We Want Rome, Not Salt Lake City!

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



One final word.

I wanted to apply some of this thinking to an explanation of "Hey Rome." One of the concepts that has interested me lately is the fact that ours is the only persecuted religion that did not merely find a safe, uninhabited location to set up shop (e.g. Salt Lake City). Instead, Christ was crucified by Rome, then set up his Church in Rome. At the time, Rome had only one principle from which it derived its privilege and prominence, that of brute power. And this is the important thing: Christianity did not engage Rome on the playing field of this principle, the stacked deck of this principle. Christianity, in other words, did not beat Rome at its own game, did not engage its content.

In reading Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus," I've realized that he is almost entirely right, that he takes the questions raised by existentialism and modernity through to their most coherent conclusion. But this intellectual victory takes place inside the stacked deck of a certain line of thinking, the context in which this content is undeniably true. I can't quite describe the parameters of this context, but I know that, in addition its sole axiom being that of humiliated thought, it also is an overwhelmingly white male club.

I'm likening the unassailability of this philosophical position to the political one enjoyed by Rome.

It sometimes seems like we are going to live with this principle of humiliated thought--which sets the stage for the murderous dictatorship of relativism--forever, putting God and creation further and further in our rearview mirror until it altogether disappears.

I'm sure a lot of people felt the same way about Rome.

But could it be that Christ has a similar takeover in mind, one that will use the basic root and branch system established by the prior order? God uses Cyrus, Caiaphas, Rome, etc., why not juggernauts like Planned Parenthood or Dan Gilbert? I have come to believe that this is the mysterious way God operates; it is one of my most compelling reasons for belief right now. So much more definitive of a victory than beating down one's enemy.

What would it look like if the Church showed up, not in "the promised desert / wasteland that you set aside for me"--i.e. the postmodern version of Salt Lake City--but rather smack dab in the middle of the postmodern Rome of relativism, hyperreality, or whatever, metastasizing through all its mechanisms and making it entirely its own ("one day I'll make you my home sweet home")?

I think McLuhan had some ideas about the end of the Gutenbergian era with its stacked deck individualism, linear thinking, privacy, repression, detachment, specialization, modern militarism, etc.--all of which put non-Latin, Teutonic Europe in the driver's seat of modern history. McLuhan saw modern media as retribalizing us, and, if we can take his devout Catholicism as a data point in his philosophy, he saw the Church as the best bet for transitioning (back?) into this paradigm. Interestingly, he saw non-white peoples (bye bye northern European Übermensch and all your awful offspring) as being more able to capitalize on the values of this dawning era. Incidentally, he also believed that the new tribal values would ultimately be highly conservative but consensus, as they are in non-alphabetic, tribal societies.

Some I am sure are not finding any of this humorous or thought-provoking anymore. Facebook and Twitter pages have gotten very mirthless. Recent events have made almost everyone (myself included) take sides as drummers or warriors such that we can no longer comprehend one another (cf. Tower of Babel). But I continue to think what we are doing on all fronts is important.

I also hope some of this answers your questions about why we are engaging modernity so much. Although you may not like reading Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, or Baudrillard like I do, you do like Don DeLillo, who work posits similar theses. I don't think that's because these musings "spark my intellect without engaging my soul." Rather, it's because we have the universe's most commodious frame, that we can comprehend everything "according to the whole." And that perhaps this is one small way in which God as "All in All" is made manifest. We want Rome, not Salt Lake City!

The idea is to keep hanging around getting fed to the lions until the emperor has a vision.

Weezer was the First Weezer Tribute Band

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



Thanks for the generous response. So many thoughts. First one a statement from Bryce: "Weezer was the first Weezer tribute band."

I like your balanced Christian cynicism of both parties as well as of the trash talkers on Facebook. It's important to hear. I do find it terrifying to see the left unmoored from its foundations, first and foremost, from the inviolable dignity of the human person. This is not a new development. Camus saw this clearly in his own day:

Traditionally, the left has always been at war against injustice, obscurantism, and oppression. It was always thought that those phenomena were interdependent. The idea that obscurantism can lead to justice, the national interest to liberty, is quite recent. The truth is that certain intellectuals of the left (not all, fortunately) are today hypnotized by force and efficacy as our intellectuals of the right were before and during the war. Their attitudes are different, but the act of resignation is the same. The first wanted to be realistic nationalists; the second want to be realistic socialists. In the end they betray nationalism and socialism alike in the name of a realism henceforth without content and adored as pure, and illusory, technique of efficacy.

