Channeling a Horror Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 28 October 2015.

A Tale from The Decameron by John William Waterhouse

I agree with everything you've said.

I'm just channeling a horror story right now. Is Arthur White like the The Decameron or Canterbury Tales or One Thousand and One Nights, just a flimsy frame story within which to tell cool stories? Is this Alyosha saying, "Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!"

I know the context is different, and I don't think we'll be talking about all of our favorite horror movie ideas in Heaven (it is a troublesome line nonetheless!). And I don't think our story has a lot in common with a frame story. But we have come up with a basic idea as to why all these unrelated stories can be subsumed and integrated, namely, the effect the lodestone and the turbulent reversals seems to have on characters and plot lines.

We also have the idea of legends, stories that flourish around a character, especially ones of dubious historicity. Only at a much later date do individual writers try to impose coherence.

Also, the nefarious process of disintegration that sets itself up against God as All-in-All.

But is does that last one also show God's action in that He is able to integrate even disintegration? Something like "captive led captivity."

It's therapeutic to revisit these stories and hopes and dreams from the past through the magic lens of this story. It's like I'm reclaiming all the mundane moments and locations of my life. I'm not even sure this is an attempt at literature; more like an attempt to retake all the ground conquered by the forces of evil, which, as some have pointed out, is characterized most by its banality.

Lately, I've been tromping around my college and post-college days in Ann Arbor, accompanying those Tokyo International College of Business exchange students to Sleeping Bear Dunes, heading out of Las Vegas into the desert darkness west of Nellis Air Force Range. No need to explain how all this is finding its way into the story.

Because I'm making these journeys not through a spirit of nostalgia, but through an all-out effort to shatter the ice that has encased and obscured them, half expecting—like Philip K. Dick—to find first-century Palestine beneath their stale surfaces.

And is the story obscure because we are being deliberately obscurantist?

Or is it because we are trying to "make dark things plain"?

Will Will

The following is an excerpt of an October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

In all our messing with nomenclature and in all my years living with my own name, we've never thought of "Will" as a future helping verb.

Art:

How about when Farthington can't control Will he creates a clone of him called Will Will (helping and main verb). Maybe this is what is in Steffi's womb, although I'd always imagined that one being female (perhaps male/female monozygotic twins?). Maybe this is another reason a raging Will follows Farthington into the tunnels. Modernity enthrones the enfeebled will at the center of its moral law. 

Will should only be a helping verb; modernity tries to make it both helping and main verb. 

One of the twins dies. Does the other become the inarticulate monster?

Will:

So, I am conflicted on the saline avenger. 

My pro is that terrible topics are important to cover, especially in a project that seems to be a mock grand unifying theory of postmodernisty. 

My con is that for some reason, I have never lost my faith in the idea that at some point, this story will actually take some conventional narrative form and be told, and at that point, the saline avenger, if we aren't completely past the tipping point of holding an audience already, completely dumps us over. I know I've always said I want to work within the influence of a morality play, but I still like shaded, complex, mimetic characters. I worry that we keep flattening out everybody. 

Who knows. But there's no reason why Will Will can't just be a girl, who I suppose leaves the cryptic message "WILL WILL" in blood on walls.

Art:

Pulled in two opposite directions then... 

You want our narrative to take a more conventional form (a flattening, rationalizing, dehumanizing impulse). Your original, Everyman-inspired allegorical impulses might be classed with this as well. Deus ex machina too. 

But you also want nuanced, mimetic, irreducible characters (a deepening, irrationalizing, humanizing impulse). 

We've defined postmodernism the synthesis of these two. One way we've conceptualized it is clear, straightforward narratives told by unreliable narrators! 

Is that scaffolding robust enough? 

Carrie, the Stephen King movie, is great for this. All the nuance of modernity is finally judged by a pre-modern God, who is PISSED OFF. It's one of the most dialectically satisfying moments in film. Similar to the tension in Antigone between the younger Olympian gods of Creon and the older chthonic gods of Antigone. Hilarity ensues when the older gods wake up from their slumber and get pissed off by all the silly modern antics for which they have no context, understanding, or compassion! 

Although it's a piss-poor movie, the scene in Prometheus where the Weyland wakes up the engineer gives a similar pleasure: old gods waking up and KILLING EVERYONE!!!

A Terrible Beauty

The following is an excerpt of a 28 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at the April in Paris Ball 1957

Will:

I guess another way of putting my concern is that I want the story to be beautiful and uplifting.

Art:

I understand that, but this probably goes along with my Aristotelian/Millerian preference for tragedy. I find works with a clear moral valence—or, worse, an "inspirational" intent—NOT beautiful. Isn't the human being endeavoring against the black backdrop, against impossible odds, beautiful enough? Isn't it the case that the black backdrop provides the occasion for his beauty to shine forth? Isn't this the most inspiring of all pictures, the one that calls us forth out from complacency, blinking in the cold wind of the world? 

I see you as the protagonist, trying to assert your story, to build your foundationless castle. It's like what King Arthur tried to do. But we've found that it only exists as "once" and "future." It only exists in the telling or, better yet, the singing of it. I'm the one who provides that black backdrop most of the time, the chorus roaring moira. You're the hero who needs to keep building, believing, setting things aright, even as you sink down into the morass.

