed would be so slim, as would the odds of maintaining our vision of the project. Plus, our chances to play our characters would just disappear.

Tonight, it dawned on me while watching Drunk History that if we were to work on making the project podcast-based, we could retain the DIY feel and our own ownership of the project while liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the visual, which creates massive amounts of cost and labor. A podcast would let us tell our stories from multiple angles and create a venue for the music.  We also wouldn't have to have everything ready to go, which is something I liked about the performance idea originally: let a little of the story out at a time, and since the story could come from multiple narrators, the different stories wouldn't even have to mesh with each other.

You might remember an old idea I had for the Arthur White superfan who runs the fansite who really knows very little about the story and just wants to maintain the aura that comes from being the biggest fan of a group nobody knows. We could have him on. We could interview people who saw the shows. We could play snippets of records we make, or we could broadcast concerts that wouldn't have to look particularly authentic as long as they sounded authentic. We could even get into the meta stuff by being ourselves on occasion.

What do you think?

A Unique Disclosure

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 12 July 2014.

St. Pope John Paul II in 1999

I've been wading into John Paul II's "Letter to Artists" (1999) and am pleasantly surprised so far. I'd like us to meditate on this a little in our correspondance if you're game.

In particular, I'm looking at the following paragraphs:

The special vocation of the artist:

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece. 

It is important to recognize the distinction, but also the connection, between these two aspects of human activity. The distinction is clear. It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art's specific dictates. This is what makes the artist capable of producing objects, but it says nothing as yet of his moral character. We are speaking not of moulding oneself, of forming one's own personality, but simply of actualizing one's productive capacities, giving aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind.

The distinction between the moral and artistic aspects is fundamental, but no less important is the connection between them. Each conditions the other in a profound way. In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life...[italics are mine]

I think this passage is so germane to our project, seeing as we are so closely related to our creations. And these creations of ours have been, at different points, unredeemed or at least not very far advanced along the path of moral perfection. As we get further along in this project--whether it really is a project or not--I'm increasingly aware how my narrative choices are "unique disclosures" of my own being, of what I am and of how I am what I am.

For instance, when my back is against the wall with blogging and I can't always micromanage some Wordsworthian "emotion recollected in tranquility" due to the time crunch, I come up with ideas that reveal my personality and the state of my soul.

One example is how I got so wound up recently about how tragedy comes closest to touching on the truths of the faith.

Another example is a recent idea I've had, which I may or may not do, called "Basement Diaries." The idea is I will bring a camera down with me into the basement with all the lights out and try to find my way around while taking a video of me (no picture because it's pitch black) reflecting on various topics related to darkness, being underground, coal, fossil fuels in general, Hell, the project, the labyrinth, etc. I would upload this to YouTube and let Google mess up the transcription, as usual. Then post the video and its transcription.

The idea is take it or leave it, but I think about what it means that I had this kind of disturbing idea (and not some holier one). Why does it resonate with me right now? What does it say about the state of my soul?

I'm not interested in answering those questions in a psychoanalytical way, but I am getting a sense of what John Paul means by a unique disclosure of one's own being. You can't produce something other than what you are. If you are further along the path toward moral perfection than I am, that will come out in your artistic leanings. In some ways, it wouldn't be surprising to see a consummate artist uniquely reveal the destination of his soul in his last works. He would not be able to disclose anything but that truth.

Do the landscapes and settings and narrative we have created uniquely disclose the elements of temptation, damnation, sanctification, salvation that hem us in and define our own inner state--and maybe even more so than your average artistic work due to the highly self-referential aspect we have embraced?

It reminds me of a statement of C.S. Lewis (which I can't find) about how, in certain moments, you can't pretend to be anything other than you are. We may have many moments where we have the time or energy to muster an "appropriate" response--in our case, "What Would Jesus Do?" But in moments of sudden distress or pain, we can't reveal anything but the true state of our soul.

A saint will continue to love God and neighbor with all his heart, mind, and strength; a professed Christian who has a private Hell opening up inside of him will start exhibiting that somehow. I seem to remember another statement of Chesterton (which I also can't find) about how our lives all give us an opportunity to "leap past Hell."

All of us, in other words, have a gaping abyss somewhere in the landscape of our lives.

And like Chekhov's gun, this abyss isn't superfluous to the plot! I wouldn't say it's there for a God-given reason exactly, although the gift of free will does necessitate it as an option. And we are either going to have to leap into it or leap past it.  Admittedly, that sounds way more dramatic than our current quotidian existence with its blended, blurry options, but God makes that moment possible for each one of us, allowing us to make a clear-eyed, fundamental choice that will persist for all eternity.

So you may have something to say about the paragraphs I excerpted; or maybe you read more of it and find something else. I really see this vision as needing to be central to our project since it's a letter explicitly addressed to artists in the postmodern age! What is the Holy Spirit telling us through this message? What questions of ours does it answer?

Epitome of the American Dream

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 5 July 2014.

I wonder if Stan could have been accused of murder in the cement burial of a worker (or someone else--Jimmy Hoffa?).

A line of grates cover the outflow of Savoyard Creek

And the Witkowski name--previously an irreproachable pillar of the community, an epitome of the American Dream--was suffering. This is all during the time of the riots, so it could be suffering for multiple reasons (and I think you've already mentioned that is was, even among the members of the Polish community).

Will always thought his father had achieved definitive success, that his father had paid all the appropriate dues and that his legacy was therefore assured inside the American "covenant."

Maybe Stan was killed before a verdict was pronounced.

But this would definitely set Will in motion, attempting to achieve the decisive ascendency owed his family by the American Dream--leveraging everything, sacrificing everything, risking everything. He is kind of like "Happy" at the end of Death of a Salesman speaking of his father: "He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have--to come out the number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I'm gonna win it for him."

Depending on the circumstances surrounding the murder and the victim, I like Stan ending up in the Savoyard Creek, which was buried as a sewer in 1836, became Black Bottom, and then was partially paved over by I-375. I'm sure there is still a canal in Detroit's sewer system that follows its flow. These primordial rivers persist despite the concrete.

Here's the video about the woman who gives tours of Detroit's buried rivers. Also, check out these pictures of other rivers that have been forced underground due to the dominant concrete.