This is a temptation that can, after all, be understood. But still, however the question is looked at, the new position of the people who call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in saying: certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the direction, which cannot be justified, of history. Hence there are presumably privileged executioners, and privileged by nothing...But this is a thesis which, personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up against it the traditional point of view of what has been hitherto called the left: all executioners are of the same family.  ("The Artist and His Time")

Substitute some details from that first paragraph--namely the idea that killing the weakest of the weak can somehow lead to liberation--and you have the contentless progressivism of modern times (Baudrillard called it "moribund"). No longer can it be said, as it was in Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

Camus also lamented this same divorce from an atheistic perspective in his essay "Helen's Exile":

It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul for contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred to a spiritual nature and thereby preserved a certain fixity. With God dead, there remains only history and power. For some time the entire effort of our philosophers has aimed solely at replacing the notion of human nature with that of situation, of replacing ancient harmony with the disorderly advance of chance or reason's pitiless progress. Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly. For the Greeks, values pre-existed all action, of which they definitely set the limits. Modern philosophy places its values at the end of action. They are not but are becoming, and we shall know them fully only at the completion of history.

Some of this sounds a lot like your statement "the less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death)." This is one of the guiding principles I've adopted from you, that the artist has a very particular role to play and that no one in a time like this will appreciate that role. More Camus:

We must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty. The long patience, the strength, the secret cunning such service calls for are the virtues that establish the very renascence we need...the era of chairbound artists is over. But we must reject bitterness. One of the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in truth he hears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all. This is where art, against its enemies, justifies itself by proving precisely that it is no one's enemy. By itself art could probably not produce the renascence which implies justice and liberty. But without it, that renascence would be without forms and, consequently, would be nothing. Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Chinua Achebe has some great statements about this in his interview with Bill Moyers, maintaining an activist orientation while at the same time differentiating the role of the poet or storyteller from that of the "war drummer" and "warrior":

Well, if you look at the world in terms of storytelling, you have the warrior, you have the war drummer; the man who drums up the people first of all, the man who agitates the people, I call him the drummer, And then you have the warrior, who goes forward, you know, and fights. But you also have the storyteller, who takes over to recount the event. And this is one who survives, who outlives all the others. It is the storyteller, in fact, that makes us what we are, that creates history...The memory which the survivors must have, otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

And of course, implicit in his statements, is the fact that his own countrymen almost assassinated him in the post-colonial period. Poetry needs to somehow straddle this fine line between activism and neutrality; its allegiance is never for sale even in the most polarizing of situations (cf. also Yeats's "Easter, 1916": "Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream").

As Camus writes, "In my mind, neither one is ever separated from the other and I measure the greatness of the artist (Molière, Tolstoy, Melville) by the balance he managed to maintain between the two."

Buddy Holly

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



Speaking of commercials, have you seen the Honda commercial in which the family in the minivan has a singalong to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer?

It encapsulates more than anything I've ever seen, I think, what I hate about being a white person. I've been thinking about race in our story a lot, and it has an undead nature to it, as well. Is it possible that the most effective way for our story to confront problems of white privilege and racism is to keep the discussion muted and in the fringes of the story? I think that's the way whiteness tends to operate, and it seems to be the story of suburban Detroit and Henry Ford's urban planning.

I think white people tend to win a false victory over their feelings of racism by carefully controlling their exposure to non-white people and culture. That way, the white person gets to have all sorts of feelings of love and admiration for people and cultural artifacts that aren't white while never having to engage, at least for very long, in any personally challenging interpersonal or social experience.

I can listen to NWA and side with Ice Cube without having to deal with 90's Compton, for instance. I think of how metro-Detroit hipsterism works. If you are from Birmingham, you become cooler by moving to Royal Oak, but Ferndale trumps Royal Oak, Hamtramck trumps Ferndale, Corktown trumps Hamtramck, and the Cass Corridor trumps Corktown.

But at some point, you're less of a poseur if you are just an ignorant yokel from Wyandotte who just stays in Wyandotte.

Simultaneously Villain and Savior

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



I do see why we absolutely must engage the concepts of simulacra, the undead nature of language, and the secular worldview that derives from Camus and Sartre. I get why we need to engage Nietzsche, too, and any time I forget, I've got Planned Parenthood to remind me. Speaking of Derrida, I was thinking about your last major email, and the value in keeping Farthington "of indeterminant ethnicity" (I think those are DeLillo's words about Willie Mink; Jack Gladney also is frustrated by Orest Mercator for the same reason) and of having him set "indefinite longevity" as a goal.

