Haunted by God (Part 6 of 6)

The following is one of a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

Art (and others),

Onward with your cc'ing. I remain in my silence as captivated as I was in my communication. As you know, Connor and I are now on day 11 of our dispersed camping excursion through the Keweenaw. We've slept alongside the Huron River, atop mountains, on the outskirts of ghost towns and Native American burial grounds and a long-ago abandoned Catholic cemetery, deep within a national forest, and under the stars on the stamp sands of Lake Superior.

It was on these sands, early this morning, that I came across a passage in The Writings of Dorothy Day in which she quotes Dostoevsky's Kirilov. "All my life," he says, I have been haunted by God."

That is the way it is on these mountains, along these riverbanks, in these woods, deep within these plantations of God. That feeling is everywhere around me here now. Nature, when not yet rearranged by man, reminds me more than anything else of this world just how it feels to be haunted by God. So, for the time being, I remain in the clouds of this thread and in the clouds of the Keweenaw.

What wealth to me this show has brought.

Liza 8/12/'15

Haunted by God (Part 5 of 6)

The following is one of a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

Dorothy Day-ly Intentions:

"Don't worry about being effective, just concentrate on being faithful to the truth." - The Long Loneliness

"The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up." - Interview with Time '75

"If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God." - The Catholic Worker

"Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington." - The Catholic Worker

Though Dorothy possessed the art of human contact, her autobiography is The Long Loneliness. All of us, she believed, have a yearning for love; deep down, buried beneath the clutter of our days, there was in every person the longing for community. But there was a loneliness that persisted even in the midst of other, the essential isolation that belonged to any commitment or vocation. There was a kind of loneliness, to which Christ invited his friends. Yet of his long loneliness, whe wrote in the words of Mary Ward, an 11th-century English nun, "The pain is very great, but very endurable, for he who lays on the burden also carries it."

Haunted by God (Part 4 of 6)

The following is one of a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

A New Society
from Easy Essays by Peter Maurin

To be radically right
is to go to the roots
by fostering a society
based on creed,
systematic unselfishness
and gentle personalism.
To foster a society
based on creed
instead of greed,
on systematic unselfishness
instead of systematic selfishness,
on gentle personalism
instead of rugged individualism,
is to create a new society
within the shell of the old.
Modern society
is in a state of chaos.
And what is chaos
if not lack of order?
Sociology
is not a science,
it is an art,
the art of creating order
out of chaos.
All founders of orders
made it their personal business
to try to solve the problems
of their own day.
If religious orders
made it their business
to try to solve the problems
of our own day
by creating order
out of chaos,
the Catholic Church
would be the dominant
social dynamic force

in our day and age.

Haunted by God (Part 3 of 6)

The following is one of a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

EASY ESSAYS by Peter Maurin

Speaking in a girls’ college
near St. Cloud, Minnesota,
I was told by Bishop Busch,
“Conservatives
are up in a tree
and you are trying
to go down to the roots.”

Poor Conservatives

After another meeting
I was told by a sociologist
“I still think
that you are a radical.”
And I told the sociologist
“We have to pity
those poor conservatives
who don’t know
what to conserve;
who find themselves
living in a changing world
while they do not know
how to keep it from changing
or how to change it
to suit themselves.”

Radically Wrong

Monsignor Fulton Sheen says:
“Modern society is based on greed.”
Father McGowan says:
“Modern society
is based on systematic selfishness.”
Professor John Dewey says:
“Modern society
is based on rugged individualism.”
When conservatives
try to conserve a society
based on greed,
systematic selfishness
and rugged individualism
they try to conserve something
that is radically wrong,
for it is built
on a wrong basis.
And when conservatives
try to conserve
what is radically wrong
they are also
radically wrong.

Haunted by God (Part 2 of 6)

The following is one of a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

Not Liberals but Radicals

by Peter Maurin

The word liberal is
used in Europe in a
different way from the
way it is used in
America. In Europe a
liberal is a man who
believes in liberty
without knowing what
to do with it. Harold
Laski accuses liberals
of having used their
intelligence without
knowing what to do
with it.

Liberals are too
liberal to be
radicals. To be a
radical

is to go to the roots. Liberals
don't go to the roots; they
only

scratch the surface. The
only way to go to the roots
is to bring religion into
education, into politics, into
business. To bring religion
into the profane is the best
way to take profanity out of
the profane. To take
profanity out of the profane
is to bring sanity into the
profane. Because we aim to
do just that we like to be
called radicals.

Haunted by God (Part 1 of 6)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it illuminated and in its entirety, following Liza's directions.

Quick notes: 

1. First "response" attached. Begin reading on the page addressed to Art (& others), move left, and then move on to second attachment as a continuation of first attachment. In explanation of quoted excerpts: I've been absorbed in The Catholic Worker lately and have a newfound fascination with Peter Maurin, namely his Easy Essays. Worth checking out if incognizant and/or interested in Catholic social justice warriors.
2. Response to most recent e-mails in the works. Patience is appreciated and admired. This here human hand sure don't move as swift and mighty as that there information technology. 
3. I wrote these by hand to avoid screen time, yet here I am breaking this very rule through these "quick" notes. The machine wins again. I'll beat it next time, I swear.