Pretty spooky!

Plenty of Room for Mafia Ties

The following is an excerpt of a 5 July 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Why does Will want to "assert the family name"?  

Is it a situation like The Wild Duck in which Hjalmar's dad was convicted of a crime that brought shame to the family name (whereas Old Werle, that perv, goes free)? Plus, Will changes the family name! 

from Ingmar Bergman's 1972 production of The Wild Duck

Names and renaming are important in this story, but I don't see the sufficient motive for Will Witkowski other than the usual desire to be famous idea. This might be an area to shore up somewhat. In The Wild Duck, Hjalmar was going to reveal his great invention (or his "life lie" as Relling puts it) and bring honor back to his family name--he wasn't just desiring fame for the usual reason. 

I really think this story has some connections to The Wild Duck, by the way. I'm afraid to say I identify far too much with Hjalmar--such a simultaneously pitiful and unlikeable character!

Will:

I just see asserting the family name as being tied to the American Dream.   

Polish people aren't known for wanting much more than a decent factory job out of America, but Stan is one of those guys who has to evangelize the gospel of the self-made man.  Supposedly my family in the old world were an unimpressive lot: a few prostitutes here and there even, but mostly guys who didn't want to be cannon fodder in the Russian Army.   

I'm not trying to compare the plight of Polish immigrants to the plight of African Americans, but I think of the black doctor in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter who is constantly infuriated that the black people dream what he believes are such feeble dreams. That's Stan. Will totally shares his dad's worldview and feels compelled to do better than the previous generation..a key part of the dream. And he wants to be self-made as well, which means making it in the music business instead of cement, even though he's good at cement. 

The other part of the dream is branding. Everything is about branding. Of course, Art is pretty representative of the majority of Poles, who in my experience tend not to be particularly materialistic or power hungry. I don't think we necessarily need some Old World ghost in the closet: the emptiness of the closet would be both a source of shame and the freedom of a tabula rasa for Stan. And a landscape of cabbage, hard work, forced military service for the Russians, and poverty accepted with happy songs, dances, and ritual prayers would make him hungry for modern affluence in the New World. 

Of course, if you are okay with it, there's plenty of room for him to build mafia ties.

Divina Commedia (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of a July 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

I can also point to a single moment in which I grasped almost on a mystical level the power of tragedy. For years, students asked me why I taught so much tragedy, and if not tragedy, at least novels and plays with sad endings. I sincerely thought that tragedy taught more than comedy. Honestly, I still do, but only because we are better at writing tragedy than at writing comedy. 

But it struck me that when we map out the plots of tragedy and comedy, comedy parallels the reality of God better than tragedy, which tends to parallel the reality of human endeavors. So how could it be that we were so much better than tragedy? Why did comedy seem so slight and inconsequential to me, and tragedy so profound? I figured that the power of tragedy is that it realigns us with the comic: it scares us into rejecting pride and accepting God's friendship so that we can serve him instead of ourselves through the grace of humility. But still...why so many sucky comedies and profound tragedies? Why couldn't I experience a catharsis in a comedy, since I believe that God wants to lead us to happy endings and pulled out all the stops to lead us there, and since I believed in our power to repent through grace, reject pride, and accept God's salvation and in my own ability to use the gifts God gave me in His service instead of my own? 

Then I saw a version of As You Like It at Stratford that had a profound, mystical effect on me. 

Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2010 production of As You Like It

I can barely describe it. I'd seen As You Like It several times and read it in college, but suddenly, I had my confirmation that comedy can deal with profound issues successfully. I felt so much empathy for the exiles in the woods of Arden; I marveled at the joy they found in the beauty, friendship, and I'd dare say swaddled existence--freedom from the burdens of the secular world. 

My description of what I felt limps, but I had the moment for which I longed: the experience of catharsis in a comedy. And what really hit me was how much more of an emotional outpouring it was in me than any catharsis I had experienced in tragedy. Those experiences tended to be intellectual. This experience was far more visceral. 

From there, texts like Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory began taking on new power. And I've also got to say that I started feeling new emotions as a result of reading tragedy. The gravity of tragedy started slipping. Epic changed, too: The Odyssey started feeling like a horror novel! Lord of the Rings made me cry instead of merely entertaining me. Frankenstein became more two dimensional and political. Death of a Salesman shifted, too: I started wondering more and more about Biff. I used to think Biff was right for calling himself a dime a dozen, but now I think he was overcompensating for his former ill-founded pride. He really is a poet, and I mourn that he can't see in himself what even Happy, who strikes me as a fairly dense and pathetic character, can see. 

I guess a third thing, not exactly an experience but a tendency, is that I see myself as someone who very easily could have become a tragic figure and who instead became someone who hungers for God's grace and mercy and rejoices in it. I haven't lost my desire to create crazy schemes (as this project attests), but there's a light-hearted joy that comes from the recognition of my foolishness and God's majesty that the Famous Willy project lacked (that was a very serious project by comparison). I was out to build a Tower of Babel. I might still be, but I see what an absolutely hilarious idea the Tower of Babel is. It's a meta-tower at this point, a type of cute joke.

Art:

I think you're right. I too have experienced something like catharsis watching a comedy. I certainly came out of Twelfth Night a few years ago feeling more alive. And then I think about St. Lawrence who told his torturers who were grilling him alive to "turn me over, I'm done on this side." Also, I guess Dante didn't call it the Commedia for no reason (not just because it was one of the first serious poems written in the vulgate). 

Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2012 production of Twelfth Night

I'm not sure I buy the tragic being a response to the absurdity of polytheism--most writers seemed to be grappling with the absurdity of human existence, not with the capriciousness of one or more gods. Perhaps this is what postlapsarian life amounts to without the Pascal solution. 

Christianity is comedy that can laugh in the face of anything, sing taunt songs in the face of death, even harrow Hell like Dante.

Divina Commedia (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of a July 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

I think I understand better where you're coming from, most importantly that something about the story being comic is indispensible to your understanding of Will. As I reflect somewhat, I think my insistence on the story being tragic comes from my understanding of Arthur. And I think I can go a step further and say it comes from my understanding of Art. 

