Historicity Destroys Legend

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 10 April 2016.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones

I love aphorisms. Nietzsche is particularly good to read as a collection of isolated aphorisms, most especially at The Nietzsche Family Circus. I also took some inspiration from Liza's cut-outs from The Believer article on the writing style of Roland Barthes. (Wow, that had a lot of subordinate phrases, but that's the reality—frames within frames!)

I've begun to think that it might be fun to do a bunch of aphorisms that are ostensibly taken from a full-fledged text that doesn't exist, such as The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas, or the seemingly more pamphlet-like “What is Knology?” I am especially proud of “Joseph Lazarus is not only the most complete guitarist of his generation, but also the most complete human being,” which is a rip off of Sartre's comments on Che Guevara. How would that have ever come up in the pamphlet (or treatise or interview or feature article) on Knology?

I would love some of the more philosophically trained among you (Allison? Joe?) to start trying to “connect the dots” as to what this philosophy actually is, kind of like what some have tried to do with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which is to try to systematize aspects of their philosophies after the fact due to the often oblique and evasive styles of writing.

Will, your “tons of likes” statement brings me back to an original strategy for the project. We've talked extensively about the significance and importance of likes, favorites, retweets, reposts, embeds, but, as we well know, we get nearly none of those things. And I understand the reason for that, namely, that the posts are too confusing to inspire anyone to mouse over and give us a thumbs up on anything. Not to say that what all of you have contributed hasn't been incredible—it has—it's just the way we frame it makes it hard to contextualize. Plus, we have so little actual existence in the “real” world.

Still, in accepting any of this as an excuse, we've lost sight of the critical aspect of the project, its fundamental and essential donnée.

The project is supposed to show how in our current age, the frame is more important than its contents, the proscenium is more important than the scenium, the smoke is more important than the fire, the echo is more important than the utterance. In fact, the project attempts to take this to the degree where those former things—the antecedents or referents—no longer exist. So many reasons for this that have been discussed ad nauseam and I don't want to get into it all over again.

Will, in addition to a central contributor to the project, you've been pretty much its only groupie. My main point in this email is that we may need more people willing to be groupies, to be frames, to be echo chambers. And I'm going to argue that this groupie-hood should not be based on any quality inherent in the content. It should be groupie-hood for the sake of groupie-hood. Call it groupidity. This is a central precept of Knology. Gotta get that on an inspirational meme soon.

I'm not saying that this should be any of you by the way. Honestly, I appreciate any likes you can give, but I don't want you to give them unless it makes any kind of sense to you. Perhaps, you have some better ideas of how we can cause this to flourish without attempting to endow any further reality to the original, which should remain shrouded in doubt.

Once this dynamic is established, I believe we begin to harness the power of infinite regress, the infinite series of receding images produced by two facing mirrors. I understand the argument that we should strive to make the primary as meaningful, sincere, relevant, interesting, entertaining, engaging, helpful, good, true, or beautiful as possible. But I also argue that's just what they'll be expecting us to do. More importantly, that's missing the whole point—the whole dynamism of the Female King, the Symbolism of Ophelia, the Wisdom of Silenus, the Tunnels within Tunnels, the Restaurant within a Restaurant, and so many others.

It goes back to the idea hinted at throughout Tennyson's Idylls of the King: that of Arthur and Camelot's nonexistence. It is this absence of historicity that makes Arthur—not Richard the Lionhearted—England's enduring image of king.

In other words, anyone looking for an underlying principle in any of this will be disappointed. There is no principle; there's only what comes after. That's why we're always dodging, refusing to go on record, why every narrator is untrustworthy, etc. We're hinting at an absence, a lack. We're trying to get people to stumble across the event horizon of a black hole.

This isn't to say that I don't love all the ideas. I love Liza's zine idea. (I wish we could somehow mass produce “Cartography of the Mind”!) I love Will's podcast idea. I love Nick's journalistic idea. I love the recording idea. I'd love to do as many of those things as possible. That said, I also love Joe's documentary-footage-on-a-dead-computer idea.