Orwell talks about this idea that when Big Brother needs 2+2 to equal 4, it equals 4, and when he needs it to equal 5, it equals 5, but that's not exactly what Derrida is talking about.

Philosophically, we live in the age of O'Brien: the unborn child is a child when society needs her to be a child, a fetus when it needs her to be a fetus, tissue when it needs her to be tissue, a clump of cells when it needs her to be a clump of cells. But all we're really doing is doublethink: choosing temporary meanings.

Still, our increasing tendency to keep all options open approaches Derrida, where language is like a zombie--resistant to binary oppositions of words like "alive" and "dead." And for some reason, the more digital/binary our existence becomes, the more our communication becomes undead.

I think about this with that horrible Chevy commercial that borrows its plot from Sophie's choice: a mom must choose which child goes in the Chevy and which child goes in the car with inadequate airbag protection. The salesman who gives her the choice is also her savior, because he lets both kids go in the Chevy. So he is simultaneously villain and savior and neither and both...we can't sort the two out.

This undead thing works well for Farthington, who may or may not be alive, and who communicates digitally.

Polishing the Turd of Nihilism

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

Camus in Stockholm

One thing I have been wondering about the project is why the French matter so much to it.

In my mind, they matter because the project needs to take on the philosophies of our age and expose their limits. Graham Greene nailed this approach in The Power and the Glory: a very weak, broken, and ineffective priest fizzles out and a noble, hard-working atheist lieutenant triumphs, and yet the triumph is empty and everything the priest stood for lives on or is resurrected in others.

I've come to see Arthur as this triumph of the Church, a type of lodestone of the Church. In and of himself we see both beauty and failure. His perfection doesn't lead anybody anywhere; his brokenness does, because the brokenness is completed by Christ. On the other hand, Farthington and Steffi are obsessed with perfect systems--the ultimate manipulations or the fruition of grand ideologies.

Somewhere in between are the French, who I think are about polishing the turd of nihilism. Camus and Sartre try to give us some sort of way to be Christian without Christ. Baudrillard and Derrida delight in exposing the limits of language. There's a poetry and a beauty to what they write, but with the former, I see misplaced faith in the lack of God, and in the latter, I realize I'm not chasing shadows of truth, just shadows of shadows of shadows. Of course, I'm not well-read enough in any of them, but out of all of them, Camus is the only one who holds my attention for long. I worry about things that spark my intellect without engaging my soul; I prefer the combination of the two.

And really, I worry that our project gets mired down in confronting these philosophies and that we don't direct enough energy toward its core, which in my eyes is evangelization. We have written far more criticism about the project than we have created the project itself, or rather, somehow the criticism has become the project itself!

We have a lot about exposing the limits of the world, but not enough drawing people toward the beauty of God. Perhaps I'm blaming French philosophy for this effect because it is the effect French philosophy has on me.

A Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever

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

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake

The Planned Parenthood stuff has been eating at me, too.

I think in the case of the elected officials and billionaires who back them, we've got a case of human sacrifice to evil gods in exchange for power. I also think of Orwell, as usual: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."

As far as supporters go, I think we have two camps: one that sees abortion as a necessary evil and the health care services Planned Parenthood provides as an indispensable good (all of which can be swallowed by deconstructing or rationalizing what the preborn are or by looking the other way), and the Nietzscheans, who basically rank weak, dependent life as inferior to stronger, independent life, and an ideal as mattering more than a person.

In this case, we have the left's version of the right's frequent justification of war: if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. In terms of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood, I think their biggest mistake was bring Cecil the Lion into the discussion. They increased the polarization of people who might have been on the verge of converting. I think the videos were eye-opening; it's this stupid memifying effect of Facebook where people rejoice in their rightness and triumph over their enemies' wrongness that really ticks me off.

It's something I'd like to tie to the Sea Devil.

One of the things I love about Catholicism is that we're all sinners, we all have to enter the Church on our knees, and we are all elevated by God the Father's gift and sacrifice of His Son. We've got so many parents who want children and so many kids who are destroyed. I think the right tends to be unjust in not offering up enough support to single mothers, prenatal care, food and medical support, and adoption aid, and the left tends to be unjust in the same freaking way, except they pretend to be sympathetic by saying, "It's okay: we can make the pregnancy go away and offer all sorts of ways of pretending a child isn't a child."

So the right dumps you after you have the kid, and the left dumps the kid and then you after dumping the kid. The left is the more devious: if you look straight at what they are doing, you see the support they are willing to offer women is the extermination of their children.