Will looking the part

Not to go too personal, but I wonder if your insistence on the story being fundamentally comic is something that you can trace to your understanding of yourself and your own "fundamental life project." One thing that pops into my mind is something I heard on the radio about your naming of bands: not wanting to go overboard with the usual seriousness that accompanies such a decision. And then, as you mention in this most recent email: "I'm also far more prideful than you are, so probably far more afraid of pride." 

I've got to go to bed, so I can't begin my self-analysis on when my preference for tragedy started or how it is rooted in and/or mirrored by my fundamental life project. But if you feel comfortable, when did this tendency or perspective of yours begin to be forged?

Will:

Tough question! Not because I've lived some complex life, but because there haven't been too many moments of epiphany. But I have a few stories. 

One is related to my involvement in Kairos retreats and touches on something I mentioned in the last email. Throughout my childhood and all of college, I simultaneously believed that a just God should send me to Hell and that I was basically a good person and superior to most people because I did less bad stuff than they did. Back then, my vision of bad basically meant taking drugs and drinking. I don't even really like to think of who I was in college because I was such an ass. 

When people ask me if I'm a recovering Catholic, I say no, I'm a recovering asshole. 

Anyway, Kairos was my first exposure to the idea that Hell was my choice and not something that God wanted for me. In a way, it was the first time the concept of God's mercy started sinking in. I also started developing empathy for people who drank and used drugs. So basically, my life filled up with mercy: an understanding of God's mercy for me, and consequently a love and sympathy for others that eroded so much of my arrogance. The more I attended Kairos retreats, taught, and grew in my faith, the more I understood that the Truth I always sought is a person, not a concept. An answer, yes, but in the form of a relationship, not a formula. And consequently, all relationships became really important to me, and my love of strangers just skyrocketed.

How Screwed We Are in the Face of Polytheism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 1 July 2014.

I was probably too liberal with my use of the term "ancient Greeks."

Obviously, if it weren't for the Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Paul never would have been able to say, "You know that unnamed God above all gods you built that statue for?  I know Him!" and we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

I'm mainly picking on the ancient art, and not even that, really, since I love it. It's polytheism. Sophocles is amazing in his articulation of how screwed we are in the face of polytheism, and how beautifully heroic and tragic a person can be in the face of that being screwed. Sophocles is not far from Heaven in his understanding of the irrational and the idea that part of existence is to be at war against the whole world (paraphrasing Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday). But he doesn't have Christianity to help with his answers.

Antigone leading Oedipus out of Thebes

You're right about the pinned feet and the swaddled existence--in a way, they point to a primordial understanding of Christ as the Logos. In the religious festival, you have a man who is sacrificed so that others may live. To me, that's the highest value of the traditional tragic hero: that his fall can prevent the falls of others, and it takes a sort of greatness to rise to such heights of failure and bear that fall. The first shall be last! Still, Oedipus wouldn't voluntarily choose that fall, and he still has a type of pride in his fall, running around Thebes saying how he is the greatest of sinners, the most accurst, etc.

The heart of my view, really, is that the story of existence--as I believe Catholics correctly see it--is comic. I have no problem with the idea that you see the Deus ex Machina as a crappy plot device in human art; I'm completely fine with the idea that we make better tragedies than comedies. I still believe reality as God has sculpted it for us is comic in nature, and I take no issue with His art. His plot is infinitely superior to any we can create.

I agree with your assessment that Christ is not an easy answer: it's the "mystery of our faith," not the philosophy of our faith. One of the most challenging concepts of describing Christianity to non-Christians (or even Christians, for that matter) is that the Truth is a person, not a set of doctrines! Yikes! It's that idea that we are called into a relationship with God, not adherence to a rule book, that continuously baffles us. In that regard, Homer was onto something with Odysseus, although I'm grasping at straws here. He's just more about a relationship with Olympus than he is about personal virtue or true humility, which I think is too Christian of a concept for Odysseus' world, anyway.

I also see the hamartia as being the source of the hero's greatness. I just believe it's a false, b.s. greatness: a big lie that needs to be stripped away, either voluntarily in small doses, which seems to me the preferable way, or in one fell swoop, as is the fate of most tragic heroes. In tragedy of the Christian era, the stripping away is an act of mercy that reunites the hero with Truth not of the hero's own making (I think Willy Loman and Macbeth are exceptions: both are too hardened to see reality before they die). I differ from Aristotle in that I view the hamartia as a vice. I understand it and marvel at it and sympathize with it and see the beauty in it even if it is toxic, but sorry...I'm German. I'm also far more prideful than you are, so probably far more afraid of pride.

I see the tragic hero as someone who views himself as a self-made man but who really is in his own way. In a sense, this makes him a very foolish or comic figure. He senses his own weakness and compensates with self-aggrandizement. He senses his own lack of wisdom and doubles down on a bad plan, compensating with confidence. He simultaneously is everything the secular world trains us to be and a walking billboard for the dangers of defense mechanisms. Why is he foolish? He's basically missing the point of his existence: to be an object of God's love and a reflector of God's light. Basically, he tries to be God. That is charming up to a point. I think we disagree on where that point is. As you say, my view doesn't fit perfectly with classical tragedy, although it's not completely incompatible.

Also, I think the American Dream is like crack to the tragic hero. And yes, the story of a Willy Loman who works in construction, teaches his boys good values, treats his wife really well, pays his bills on time, doesn't cheat at cards, takes help when he needs it and gives help when others need it, and takes the family to church on Sundays would make for crappy art, but that's still the guy I wish Willy could be. If I didn't, the tragedy would fail.

So, my words still stink, but hopefully they are a little more clear, even if the views still evince a simpleton's understanding of tragedy. I'm not trying to convert you to my view; I just want you to understand mine, and I'm my own worst enemy in that department.

Why even waste time and effort on clarifying it? It's a pretty central concept to my view of Will.

That's Not a Flaw! The Other One is a Flaw!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 1 July 2014.

We are somewhat far apart in that I see the Greeks as having gotten extremely close to many things (in a "You are not far from the Kingdom of God" kind of way). The main philosophers were all monotheists, and later Platonists--especially Plotinus, one of Augustine's favorites--actually got darn close to hitting on the Trinity.