Because historicity destroys legend!

All One, Alone

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 8 April 2016.

Utterance is its own rationale: by speaking one dispels the reigning silence, creates the clearing, floods in to fill it.

Speech is its own rationale: it partakes in the self-referential “I Am Who Am.” It is how we bring being out of nothingness. To a greater or lesser extent, every creative work arrives at a stage where the circus animals desert.

So abandonment, desertion, desolation, the profound aloneness—these are necessary for one who would become creator, a little god made in the image and likeness of the One.

Abandonment is itself a word. Abandonment is both a curse and a summons. Abandonment is not (nothing is) the absence of word. It is full, superfluous, gratuitous.

It is the way the creating word echoes in our ears. Not nothing, not every thing, not many things, but one. All one. Alone.

What seems at first to be a curse is still more a summons, a prophesy, a promulgation, a fable, a preface--spoken to us by the Father, singling each of us out individually as son or daughter. We abandon ourselves with wild abandon!

Deserted = summoned into the desert

No blue bloods in this world as those who were born blue blooded know. No mountaintop, only a swamp primordial. No parade of prophets who precede us. Only paths that can be made straight, a highway or a river.

Nothing to be dug up or discovered, no more sound basis than this malarial marsh. No basis in other words. Everything comes after.

That is why abandonment is necessary. The action of speaking toward, the moment at which God addresses me, speaks to me. His speech is a summons, a prohibition, a curse, a proclamation.

At that moment I am again an infant—literally, not able to speak—in the face of the ineffable.

Brought out of nothingness, brought out of the malarial swamp, brought out of blood, washed, adorned with jewels, earrings, nose ring. In this is our dignity, but still more is the moment of abandonment.

The verdict is a tolling back, a remembering: all one, alone.

If that moment of adornment is critical, still more is the moment of abandonment.

We aren't the Word, but we are a word.

A remembrance, a dismembering, a pruning, a lopping, a stopping, a stemming the flow. At once a remembrance and a dismembering. A recollection. A return. Because those branches have bankrupted the core, the spring, the seedling.

O to be an infant in the face of the ineffable, no more casting forth of fibers! O dimensionless, infinitesimal infant!

Not infinite, you infinitesimal you. Infant small.

This speech is a summons, a prayer, a request, a pledge, an acknowledgement, an admission, an utterance--cacophonous, euphonious, blasphemous. An abandonment to the fabulous, to fate.

Hiding in the lee disturbs the river, ripples eddy into swirling worlds.

Myth of Sizzliphus

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 2 April 2016.



Since I have some time, I'm going to explore a little more about the cult/LGAT. After giving them a lecture on the major themes of existentialism, I showed my students the Sizzler promo commercial and asked them to analyze it.

There seemed to be two major interpretations:

One was that this was a kind of heaven for übermenschen, ones who are capable of facing the full extent of their freedom. I know Sartre said that rational human beings, faced with the full extent of their freedom, rightly experience nausea and anguish. But we entertained the notion that perhaps they had somehow transcended that and were now Nietzschean “birds of prey,” triumphantly reveling in their restaurant within a restaurant, laughing fearlessly as they are confronted its dizzying array of options. There are a few characters in the video that support this interpretation. I think of these two and the dismissive way the Italian guy looks at the camera, showing a Nietzschean scorn for the timid, insipid values of the imagined viewers. Another point in favor of this view is the many vertiginous elements incorporated into the camera work (for instance, here and here), suggesting that, although the inhabitants of this world seem to relish their experience of contingency, we the plebeian viewers are nauseated.