In my world of paranoia about the ultra powerful, though, I have two thoughts about the right. One is that they need to consistently look like they are fighting abortion and deliberately keep on losing the fight so that they hold onto the Catholic vote indefinitely. The other is the fact that the ultra powerful are currently working on living indefinitely, which means they had to create a gigantic middle class to grow the sort of wealth necessary to fund all the technological advantages they hope to exploit.

And now that America has produced that sort of wealth, they can begin shrinking the middle class again, mainly through college debt. Meanwhile, they have helped rebrand the Nazi-style research necessary to live indefinitely as women's health, nanotech as cancer research, interfaces between human and artificial intelligence as progress, etc. In education, we've had to deemphasize the humanities so nobody has too much attachment to the human experience as we've known it.

The less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death).

Vacation Settings

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

St. Jerome Reading in the Countryside by Giovanni Bellini

I'm probably due for an update here. I've been going through a lot of stuff lately as you might have gathered from the vacation settings I placed on the Farthington email account.

I was running on empty somewhat with the project. I really feed off you guys ("the image of the cannibal"?) and wasn't getting a lot of interplay for a long while there. Then, my spirit got kind of broken by all this Planned Parenthood stuff. I haven't fully discerned the spirits that are at work there, but it's having a big effect on me. I'm reading a chapter from the book Saintly Solutions on anger. I guess the good news is that I am in good company; the bad news is that my anger is probably the front runner in the quest to utterly destroy me. The sheer horror of it all has sent me fleeing back to the Church after a good amount of time spent kicking aimlessly around town. I need to see nuns and hosts and crucifixes and children and anything else to exorcise these demons, to remind me that God wins.

I'm sorry for the message. It was my immature way of despairing of the project entirely. I still am living with some of that confusion. I'm at a Manley Hopkins-type moment of wanting to throw all my pre-conversion writing in the burn barrel.

In the midst of all this, Max reached out to me as soon as he got home from New Orleans wanting to work on the project as soon as and as much as possible. That enthusiasm was contagious and we worked together a couple nights ago, going through the Joe Lazarus material together. It is an interesting selection of songs, not exactly palatable to a wide audience. I think all of those songs, with the exception of "Hey Rome," need transposing and/or arranging. So Max and I are going to do some work on those and see if they come out playable/listenable.

I could use your perspective on things at this point, your thinking on the direction of the project as a whole and your role in it. I'm full of doubts about everything.

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)?

Bait on the Hook

The following is an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 July 2015.

Detail from Quicken Ye Loa(dsto)n(e)s While Ye May, Mr. Gilber by Liza Polaskey

Quick(en) comment due to shortage of time.

I wanted to reiterate the awesomeness of this drawing by the way. I am continuing to work through it and it involves a lot of documentary watching.

I want this tshirt!!!

I love this guy's posts!!!

so my friend don gilber got his team in the basketball championship so i just wanna say good luck to lejohn jame and i hope he bring don gilber a trophy or your fired
Posted by Underachieving Detroit Hipster Guy on Sunday, June 7, 2015

I love all your suggestions for movies. I've worked through most of Kate Levy's videos, especially the shocking "Gilbertville." Just looking at some preview materials for The Institute and The Eraserhead Stories, I can see how they are required viewing for the project.

And I appreciate your heartening words (riffing off David Lynch's concept that "unrelated thoughts" are our bait on the hook): "the more we dangle, the greater the likelihood we have a catching a HUGE fish."

And of course the drawing!

I have so many other thoughts which will eventually be forthcoming, but thanks for this, tomodachi.

Characters Replaced by Chyrons

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



Wow!!!

I'm working my way through Kate Levy's videos. And I worked my way all the way through your incredible "handwritten response." I think you should use this for the Detroit Public Library commission.

Will, I guess I'm just talking about what you and I (Will and Art) have done in developing these characters. Back inside the story, yes, Arthur White is somehow graced with the power to stop this insanity. But it's just the way that I've hollowed myself out and created a third-order simulation that was

• first, a reflection of a profound reality (myself--everyone at first is a profound reality)
• second, a masking or denaturing of that profound reality
• and third, a masking of the absence of any remaining profound reality

I do think there's a possibility of moving into the fourth stage--that of the image having no relationship to reality whatsoever, of the simulcrum preceding reality--even in our project. I guess that might be the scenario if some real killer started dressing like Carlton Farthington in the mascot suit (cf. the Slender Man murders), but I'm not sure it will ever involve my identity per se. Arthur White is unmoored from the profound reality that was me (that I embalmed and keep in the glass coffin), but it is based on something. It is not (and will never be?) its own pure simulacrum.