The Birth of Jesus by Barna da Siena

And on the literary side, you probably know by now that I think Tragedy approaches the heroism of the cross a lot more than do the other genres. Oedipus' pinned ankles are so reminiscent of the swaddled/crucified existence, discovering the limits of human freedom and yet achieving a kind of mastery, a kind of victory in that moment of greatest ignomy and defeat.

Perhaps they were asking the question, how can one be a hero when the age of heroes is over?

And Kierkegaard's Abraham (or just Abraham, really) gets very close to this quandary as well. The whole episode leaves us with far more questions than answers. Definitely no "pat" answers, and the Deus ex Machina, if you will, is not definitive or satisfying. The problem I have with the solution being, as you say, "alignment with God's will" is that it doesn't answer the fundamental questions posed by this episode in Abraham's walk with God--or, for that matter, any of the questions implicitly posed by the tragic figures of pagan times.

So what is the answer? Jesus Christ. But he is--and I say this with the utmost reverence--an answer that is irrational and irreducible. In other words, he cannot be reduced even to a complicated code of ethics or philosophy. Yes, he said things like "It is not everyone that says to me, 'My Lord, my Lord'', who enters the Kingdom of Heaven, but whoever does the will of my Father who is in Heaven" (Mt 7:21), but that's not all he did and said. He was wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger! He was baptised by a human being! He was crucified, died, and was buried! He comprehends everything that has happened before and since. He doesn't stand dumbfounded before the fate that Oedipus or Abraham suffered. And as inarticulate as those questions might have been (and I have a hard time calling Sophocles inarticulate), he comprehends all contradiction, paradox, ambiguity, irrationality and provides the answer in who he is. Note that I didn't say he just tells all those things to shut the f--- up (although he does that with the wind and waters sometimes). He comprehends them within his person.

I disagree with the phrasing that "from Marlowe onward, we've got tragic heroes who aren't marked by Olympus to suffer, but who bring about their own suffering, although there are always extenuating circumstances."

I think it's close to, but not as accurate as the Aristotelian characterization: "a man who is not eminently good and just--yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty" (Chapter 13). That's a very nuanced emphasis--the difference between tragic flaw and hamartia--but, as a professor I once heard explained, "His error is inextricably tied up with his human greatness." His greatness, that which places him above his fellows, is his willingness and ability to face his fate directly.

Neither did Arthur Miller believe in the traditional conception of a tragic flaw:

In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the characters, is really nothing--and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.

For Miller, the flaw sounds like a good thing! Kind of like how people answer that question that they ask in job interviews: What is one shortcoming that you have?

Answer: Oh, I guess I have this unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what I conceive to be a challenge to my dignity. I guess I don't just accept my lot without active retaliation.

Come on, that's not a flaw! The other one is a flaw!

Sit Back and Watch the Felix Culpa

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 30 June 2014.

"...like a Kierkegaardian Abraham"

I love Aristotle and I think it's remarkable that Poetics holds up so well after the whole rise and fall of Western Culture.

His method in all things, though, was to study every example of the subject that interested him and seek the patterns. I love this method: pattern recognition. McLuhan says it's the key to our ability to fabricate a survival strategy. But Aristotle only got to look at the art of his day, all of which was governed by the absurdities of polytheism. The pagans gave us tragedies of fate and epics of action; Christianity gives us tragedies of action and epics of...well, fate isn't the right word, but humility, maybe alignment with God's will.

I think the spirit of Poetics holds up, but I think the letter would be different if he had had the advantage of looking back from our point in time and space. So, yeah, I take liberties with Poetics because I see Shakespeare, Miller, and all sorts of other artists and philosophers continuing the work of the original text.

The question of Odysseus' virtue is impossible to reconcile since the gods don't have a unified will: none of them stay even personally consistent.

It's the problem of Plato's Euthyphro: polytheism just can't deal well with virtue, which is crazy considering how much the ancient Greeks prized it. I don't see Odysseus as having humility in the Christian sense. He doesn't become more devout, he doesn't say Zeus must increase and I must decrease. He is still a man who strives with gods, to steal from Tennyson. He's humble in the same sense I'm humble when I drive: I'm better at not getting caught when I speed than I used to be, I'm less reckless, and I could probably handle a conversation with the cops better. I even have a sticker in my window that shows I donate to law enforcement. I'm about as humble in the face of speed limits as Odysseus is in the face of "the gods." And if Officer Athena counseled me on how to beat the system, the analogy would be even better, not that it's that good.

The Greek epic hero has to figure out how to assert his humanity to its fullest extent, something approaching "god"liness. The Greek tragic hero in some ways just doesn't have as many resources available to prevail.

I see Oedipus as a supremely screwed character. I read him like a Kierkegaardian Abraham, put in a position in which serving the heavens means doing the opposite of what a moral person would expect of a divine request.

Humility means accepting his lot and killing his dad and marrying his mom, or at least resigning himself to that future. Morality means protecting his family. So he can't be moral and humble. And he doesn't earn his curse, really; it's like he's the living punishment of his parents' transgression. But even then, what makes their attempt to defy fate immoral, if morality comes from the gods and Kronos and Zeus are both child killers, not to mention father killers? Again we hit Euthyphro: morality must come from a source higher than the gods.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I think Zeus was probably Satan.

Anyway, from Marlowe onward, we've got tragic heroes who aren't marked by Olympus to suffer, but who bring about their own suffering, although there are always extenuating circumstances. And we get the Christian approach to comedy and the epic, plus the morality play about finding one's proper place within God's perfect plan. I wonder to what extent Milton set out to mock the pagan epic by having Satan more or less get smashed by the God's providence, and not by a set of death-defying scampers (if you cut out the pre-story of the war in Heaven).

God just spells it all out in Book 3, and we sit back and watch the felix culpa.

We Aren't Dogs, Either

The following is an excerpt of a 30 June 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

Comedy would be the lower art form if it weren't the higher truth. 

That the Deus ex Machinas in art tend to be cheesy doesn't have any real bearing on the majesty of Christ's intervention in the story of humanity's tragic reversal. 

Most tragedy certainly feels more compelling than most comedy because the message isn't that everything will work out just fine, and probably the first thing we need to recognize if we're going to ever find salvation is that we're not gods, which is the message of tragedy. 