The Doo Doo Chasers

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 August 2015.

Bootsy Collins

I've been watching a documentary on P-Funk, and there's a big section on the influence of the group on other groups that makes me think of their influence on us in this project.

I think P-Funk, Frank Zappa, and Devo were the first major bands in my life that made me love high-concept in music. I've seen P-Funk and its different permutations more than any other group in my life. The best show I ever saw was Bootsy's New Rubber Band at Industry in Pontiac. I was in the front row, and Bootsy saw I was so into it, he came down off of the stage mid-song and hugged me, then hopped back on stage. I was baptized in Bootsy sweat. At one point, he told us all he was going to run around the room and and hug everybody. He said his security guards said you can't do that--you need protection. He said this is Detroit. These are my people. They're all the protection I need. At the end of the show, they shut off all the instruments and led us in a chant of "Keep the funk alive." All the members of the band came off the stage and gave the women in the audience roses. They left in darkness. There was no encore--we wanted one, but we also knew there was no way to add to what they already put on stage.

I think that story plays into our desire in the project to bring everybody into it...to turn people into characters in the drama. So much of the framework of P-Funk is rooted in this idea that artists must draw people into a total environment (visual art, music, ritual, writing, etc.) that incessantly shines a flashlight on the falsity of the world we live in and guides people toward the transcendent. Allegory, myth-making, and ritual draw people into the mothership that guides people toward the transcendent...they meet people in both places that we all live and make us look at both...the earthly and the heavenly. I think my desire to take on a character is rooted to some extent in Starchild and Sir Nose. Will is largely a Sir Nose character, and Will and Arthur's story is sort of an inversion of the story of Sir Nose and Starchild...through much of the story, instead of Starchild curing Sir Nose by hitting him with the Bop Gun, our Sir Nose zaps our Starchild with electroconvulsive therapy after years of trying to keep him from swimming. But the two stories will end up the same...our Sir Nose is eventually horrified by his actions and repents and tries to follow the lead of the mangled Starchild.

I was listening to "The Doo Doo Chasers" this morning, and it is interesting to me how in Funkadelian terms, our project is a bit constipated. Free your mind and your ass will follow, but in our case, it seems like we let our minds wander really, really free, and as I've mentioned before, they too frequently detach from our asses. There's something in George Clinton's model where he just constantly was in motion, writing music, recording performing...and then within all of that action, the ideas came together and grew around the action. Our action tends to follow the thought, but our thought to action ratio is very high to very low--or the thought is the action, in the case of the blog. I'm really excited for the album. I really liked the last show, too--it had that atmosphere of total involvement, or close to total involvement for the people who didn't leave after Iceland! Even that is a type of involvement, though...the first show didn't have that as much, and the open mic was kind of a spectacle--sit back and watch the weirdos until the next acoustic guitar act comes up (which was also super fun--don't get me wrong!). I think that idea of Arthur White vacation tours makes a ton of sense. I also wonder about how most of our medium is the Internet and small stage rather than the radio, record player, and concert hall.

I should get to work. There's more to think about, though.

I'm Turning Myself to a Demon

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

Emily Dickinson

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

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

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

How tempting to fall back into the old polarities!

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

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
by Fleet Foxes  

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

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

Art Art

The Devil We are Possessed By

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

Flannery O'Connor

Look to this Flannery O'Connor quote as to how to be a religious artist in the modern and postmodern age:

The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common--a distrust of the abstract, a respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together. But I don't believe we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one. (Spiritual Writings)

I would say this is more than a modest achievement now (maybe it was more modest in her day). The vast majority of us don't believe that our world is possessed by a demon at all. Most people think that history is headed in a progressive direction analogous to evolution (as in "my views on the topic have evolved"). Thus, the weak-ass atheists we've seen crop up in recent decades. That's why I find the existentialists so refreshing: they realize that the death of God means anguish. This naive crop is like a throwback to the Enlightenment, coasting on the fumes of Judeo-Christian morality and gloating like they've staked out something new.

I think the polarization that we experience right now in our society is one of the aspects of the devil that possesses us. As long as our resistance against him is divided, he will never be recognized for what he is. I should state outright that I personally believe this is an actual, ancient demon that we're up against. And I think that art is uniquely equipped to help us glimpse his face. What St. John of the Cross said about spiritual visions is doubly true of reason, argumentation, and rhetoric: all of these happen in an arena among which the devil can "insinuate himself."

For some reason, artists and poets are able to intuit spiritual realities that would otherwise require passing through the dark nights of the soul to apprehend.

Unharvested

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



I think you're right on all counts.

As you saw, Max and I practiced all the Joe Lazarus songs, as well as the songs "One and Only" and "Centerstage." My only thought is that those last two really don't fit musically or lyrically. Especially if we're going for a What's Going On kind of dynamic, I almost would like to leave those two out (do your soul a favor and listen to the entire thing right now). What's Going On only clocks in at around 36 minutes, but of course it has that unity that makes it feel like a whole universe opening up every time you listen.