But I see the ways in which a lot of us in this age manage to hollow ourselves out and then create a Disney version of ourselves, one that is easier to find Facebook profile pictures for. So, now, instead of seeing some 20-year-old kid sobbing through the night at a Vipassana meditation retreat, I can instead get some sleep, and show up as this character Arthur White, who can levitate! Instead of dealing with actual pirates, we have Pirates of the Caribbean! Instead of Detroit, we have--well, yes, Gilbertville--but also (sorry if this sounds too harsh) a resuscitation of the moribund principles of the Left, "simulation of scandal for regenerative ends":

Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality--that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism. One imputes this thinking the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn--it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc."--as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffice that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange).

The irony may be that, to the extent that our characters succeed, our own transition into the posthumous existence characterizing third-order simulation will be complete. We will be like the screaming characters near the end of Too Many Cooks who have been replaced by their chyrons. But our point is that this happens to everyone nowadays.

I know this isn't the story story, but by naming our characters after ourselves we almost guaranteed this problem would be a central one. The Baudrillardian collapse, implosion, short circuiting of "the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect, between subject and object" and, I would add, between artist and art.

...and between actor and character. Is this loss of perspectival space what Plato feared, McLuhan welcomed, Baudrillard lamented?

Gilbertsville

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 23 July 2015.

For explanation on Dan Gilbert as anti-democratic bully, check out this documentary by Detroit videographer Kate Levy. If you've only the time/patience/interest for one, Scene 4 has my vote:

Quicken Ye Loa(dsto)n(e)s While Ye May, Mr. Gilber

The following is an excerpt of a 23 June 2015 exchange between Art, Liza, and the group.

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

Quicken Ye Loa(dsto)n(e)s While Ye May, Mr. Gilber by Liza Polaskey

Art:

I'm wondering if the thousands of blog views on July 20 is a fluke and not Dan Gilbert's henchmen and web crawlers. 

Liza, are you in trouble with this guy? Are we in trouble with this guy? 

You said you were going to explain what the deal was with him and his "anti-democratic bullies." Given that probably half our readership is rabid Spartans who probably would like to believe in their richest, most powerful alumnus of all time, we should be ready to state our case, which I know little or nothing about. Of course, Gilbert's devotion to Cleveland and Draymond Green being a Golden State Warrior probably complicates the matter somewhat. 

Still, I'm wondering if we've triggered something like the Tulpa Theory here and, if so, are you and your sisters ready with your bows and arrows?

Liza:

Interesting. I may be mostly silent in the days preceding Saturday on account of an intensive Detroit Public Library commission, but I'll ponder the above as I work this evening. I'll also set aside some time to (way belatedly) scan my handwritten response to a foregone thread that slightly touches on Gilbert's personification of anti-democratic tendencies. If I've not sent it by 11 this evening, feel free to badger me and remind me of my promise. When I'm working in the flow, my temporal experience is greatly distorted and I lose grips on most everything else (including but by no means limited to: promises, time, space, basic human necessities and interactions). A simple, "Yoo-hoo, Liza, come back to earth..." shall probably suffice.  

I use personify in place of another word as I'm fairly convinced Gilbert is not a real human, but rather some sort of evolved virtual embryo with an advanced sensory connection to our reality. Somewhere along the way, however, he lost all contact to this reality due mostly in part to his immersive business model. His representation therefore not only precedes his reality, but it also produces his reality. Dun dun duuuun! 

Welcome to the third order of simulation, Detroit.  

Coming soon to a city near you...

Surging Up in the World

The following is an excerpt of a 20 July 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Jean-Paul Sartre in Venice

Will:

So you mean Arthur White the project, the world Arthur White inhabits--postmodernism, basically--not Arthur White the character? 

Your ideas about cloning in place of fertility remind me of one of my favorite archetypes: Frankenstein (played by Will Witkowski, Farthington, and Steffi Humboldt).

Art:

I do in fact mean Arthur White the character (and the other characters for that matter), who proceeds through something like Baudrillard's sign-order system toward eventual disintegration, a perversion of the Christian/Plotinian process, which instead radiates out from center to final and definitive fulfillment. 

I've just been contemplating the way in which this perverse radiation of identity becomes progressively more false with each iteration. And yes, it's very Frankenstein's monster. 