After we accept that, we can accept the comic message that the resurrection teaches us: we aren't dogs, either. 

The more I look at the forms, though, the more I think my vision of the comic and epic overlap.

Art:

Odysseus and Argos

What would prevent that from being Epic, as defined by Aristotle? Unlike Tragedy, which Aristotle calls "single threaded" (goes from prosperity to adversity), Epic is "double threaded" (goes from prosperity to adversity back to prosperity). And indeed, Odysseus undergoes something very similar before he can return, following Teiresias' counsel: he threads the strait of Scylla and Charybdis, and follows several other dictates to demonstrate his humility and to propitiate Poseidon.  

When he returns to Ithaca and Telemachus sees him transformed from the old beggar to a much younger man, Telemachus exclaims, "You are a god!" And Odysseus, having been humbled by his journey, says “No god. Why take me for a god? No, no. I am that father whom your boyhood lacked." Sounds like something Arthur could say, maybe in a rare moment of clarity to one or more of his children. 

But then again, I think you may have a more Elizabethan view of comedy, which seems much more informed by Christian understandings. The idea of a lowly fool gaining superiority over the overweening ones (such as the "Lord of Misrule" figure during Christmastide) is a pagan idea that found a lot of traction within the Christian worldview for obvious reasons. Consider 1 Corinthians 25-27: 

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong… 

And this may be significant: Odysseus, to my knowledge, is the only major hero to survive the Trojan War and its aftermath. Following Hesiod's telling, Helen and the Trojan War was Zeus' plan to bring to end the age of demigods and heroes. Odysseus is the only one who transitioned over from the former to the latter age alive. 

Was his willingness to be brought low the reason he survived?

Drunken Phallic Processions

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 29 June 2014.

Agreed on the differences between ancient and modern tragedy. But I'm not sure I agree that "tragedy should scare us all into the higher reality of the comic."

Attic komasts

I tend to agree with Aristotle that, between tragedy, epic, and comedy, tragedy is the highest and comedy is the lowest, with epic a close second to tragedy. As he writes, "Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life." In other words, comedy holds humanity in low esteem, tragedy in high esteem. Tragedy grew out of religious, dithyrambic dances probably involving the sacrifice of a goat; comedy grew out of drunken phallic processions.

I think we're better than comic characters and I think God thinks so too.

A morality play would be considered a poorly done tragedy. Seeing the downfall of a sinful character in a morality play does not produce catharsis:

A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. (Poetics, Chapter 13)

I like to think that morality plays fail because we just make a resolution not to do what the fallen character did. But how are we going to get out of Oedipus' plight???

The ultimate tragic character he describes as

a man who is not eminently good and just--yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families. (Chapter 13)

As for the  Deus ex Machina, it should be avoided:

The 'Deus ex Machina' should be employed only for events external to the drama,—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element in the Oedipus of Sophocles. (Chapter 15)

And happily, I don't think that's what God does for us in his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. Otherwise, why did he become human? Otherwise, why would he involve us? If we're just some maiden being saved from the dragon, carried away by our knight in shining armor... Something about resolution that doesn't satisfy some important aesthetic, ethical, moral, and/or religious criteria we have hardwired into ourselves.

And this is one area where I have an axe to grind. I think the Deus ex Machina is precisely the reason why we people of faith have been rightfully denied access into postmodernism (actually into art, period). A long time ago, I read an article in First Things about the poetry of John Paul II. As much as I love the guy, I was not surprised to learn that the major criticism of his poetry is that he gets down to some deep dark areas of personal emotion and crisis and then swoops in with the pat, predictable answer: God will take care of it. Tolkein with his big eagles who just happen to overhear the ruckus of the wargs and goblins is another example. I love Tolkien too, but he relies on this sort of forced plot device a lot as well.

I've already explained some of the ways I think postmodernism and a religious worldview could coexist, so I'm not going to get into it again. But that criterion of avoiding Deus ex Machina goes back to 350 B.C.! And Jesus brought about a happy ending that I think would blow even Aristotle's mind--but that means that he didn't use any of the cop outs enumerated by Aristotle.

He did something entirely surprising and NEW!

Better Men Than You Have Tried, Dumbass

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 June 2014.

You know I'm a big Arthur Miller fan, but I'd say the great tragedy of all times is that we're made to be saints and most of us don't even realize that's our calling. Or that it's an attainable calling.

I think the shift from classical tragedy to 20th-century tragedy is the increased chance of a 20th-century person attaining greatness. Older tragedy took for granted a world with limited social mobility; the American dream as it appeared in the 20th century made everybody feel like he could be a king, which meant we needed a tragedy for the common man.

Badass?

The older common man knew he couldn't rise above his station, so the point of older tragedy was better men than you have tried, dumbass.

20th-century America propped up more people toward tragic heights and I think Miller chronicled that problem beautifully. But the reason I'm so interested in the Catholic morality play as a form is because it aims at the bigger tragedy: the tragedy of missed sainthood.

Also, Catholic morality plays traditionally haven't been that great, so I like the idea of trying to make a good one.

I'm not dismissing McLuhan's arches and I get that we ourselves are perhaps challenging our own stations and assuming a type of grandeur that might be delusional (although your songs rank right up there with my favorites from more famous greats) and that documenting all this creates an interesting metanarrative. But the core of the tragedy is the unwitting conspiracy to pull Arthur away from his sainthood. And the second layer is that all the characters are missing out on their own sainthood.

But since we're dealing with decades in the lives of most of the characters, we do have the chance to turn the tragic elements comic. Not in the sense of ha ha, but in the sense that tragedy can scare us all into the higher reality of the comic.

Reality is comic: we are mostly born into average circumstances but with divine gifts, we find some success through an unsharpened use of those gifts, and then we misuse the gifts in a way that threatens to destroy everything we are. Then, hopefully, we wake up, recognize that the gifts come from God, accept His rule over the world, and choose to be agents of His light instead of our own.

Then He provides the ultimate Deus ex Machina through the crucifixion and resurrection, and we find the ultimate happy ending of salvation.

The Tragedy (and Comedy?) of Modern Times

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 June 2014.

