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.