The Joe Lazarus songs, inasmuch as they are the only songs we have written together, have a totally unique character. In fact, I think they are important in that they are an emblem of the project as a whole: the synthesis of Will and Art, will and art, definitude and indefinitude, being and nothingness, Apollo and Dionysus, who knows what else. Perhaps Joe Lazarus, Holy Spirit like, exists in the relationship between us.

Max is on fire by the way. I have this compulsive desire to harness and harvest him in all his youthful enthusiasm. Need to just let the guy flourish in whatever way he wants. Hilariously (okay, sort of dark humor), he wants to start a new documentary. I've informed him of the apparent dangers of such an undertaking. We're basically just getting any and all footage we can. Here's some from last night. Not sure what any of this is for, but I think we again need that Robert Frost "Unharvested" attitude:

Unharvested

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

All Things New

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Also, I was trying to figure out in the last show why Arthur still cares about Carlton Farthington or Iceland.  I was content with the idea that we don't really know the nature of Arthur's mission right now, that it is inscrutable and that hearing the beauty of his music and seeing him come back into his powers would make more sense than some logical explanation for his behavior.

But in light of "Behold, I make all things new," maybe the idea is that Arthur is part of God's plan in transforming everything Farthington set in motion, everything the lodestone set in motion. In this regard, this intuition I've had that Arthur becomes the new lodestone makes sense. It also fits the Arthurian notion, that Arthur isn't so much a heroic protagonist as the figure around whom things happen. Maybe recreating the Iceland concert heralds "all things new" when the original concert heralded "turbulent reversals."

As far as the morality play goes, here is the closest thing I see to an allegorical structure.  Of course, we don't have simple allegory and shouldn't, but whatever...I'll just say what's on my mind.

• Arthur:  the herald of "all things new"
• Stan, Will:  the rise and fall of the American Dream
• Farthington:  science, psychology, and media ecology as false religions
• Steffi:  digital existence and postmodern nihilism
• The Benefactor/Victoria Woolf/Leif Erikson's sister/the lodestone: the hold and resurgence of myth and paganism

Back to Arthur--some priest friends of mine have explored the idea privately (they are worried this might not be theologically accurate, but it seems pretty valid) that Christ seems to say over and over again that he prefers repentant sinners to people who have never fallen in the face of sin. It would probably make sense that if Arthur is the herald of All Things New, that he himself must walk a path of being made new, that his youth should be full of promise and blessing, and that all that promise and blessing must be smashed through his own failures and the sins of his people and culture. Then he should be brought to glory through Christ, not through some modern notion of "getting back on track" or "being his best self."

A transformation in Arthur, then, would not so much be about getting his act together, but in getting a glimpse behind the curtain that God has ordained his life to be a witness. In this regard, we end up with the existentialist issue with the absurd, which is why we must engage the French (and Kierkegaard and the Russians and Nietzsche of course).  We also engage Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory: the notion that evil is so evil that good seems to be a lie, and good is so good that evil seems to be a mistake, and the notion that even a dark, fizzling out world can be the shadow of a glorious divine plan beyond our comprehension.

This is a completely messed up thought, but we might be on the verge of making the What's Going On of our age!  How crazy that this is the path that may lead us there.  It absolutely fits.

Laughing Song

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Laughing Song by William Blake

Thanks for the clarification. I envy how well-read you are! My dream this summer has been to lie on the beach with a stack of books for a few days on end. Hasn't happened yet! I think I'm relying to frequently on biases I formed a decade or two ago...when I got what I perceived as the big picture, I stopped looking at the details, to my discredit.

I really like the shift you made in "Hey Rome" toward the idea that Rome goes from the seat of the oppressors of Christ to the seat of his Church on earth, that Christ can use all of human absurdity and turn it into divine justice, mercy, and love, all of which appear absurd from the context of our own absurd perversions of these things.

Your discussion actually verges on two things I was hoping for a long time ago in the story: some sort of truth that Arthur White the character can deliver to mankind both in the story and through the project, and some sort of homage to medieval morality plays.

At this point, I don't think Arthur has to have some profound wisdom, but as an enigmatic and seeming focal point in the story, there should be something in him that consistently points toward God's grace. If there is a phrase for it, it's my favorite line from Revelations: Behold, I make all things new. Rome is one of the great emblems we have of Christ's words. In that regard, this album should point upwards and carry this message of the man-made collapsing and being transformed through Christ.

I see a few things happening here.

One is that Will, through decades of suffering, is in the process of reconsidering most of his assumptions and has the humility to encourage his brother to make the album completely on Arthur's terms to the point of bowing out of it if that's what Arthur wants. And then, to steal from The Wife of Bath's Tale, Arthur invites him in, so that Will plays a supporting role instead of a controlling one. I think "Centerstage" makes sense on this album within the theme of "Behold, I make all things new." My songs tend to rip on America, but they don't hit the personal enough. "One and Only" might also work.  By the way, "One and Only" is very Songs of Innocence to me: "In my dreams I heard the sweet song of a bird, and it left me reeling with a happy feeling."

LAUGHING SONG

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!’
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha ha he!’