The main tragedy of modern times is that we all think we are the protagonist and we all find out we are just members of the chorus, without anything that individuates us.

Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman

We realize that we are not frontman material, that we are commonplace, and that we could have saved ourselves a lot of misery if we had merely accepted our lot in life from the beginning. Perhaps this modern tragedy has its advent in Willy Loman, who believed being a "big man" was the most important thing in life, totally devaluing his vocation as father and husband, and perhaps his avocation as a skilled handyman or builder.

The Internet has done a lot to augment (exascerbate?) this phenomenon, beginning with McLuhan's prophetic notion that the satellite provides the proscenium arch that makes us want to be an actor.

Countless millions--ourselves included--have set up stages for themselves in virtual "theaters" that theoretically accommodate an infinite number of "theatergoers": followers, fans, etc. A large number of these theaters--ours included--are almost entirely empty.

But we have also witnessed in recent years many instances of the "viral" phenomenon whereby an ordinary person becomes famous through this medium (e.g. Justin Bieber, Andy Samberg). These successes--again, an infinitesmal percentage of those who have attempted this avenue--fuel even more dreams, all of which can, in a sense, be "chartered" through social media.

This has spawned a lot of overweening pride that is, in most cases, utterly crushed by reality.

Luke Bryan

I put "and Comedy?" because this age has spawned yet another phenomenon, the name for which I don't know. We see it in the two ascendent genres of music of recent times: Country and EDM. I was largely unaware of this phenomenon until reading about it through Bob Lefsetz's newsletter over the last year.

Country is the only legitimate stadium rock still extant, not counting mega bands from past eras like the Stones, Springsteen, and U2.

Maybe it's the content: down-to-earth realities, stuff the chorus can understand. Luke Bryan puts out a Spring Break EP every year--what an amazing concept to provide a soundtrack to others' mindless revelry! And the songs are simple enough that thousands of people (the chorus) can shout/sing along with the melodies. At Stagecoach--country's answer to Coachella--Lefsetz marvelled at how "real" the performers were, how fun and flawed and passionate and in touch with their fans. And how much the fans love their artists, how all-consuming this is for them. And this phenomenon has almost disappeared in every other genre, even pop music.

EDM is a similar phenomenon.

Some famous EDM dude

I don't want to diminish what the artist actually "does" in EDM, but to an outsider, but to me it looks like music lovers communing with other music lovers. I know there's a lot of manipulation and maybe even creation, but a lot of it seems to be serving up other people's work to a bunch of drugged revelers. The DJ is on stage--a little bit like a protagonist--but he is far less different from his his peers in the chorus: he is singing and playing and dancing along with them. Accordingly, this phenomenon is more akin to comos than tragos, and, as such, is likely going to result in nothing worse than a bad hangover. The same seems true of Country.

Somewhere in this is the zeitgeist we need to confront. Do we want the former tragos or the latter comos? I'm suggesting here that what we choose will necessarily take on the characteristics of one or the other. I don't have time to summarize right now, but hopefully you got the gist (or geist) of what I was outlining about each option and can apply those ideas to our own situation.

For myself, I have seen multiple opportunities to embrace elements of one or both, and the power that would be found in that.

Evidence of Wrong Turns

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 26 June 2014.

Yeah, I was thinking about how, in some ways, you are the Apollonian and I am the Dionysian.

If we could afford it time- and money-wise, I would totally just do the garage, DIY version of the project we started with: put on shows, generate footage, get it on the Internet, and let the story unfold that way.

I'd be totally fine with a version of the project where we just pick a show from the timeline and put on that concert, then repeat. I think you go Apollonian when it comes to the records and live performances--you want to make them flawless.  I'm probably more Apollonian about the story, especially when it comes to chronology.

...filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason

I think what sets our story apart from The Office or Parks and Rec is that we don't have an anonymous documentary crew filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason.  I totally agree: there is absolutely no reason for the documentary crew to give a crap about 11 years of some paper company in Scranton.

In our case, if Jo is the frame, then the story is unfolds around her.

She is on a quest to understand her own father amid her own existential crisis, and she quickly learns that the only way to do so is to understand Arthur White, the man who inspired him to risk everything and who inadvertently led him to his death. There's that old cliche that cynics are jaded idealists, and I think that's true for Jo. She has her father's nature and her mother's nurture: her dad was attracted to truth and beauty like a moth to a flame, but her mom raised her in a cloud of cynicism, preaching the gospel of her father's betrayal and the idea that life is pain.

I think where I'm very Apollonian is that I don't really care that much about sharing the story of our quest to create the project.

I had the same problem in all of my drawing classes: my teachers would try to get me to leave all the marks of my process in my work, where to me, they were just distractions, evidence of wrong turns. But I trust your vision here.

Regarding our story, I think we need to see if we still like the strategy of aiming toward a TV show. The advantage is that we can map out the whole story without spending money, rehearsing, acting...all the things that are difficult for us. The disadvantage is the difficulty of getting the show signed and produced. Also, for good or bad, we probably won't end up being Art and Will.

If the show gets signed, we'll probably end up with lots of interviews about the making of the show anyway.  I watch too much cable, and I can't believe how much television is devoted to behind-the-scenes stuff. I've seen more interviews with and stories about the cast of Mad Men than I have episodes, and I've seen all the episodes.

Plus, we still have the blog.

Some New Fangled System (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

A lot of these decisions that we're making right now are not unlike the decisions made by translators before they get started on the translation.

It's the question of how we translate the vision from its current, almost-incomprehensible form into something more defined that nonetheless does justice to the original. A.D. Melville chose to render the dactylic hexameter of Ovid into blank verse with occasional rhyming couplets.

"What is painting but the act of embracing
by means of art the surface of the pool?" - Alberti

Any choice is going to lose some of the richness of the original.

So, the question to be asked at this point is whether approaching it in this way--with the real-life Art and Will as the main characters--is preserving something essential about our underlying theme or is it just a "new fangled" attempt to avoid the sheer difficulty of writing something. Regardless of which it is, I think a case can be made for the former.

As we've discussed at length, one of the main motifs in the work is renaming and false identities. It feels a little disingenous to explore our characters' fakery without acknowledging our own--the idea that we, like them, are adopting false identities or avatars in order to achieve our ends in a circuitous way.