Will:

In your version of Miller, I think Biff has cancer from smoking without his shirt on, got raped in jail, and had his leg ripped off by a vengeful cow and is ashamed of his homemade robotic prosthesis.

Art:

That's so much better than Death of a Salesman. Hold the presses!

Will:

Another way of putting it—Yeats called tragedy a terrible beauty, not terror. The struggle against the black backdrop unites the hero to truth, hopefully...not terror. Good comes from the hero's fall, a messenger survives to tell the tale, and order is restored to the kingdom. If people just get stabbed in the neck no matter what they do, the message is that the universe is blind terror, and Aristotle denounces the art. The movie O comes to mind, in which the writer and director messed with Othello a little too much, undermined the tragic conventions, and created nihilism instead of tragedy.

Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.

Harbaugh

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 October 2015.

Jim Harbaugh

Google and Facebook will cause the civil war, robots basically, by the way they serve up content. Based on my recent interests in news stories, my Google app is serving me up all Breitbart and Fox News. I imagine those on the other side are being served up the exact opposite. So when we have killed each other and the humans are weakened from years of civil war, the robots will take over.

And I think the robot's style of government will, in the early going at least, be Skinnerian. Check out his Beyond Freedom and Dignity if you want a glimpse of what that will look like!

I take that back: it already is Skinnerian!

I take that back: it's also serving me up stories about Harbaugh.

Is this what the lodestone does?

The Monster That Now Pursues You

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 October 2015.



I don't think this will go in the blog either because I'm not going to be able to express what I feel about this coherently. You may be able to understand what I mean.

I think the so-called uneducated people of America are just pissed as hell having been essentially ridiculed for the last 8 years by everyone from the POTUS to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I feel some of that anger, even though I am not a Creationist or automatic weapon owner or even someone who has smelled sawdust or animal entrails in the last month. But I feel like this is a reckoning. The vengeful, silenced masses are now sending us their inarticulate messenger. The basic message is:

You have banished us from the table, from the public square, from civic discourse. You have been unwilling to engage with us in dialogue, preferring instead to use your monopoly of major media outlets and the bully pulpit of the presidency to shout us down, to proclaim us unclean, to paint our demands and desires as ridiculous, unconscionable, or worse. We, for our part, have attempted several times to present our arguments coherently according to the terms of engagement. But you have killed our most articulate messengers, replacing them with straw men whom you burn in effigy all the day. You have successfully demonized us, silenced us, and caricatured us. And so we now send you the only messenger you can recognize: the caricature, the demon, the vengeful, inarticulate angel. Its exaggerated, grotesque, almost comic features are a function of the toxic underworld from which this monster emerges. Had you extended the warm embrace of civility and dialogue, you might recognize in it a brother or sister or friend. But it is too late for that now. No, you didn't create this entity, but you are the one who turned it into the monster that now pursues you, wordlessly and inexorably.

In my prophetic imagination, this isn't Trump. This being would actually overtake and kill Trump at some point, Trump being far more articulate than the underlying impulse the entity represents. At best, Trump would be a perverse John the Baptist figure:

I am baptizing you with water...but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. (Matt 3:11)

I am not saying anything about the relative validity of issues such as flying the Confederate Flag, espousing traditional views of marriage, believing in the Genesis account of Creation, etc. I'm just saying that it's been relatively quiet lately. Voices have been summarily and successfully silenced. Hillary Clinton is the odds-on favorite for the presidency, Bill Nye has parlayed his Bachelor of Science degree into a second career, and Barack Obama is taking victory laps.

Drop the mic, right?

But you are a fool if you think those voices that raged so violently are just gone. They fester in the fetid darkness, their individual voices echoing, melding into a cacophony of incoherent rage. To be clear, if this were a horror movie, I would be killed along with everyone else. I'd be that traditional character who thinks he understands the being, who thinks he can reason with it, who is fascinated with it, who tries to explain to others how it became what it became.

Muzak/Karaoke Tracks

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Max on 19 October 2015.

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Art:

Hope you're doing well! Long time, no see! 

I'm swamped as I often am during the school year, but I had a good idea, especially if you're not swamped. 

I was thinking of doing some fundraisers where we just invite select people to my home or other people's homes and have a "freewill offering." Instead of practicing a ton and making major mistakes anyway, I had the following awesome idea (inspired in part by the concept behind Maria Bamford's The Special Special Special): 

You create muzak/karaoke tracks for a good set list of Arthur White songs. Ideally, use a heavily produced, saccharine, polished sound. You can add your own "spin." Late 90's keyboard sound, nothing vintage or cool. With my voice and content, this will assuredly be disturbing without resorting to any Nine Inch Nails high jinks. I'm talking like this synth break that comes in Palace's "West Palm Beach," but even more immersive, that is, no implied irony/critical distance. It's like an attempt to be optimistic and uplifting in a socially appropriate way that ends up being so inappropriate--all the more inappropriate for trying to pretend like it was appropriate in the first place! If you could get some awesome canned backing tracks, you could also play guitar over the top and I would just get wheeled into the room and sing the songs. I've talked about this idea before in the blog post about Pino Marelli. A couple up-tempo disco numbers would be good as well! 

