Cartography of the Mind (Part 9 of 17)

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

addressing darkness & light through inquiry & reflection

I felt that
I had
stepped
through a
door that had
been usu-
ally left open
to discover trem
endous treasures
there these
treasures terrified
me I told myself
that I could turn aro
und and go. And then I
walked on.

I am wondering...

1. Have the Benefactor and Leif Erikson's Sister become one character?
2. If not, what is their relationship to one another? To the Savage Sisters or Shakespeare (= the Icelandic Wyrd Sisters?)? To Victoria Woolf?
3. Are each of the above ultimately a different name for the same thing?
4. If so, is that thing Paganism (aka Christianity's sister religion)?
5. What is the overarching role of (myth+) paganism's resurgence within the context of this project?* (My deductions on #5 to follow my questioning...)

6. I'm a bit confused about the Benefactor's intentions...Is the Benefactor a Redeemer, a Destroyer, or both? Initially, I thought the horror raps had been written to illuminate the world's darkness, so to speak as though by carving the hallowed history into Detroit's original and unchanging rock, (s)he was ultimately giving a voice to the oppression and corruption that plagued the Benefactor's remembered world since conception. So, in the context of the story, I categorized the Benefactor as the Storyteller: (S)he's survived through many lifetimes. Outlasted history and embraced as an ageless androgynous (turn page) elder who's etched our story out into the stone for us, perhaps as a warning. In a sense, I viewed the cave as the axis mundi; as people's tunnel to Christ by way of Pagan myth. Of course a story demands an audience, but it was my assumption that despite the Benefactor's use of the Lodestone to lure people to the underworld to hear of the redemptive horrors, we were complacent in our world; we had no desire to be stirred out of this complacency, no desire to confront harsh truths, no yearning to grow deep like roots. In yet another sense, I viewed the Benefactor as Will views the French: as a protector of America's pieces we'd rather dispose of until the moment we're finally ready to grasp their value. From my current understanding, however, the Benefactor is, in fact, "nefarious"; (s)he is destroying our history through total inaccessibility to it. To revisit Will's message on storytelling, the Benefactor is ultimately rendering his/her survival meaningless—and in turn ours—by forgoing creation a total destructive collapse of all history. Though allowing us access into the cave would "make us what we are," his/her selfish isolation makes us what we were never intended to be: greedy, gluttonous, selfish, alienated, miserable, the most dangerous city in America for the third year in a row, and ultimately doomed. Am I getting warm? If the Benefactor is "nefarious," it would seem that my interpretation of paganism's role in this project is incorrect, or partially at least. My most recent deductions, from piecing together bits and pieces from past e-mails and blog posts are that this project both embraces paganism as a bridge to the "myth become fact" aka Christianity and discredits paganism for leading us to Christianity through a vehicle other than Christ. In the context of the e-mails, the Benefactor = Graham Greene's lieutenant, in that any potential triumphs will be empty failures; any truth the Benefactor arrives at without Christ is not truth at all, but mere shadows of shadows of shadows. Further, the Benefactor is not evangelizing. While (s)he may know better than anyone the limits of our physical world ("The Most Authentic Critiquers"), (s)he does not draw others toward the beauty of God. Instead (s)he, quite literally, repels people from it. AM I GETTING WARMER?