And that this inauthenticity or fraudulence is a fundamental characteristic of the age in which we live.

I have no idea what documentary Joe was trying to make, but as I look back about the material he compiled, I think that was the direction he was going. We were the main characters in his documentary. That's another critical theme: that satellite technology makes us behave as if we were famous, as if we are the main characters. That's pitiful if it isn't acknowledged and claimed artistically. But this postmodern approach does take responsibility for that central pretense.

And it opens the door to some pretty pathetic/tragic/comic details, depending on your interpretation. Your experiments in pursuing fame. My writing these songs and then sitting on them until I was pushing 40. Joe starting the documentary and then losing all the footage. If we go with one or more traditional approaches to writing this story, I feel like we are amputating a large percentage of what makes the story so strange and beautiful.

Wow, quite the response...dinner time, so I'm going to close. I do think this is a critical point at which to have this conversation.

And there is always the third option: that the two options are not mutually exclusive.

Some New Fangled System (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

I do like Jo as the documentarian searching for meaning and peace and trying to put together a good documentary in the process.

That could provide for some interesting on-camera and off-camera conversations were it to be staged like last time. It also provides the basic motive for telling the story. And it banishes anything irrational or beyond the scope of human understanding.  I also like the idea that she could have conversations with her faculty advisor as another way of telling the story.

Boy, in some ways, what we had with Joe was unique in that we had an actual person trying to create a documentary. I wonder if that would be a good route to go in the future, finding someone (Joe again?) who would be able to conceptualize some approach. The mainstream approach is beginning to get hackneyed, what with all the Christopher Guest movies, The Office, Extras, etc. How is ours going to be different?

Jim looking at the camera

One thing that bothers me about those aforementioned fake documentaries is that they often require more and more suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer.

At some point, the idea of all these people willingly going along with a documentary seems more and more unlikely. And the motive for having the documentary too...i.e. why are we spending 11 years documenting the lives of paper company employees in Scranton?

If we wanted to get super postmodern about it, we could make the documentary about the quest of Art and Will to "make this happen"--and, yes, become somewhat famous in the process. This, of course, does not fit your Apollonian leanings, but, as I said before about the blog, it releases a deluge of material to be exploited. Also, it provides much-needed relief from the approach that is getting hackneyed.

Now that I think about it, this was actually the direction we were going with Joe! Joe took tons of footage and interviewed us as ourselves! What was he going to do with that?

I understand the thought that this may be a cop out writing wise. A.D. Melville gives a good definition of cop out in the "Translator's Note" of his Metamorphoses: "some new-fangled system, more or less metrical, turning its back on achievements it is frightened to face." I'm not exactly what he's talking about, but it calls to mind Robert Pinsky's translation of The Inferno, which uses Yeatsian rhyme and loose iambic pentameter (really just 10-syllable lines) to render Dante's stricter terza rima.

Obviously, there are some gifted writers out there developing excellent made-for-TV serial fiction. Are we avoiding head-on competition with them in taking this route?

It's a good question and I don't know the answer.

A Good Disclipline to Impose

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

As we have loosely used Aristotle's Poetics as a guide in our decision making, I'm beginning to think we should keep as many irrational elements outside the scope of the play as possible.

Obviously, this goes against much of what I've described in the "Epic Finale." Ideally--as with the jawless ghost and the subterranean beast--we shouldn't have to rely on big bucks from Hollywood to make our vision a reality; we should convey it through other means such as speech, like how Teiresias comes back to the square and explains how crazy the birds were acting as he was sitting on the seat of augury.

Showing the birds tearing each other apart would amount to something Aristotle would describe as being "beyond the scope of human understanding" and therefore not proper to drama. Euripides, by having a god (Dionysus) explain a few things at the beginning of The Bacchae, violates this principle.

To the greatest extent possible, I'd like deaths and all irrational elements occur either hidden from view or outside the scope of the drama. I think imagining our story as a play (musical would be fine too!) would be a good discipline to impose. Obviously, we are writing an epic or saga just as much as a drama, but, for both practical and artistic reasons, I think we should attempt to consciously limit ourselves in the special effects department.

Odysseus at the court of Alcinous by Francesco Hayez.

Having a frame story with someone telling those irrational/beyond-the-scope-of-human-understanding parts of the story--as Odysseus did in the court of King Alcinous--would be one way to accomplish this straddling of epic and tragic poetry. Blurring the lines between hallucination and reality--as in Death of a Salesman--would be yet another way.

Despite the story's expansiveness, I think we should come up with a way of unifying the plot and perhaps even condensing the amount of time that will have actually passed. Is there a 12-step program in which these stories are being told? Is it all happening in Arthur's mind while strapped to the stretcher headed down to the ECT room? Is it a series of letters that are read by Josie Lazarus, perhaps while we focus on her more down-to-earth drama (whatever that is)?

Bottom line, could we accomplish the scripting of this story observing the unities and using a minimum of what Aristotle would term "spectacle"?

Again, for both practical and artistic reasons, I think our pilot--even for a TV program--should be highly doable on stage.

Jo's Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 25 June 2014.

Makes sense to me. There's no need to show visions; they can be described, or we can just show the repercussions of the experiences.

Jo's story is useful as a frame.

My one reservation about making the moment before ECT the frame is that it seems to shift the question of whether Arthur is a mystic or a madman too heavily in the direction of madness.

Graham Greene

Actually, it's more that that's the central problem.

If the whole story gets swept into a madman's hallucination, any healing that happens for Jo, Will, and Arthur becomes just as absurd as the voyage into the volcano, and postmodernism triumphs over Catholicism.

I don't want a neat package in the end despite my Apollonian leanings.

But I do want something like the end of The Power and the Glory, where God clearly wins but the victory doesn't look like the sort of victory people try to impose on the world. The mess we create for ourselves is still a mess, but there is a clear source of hope and redemption when you pull back the veil of human chaos.

If the frame is Jo, that gives us a type of objective narrator on the epic front and a type of chorus and foil on the dramatic front. I'm open to a lot of ideas right now, but I'd guess another advantage is that the story could still take the multiple untrustworthy narrators approach if she goes around interviewing various people about their experiences.