• First, there's just me at the center of this circle of identity, a confluence of a lot of crazy, improbable stuff 

• Then, I'm named. A lot of allusions and appropriations in that name. Overall, pretty good considering how much identity needed to be straddled; it's appropriately cacophonous, schizophrenic, unpronounceable. 

• Then, there's the Sartrean surging up in the world and defining myself: inclinations, affinities, traits. Some aspects get promoted and amplified such as spirituality, music, Italianness; others are downplayed or hidden. Also at this stage, there's the conscious appropriation/incorporation of aspects of other people's identities. 

• Then, there's these songs that I wrote, a further promotion and amplification of aspects of my personality at the expense of others. More incorporation of others' identity here as well. 

• Then, there's the whole story of Arthur White, which in some cases interpenetrates and/or precedes the previous step, the main idea being that Arthur is a spiritual and musical prodigy. More incorporation of others' identities here as well. 

• Then, there's all the radiations that occur thereafter: performances, posting, reposting, retweeting, etc. Also any interpretive meanings added by others (first by you all and then anyone else thereafter). Hell is other people, Allison?

I'm saying that there's something in this radiation of identity--going from original to faithful reflection to masking to pure simulation--that everyone experiences. I don't think the radiation itself is what is maleficent. But if God is not part of this process, then the process tends toward total disintegration: becoming a bloated, empty red giant that inevitably collapses in on itself. I guess that collapsing can be seen as a kind of reintegration, but not the kind you want. 

If, however, God is at the beginning, middle, and end of this process, then my radiation occurs in a fundamentally different way. I radiate out toward fulfillment without denaturing myself in the process. I radiate because it's in my nature to radiate, like God radiates without compromising His oneness. Luckily for me, God can break in at any point in this process. 

Incidentally, this radiation could also be seen from a more benign McLuhanesque perspective, in which we merely "caress" and make art of the mundane materials of a previous stage (the 70's, but also progressing from one bullet point to the next).

This is Hell

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 20 July 2015.

The Massacre of the Innocents by Giotto, Lower Church, Assisi

My question is how is Arthur White's predicament/plight like everyone else's in the electronic age? Except, perhaps, for those who have found some "narrow way."

I started this thought process contemplating our revelation of God through the Catholic faith. In my weakness, I tend to conceive of this in a Plotinian way:

• God the Father as The One, the Indivisible Source of All Being
• Then his only-begotten Son, what Plotinus called the "Intellectual Principle," the Word Made Flesh, consubstantial with the Father
• Then the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, Plotinus' "Soul," allowing us to cry out Abba Father in a spirit of adoption. It also begins the final age, a process of reintegration so to speak, first evidenced by the mass of humanity, scattered since Babel, hearing the apostles speaking in their own tongue.
• Then us, the Church, the Body of Christ. But also at this point becoming like little gods (Jn 10:34), radiating out, being fertile and multiplying, creating, procreating, proliferating. The ecstasy of this moment is captured by an exuberance of metaphors. Yes, we are the Body of Christ, but we are also the Bride of Christ, and this is the nuptial moment.
• Then "when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be All in All" (1 Cor 15:28).

Just like that. The whole story of the universe. Of course, this is one of those times bullet points just don't do it justice. But make it all cyclical and interpenetrating and mysterious and we should be in the neighborhood.

I think Arthur White examines the opposite path. Of course, there is no opposite to God, no dualistic universe. But if you'll pardon the semantic necessity, it goes something like this:

• Instead of God as the only source of our being, "God is dead"
• Instead of the Incarnation, the massacre of the innocents
• Instead of an infilling of the Holy Spirit, an emptying of minds, hearts, wombs, homes, public squares; our only principle is the steadfast maintenance of emptiness, a cacophony of inarticulate voices echoes in that emptiness
• Instead of fertility, spousal and conjugal imagery, we are left with the image of the clone, parthenogenesis, a recapitulation of my empty projects within my empty self, echoing that emptiness to all the world. A close second is the image of the cannibal--I'll leave you to work out the anti-Eucharistic meanings. Repost, retweet, embed!
• And instead of All-in-All, this all collapses back to the empty individual self, who, once all has been cannibalized and cloned, becomes next-to-nothing. This is Hell.

Without God as our source of being, we return back to the nothingness from which we were created (again, pardon the semantic difficulty of having to attach words like "from" to nothingness). But that which has been created cannot be fully destroyed. Thus, as C.S. Lewis somewhere explains, we exist in a state of next-to-nothingness.

I recognize it may not be entirely clear how all this relates to the project. I may try to explain what I'm thinking in a more practical sense in a later email.