I actually had a chance to see Will Oldham (now Bonnie "Prince" Billy) do a set a lot like this in Chicago, where he just pressed play on a tape deck and it played horribly "uplifting" synth/muzak versions of his songs while he attempted to play along with his out-of-tune guitar and flawed voice. It was so disturbing and satisfying at the same time! I did a similar thing back in the 90's, recording my songs direct to my Wurlitzer Funmaker tape deck. You might be able to find a cheap MIDI option where you can just plug in the chords and mess around with the voices.

Max:

It's great to hear from you! I've missed our Tuesday sessions, but I've been really busy with drawing and film studies and yadayadayada. Also, I enrolled in a drawing class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at LCC, but that is ending a week from now. But hopefully I won't be any less busy because ideally I'll just fill that empty space with more drawing, as I am trying to get really really good. That being said, I am really interested in this "house show" as us youngsters like to call them. With my class done, I'd like to open up more time in my schedule for music. I got some really good software with some really great sample instruments which, though they may be too cool for what you are talking about, could be of use in this next endeavor. I'll attach a video of a short little track I made with it so u can get an idea of what it can do. The program would also be of really great use in rehearsals if we ever get those started again! But anyways, just to be clear I am down for this show! It's sounds awesome.

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 5 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

E. On Peter Maurin

And, of course, all of this reminds me a great deal of Peter Maurin's Easy Essays. To move toward a solution by mobilizing the foundational problem is to personify the notion of radicalism. This is what it means to go down to the roots. This is what it means to create "a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the old, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old it looks new. "We don't need a new doctrine, we need a new technique."

F. On What this Means

So, yes. This is my long-winded way of simply saying yes. I agree with you. We must get behind it.

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 4 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

D. On Finding Aesthetics Within Anaesthetics

The concluding sentence on the previous page is most certainly most overused quote; especially while teaching. While the decline of the 'aura' of both works of art & human experiences is troubling on the one hand, the other hand is encouraging. Are you with me up until this point? I hope so (though I'm barely with myself, you see). Through this panoramic viewpoint, it's clear to me that our most effective mode of transportation back to the garden is by boarding the motorized machine. We must utilize the simulation as our best weapon against simulation. I'm reminded in the previous sentence of a sentence from my previous letter: →"To look upon this horror and utilize our repulsion to propel us closer to God is the most brutal form of attack against this demonic presence." Also of an e-mail I sent to Art back in May: "I think one can simultaneously scorn the regurgitory culture and utilize it for its instrumental value in understanding American mythos. To me, total immersion into the circling pools of excremental matter is the best way to stay afloat. By reconfiguring our submission, we can then make guppy-like journeys away from these subjective surfaces in search of the depths of objective truth. Understand it we may not ever, but we mustn't let our befuddlement blockade our probing! "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. This is why we "can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum. [We] must probe it from the outset."

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 3 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

B. On Books

Also, fun fact → CENSORED → All attorneys are equal but some are more equal than others.

But really, Allison, please let me know when you're in the market for your next load of overpriced textbooks. You are welcome to any & all of Connor's collection for reference or study materials. I'd be more than happy to send them your way.

C. On Will's Correspondence with Nick

This is simple yet profound! So profound!

Exchange is a damn fine representation of "the satellite's" positive potential to be the most powerful agent of social change that man has—and will—ever encountered. I write "agent" instead of a "channel" because though composed of billions of particles like the human agents behind the screens, the compendium of texts, images, & sounds that populate the world of the web coexist forever & never again as single quantum particles. What I mean by this is that a medium such as the Internet possesses the unique capability of taking on its own agency when we, ourselves, collapse our terrestrial artifacts & intangible ideas into a single public location. By giving this project, for instance, a fixed position for the collective gaze to absorb & synthesize, we (though mostly the lot of you, I mostly gaze) are simultaneously giving it instantaneous & unlimited mobility. So, by collapsing these projections into the virtual location of the blog, it doesn't quite matter that its home is in a simulated world, in a pixelated reality. It doesn't matter, that is, when observed not as a segment but as the whole. The whole, of course, is the reality we yearn for; the reality that favors confrontation with.

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 2 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

A. On Immutable Economics

Free food? Don't believe the lies! And certainly do not drink the cafeteria's Kool-Aid. Hasn't anyone ever told you: There ain't no free lunch?

Though my struggles are not as Will said, "more impressive than [any of] yours," one of my senior students from last year went missing in July. Three weeks ago, one of his brothers found his body, desecrated by bullet wounds, underneath a manhole cover. Please keep the O'Sean and Lockett Family in your daily prayers. Mortality over distraction from death's inevitability; the reality that does not separate us from "the horrors of immediacy" but rather immerses us in them; the reality that uproots us from the Apple® orchard and plants us back into the garden. It is this reality that places us not behind a screen, but before (what Walter Benjamin coined as) "the hierarchical pinnacle of aesthetic experience."

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 1 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.