A False Vision of God

The following is excerpted from the June 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Saint Augustine in his Study by Botticelli

I like that last part about the "blade of grass." 

That's C.S. Lewis artistically rendering the Augustinian doctrine of evil not having being in the usual sense. Elsewhere, Lewis describes the damned soul as being "nearly nothing." Heaven is literally experiencing the Source of Being in the fullest possible way. So it would be a superabundant, unexcelled experience of being. Hell, since it is the experience of being cut off from the Source of Being, must be as close to nonexistence as is possible for created beings with immortal souls.

The fact that Lena made Will pledge to make Arthur famous on her deathbed makes it a no-brainer that she's going to Purgatory at best. 

Saints don't say those sorts of things!

Will:

True. 

I think what makes Lena seem saintly to a modern audience is that she's always doing good things. But, then again, she's an old-world Catholic. She might have more fear of God than an all-consuming love of Him. 

She might think that she's protecting the family from its wealth through her acts of charity. That fear would be consistent with a false vision of God as a scale measurer, a pretty common misconception. Still, I think she genuinely loves the poor and sees Christ in them, although not perfectly or mystically. Perhaps she does it because of her own childhood poverty. So this loving the person of Christ in the poor keeps her from going to Hell, while her bargaining and manipulating is what needs to be burnt off on Purgatory. 

Although the family doesn't really need Arthur to become a star for financial reasons, maybe she also wants to protect Arthur from the bullies or wants him to show the world. 

Or maybe she has been partially converted to the gospel of the American Dream as preached by Stan.

Just Try to Be a Good Person

C.S. Lewis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 June 2014.

I like it a lot. All of it. Having Stan in Hell works on so many levels, and Will's vision of his torment before committing murder would account for years of Will shutting down, giving up on redeeming Arthur through the American Dream, and viewing himself as damned.

And paradoxically, understanding the reality of Hell could move him to believe in the reality of Heaven.

Also, in a world that has watered down Catholicism to "just try to be a good person," having the "saintly" Lena in Purgatory--not in the Heaven where all mothers go by virtue of being mothers-- fortifies the morality play aspect of the story.

I also love that both lend credence to the glowing lodestone vision of The American Dream!

In the midst of all this, however, Heaven is still much bigger than Hell.  In The Great Divorce, a tour guide on the outskirts of Heaven shows a tourist on his way from Purgatory and Hell that the whole vastness of the Hell he had experienced was only the size of a hole left behind from plucking a blade of grass in Heaven.

That doesn't minimize Hell...it just suggests the enormity of Heaven.

That Ocean of Flames

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

I guess I'm more cynical than you are (and impressed by the book I mentioned).

Last Judgment (detail) by Hans Memling

I would continue to consider the idea, though, from the artistic perspective. As I said, it has already figured prominently as a motif. One possibility would be that Arthur had a vision of his father and/or mother. One of the more disturbing visions that occurs again and again in Fr. Schouppe's book is when a friend or family member is seen in Hell's torment. Hell seems to be an all too common destination for people.

If this is true, many of us are in serious danger of experiencing something way, way, way more agonizing than anything on this earth and--oh yeah--for all eternity. Here's one from the book, which is highly readable due to it being more or less a catalogue of shocking accounts:

St. Peter Damian speaks of a worldling who lived only for amusement and pleasure. To no purpose was he advised to think of his soul; to no purpose was he warned that, by following the life of the wicked rich man, he should reach the same end; he continued his guilty life unto death. He had scarcely ceased to live when an anchorite (hermit) knew of his damnation. He saw him in the midst of a fiery pool; it was an immense pool like a sea, in which a great number of people, howling with despair, were plunged. They were striving to gain the shore, but it was guarded by pitiless dragons and demons, who prevented them from coming near it, and hurled them far back into that ocean of flames.

Could Stan Witkowski be in Hell? Perhaps Will has a vision of that down in the tunnels as he tries to retrace his steps and figure out who he killed. That could have some interesting resonances. We could create a Lazarus and the rich man type story, with the buried worker going to Heaven (not "Abraham's bosom" as in the original) and Stan Witkowski going to Hell. Could Stan be in Hell and Lena be in Purgatory, with Lena returning to warn Arthur about her deathbed pact with Will because, from her now-eternal perpective, she sees where it leads. I like at least one character to go Hell, and not just for being an out-and-out villain, like Farthington or perhaps Steffi. Perhaps Stan followed the American Dream straight to Hell.

In the book, the damned are able to do actual damage to the living. For example, one licentious man came back to a rich woman he had been flirting with and grabbed her wrist, burning it all the way down to the bone, such that she had to wear a wide bracelet the rest of her days. These damned are not trying to save anyone usually, they're just pissed as Hell (literally!).

As Miller puts it, "the possibility of victory must be present in tragedy." I think the inverse of that statement is also true: "the possibility of defeat must be present in comedy." As you've mentioned before, you want this to be a comedy, but we need some darker shadows to ground and provide relief for the redemptive elements.

A Natural Conduit of the Eternal

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 June 2014.

You are right about Hell, but I think you're underselling the startling power of beauty in the postmodern age.

Virgin and Child appearing to St. Francis of Assisi

I was struck by something my sister told me. A kid asked one of her mentors if there was anything left that could shock him in an art exhibit. He said one thing: genuine beauty.

I've never thought that Arthur's words inspire anything other than fandom. It makes sense to me that hardened skeptics could see visions of Hell through Arthur, but it's always made sense to me that people with soft but unsatisfied hearts could have visions of heaven or Mary through Arthur.

Also, these visions are nothing Arthur can communicate particularly well; my thought is that he sometimes unknowingly discharges them through touch. People who touch him sometimes see The Sweet World--or, if we follow your suggestion, Hell.

I've always seen Arthur as having miraculous powers but not because of anything he does.

It's really more that he is a natural conduit of the eternal, and because of that, he naturally gravitates toward the beautiful and doesn't fit in with earth-bound things. His mom's daily charity visits seemed completely natural to him. He didn't have to muster up some sort of virtue to appreciate their value. They just seemed like how things were done in The Sweet World, whereas the family cement business seemed like outer space.

Speaking of heaven and hell, I just read The Great Divorce...very helpful!