The second and more popular interpretation was that all these people are living in bad faith, that, terrified of the full extent of their freedom, they instead accept “mediated choices” (thus, “Sizzler is the one that gives us choices”). The “restaurant within a restaurant” implies that they have buffered themselves from their freedom and subjectivity even further. The doubling, as mentioned in the previous email, suggests that this method of escaping one's subjectivity can be repeated ad infinitum, as one flees endlessly down this tunnel toward a theoretical dimensionless restaurant within an infinite series of restaurants where one would finally and definitively objectify oneself. The dizzying array of choices available in Sizzler's restaurant within a restaurant can be explained as another attempt by the herd to appropriate the values and prerogatives of the ruler caste. The paradox of fleeing one's freedom while ostensibly embracing an ever-expanding array of options is simply the inherent hypocrisy of the “lie to oneself.” Indeed, following this line of reasoning, the dimensionless restaurant at the end of this long line of nested restaurants would promise an infinite array of choices. The vertiginous camera work can be explained in that, even as they try to situate themselves within the seemingly stable environs of the restaurant within a restaurant, their efforts are doomed to failure: the anguish of repressed freedom can never be fully repressed; they are, as Sartre puts it, “condemned to be free.”

In looking at how any of this could provide inspiration for Knology, I like the idea of Farthington being an übermensch who has found a way to package and peddle the values and lifestyle of the ruler caste to the herd. I honestly think that this is exactly what people like Werner Erhard and L. Ron Hubbard did.

They did it by serving up the paradox of the restaurant within a restaurant ad infinitum.

Sheer Vertiginous Horror

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 1 April 2016.



What is the significance of two?

You need two mirrors to create an infinite regress, an infinite series of receding images produced by two facing mirrors.

This has been an ongoing motif in our project in terms of dialectics and dichotomies; retweet, repost, embed; the proliferation of Joe Lazarus's clones; the multiplication of y's in Rustyy Kryystyylz's name; the postscenium and proscenium with their telescoping arches; tunnels within tunnels means an infinitude of nothing; not to mention more beneficent pairings like being made in the image and likeness of God and the holy rivalry concept.

What am I missing?

Joseph Conrad's obsession with the double, the shadow self, the doppelgänger, Lord Jim's “I--you--I”

One other area that has interested me recently is that of the entrepreneur or inspirational speaker who helps people find their passion or succeed in business. I find this to be so postmodern and Baudrillardian and unacceptable. Is it acceptable that a person's passion would consist in helping other people find their passion? Is it acceptable that a person's successful business is helping people have success in business? Is it acceptable that a person successfully leverages social media to teach others how to successfully leverage social media? To me, that seems “contentless.” To me, that snaps me back to the image of the proscenium with little or no scenium.

My first experience with this was the large-group awareness training organization I joined at the end of the 90's. It was all about living an transformed life, but to do that one needed to not only take the course (and ideally, many subsequent courses), but also to “enroll” people in the fact that you had undergone said transformation.

Going along with Heidegger's “Language is the house of being,” you needed others to “get” your transformation, otherwise the transformation wouldn't have any real meaning or existence. Who you “be” is a function of who you speak yourself to be. Word = world. And for a while at least, this notion of enrollment was collapsed with the act of registering those same people to take the course. Toward the end of my time there, they endeavored to “uncollapse” these two concepts, but the notion persisted, namely, how do you know that you've fully enrolled people in your transformation? They register for the course themselves.

I've already talked about modeling Knology (Farthington's cult or LGAT) after this concept. I've also mentioned Sizzler's “restaurant within a restaurant” idea, which to me captures the sheer vertiginous horror of the 90's.

Twins, doubles, and clones have been favorites of postmodernism because they convey its notions of circularity, self-referentiality, Baudrillard's collapse of polarities and the endless reproducibility of the simulacrum.

New Pathways

The following is an email sent from Joe to Will and Art on 31 March 2016.

Will: Though I always knew it would be true, I must say I'm relieved you don't see my loss of Catholicism as creating a chasm too wide for us to bridge. I know what you mean by not having a reference point that would help you understand my situation, and me yours. It bothers me, but that's one of the reasons why I want to keep talking with you and Art. I'm trying to be methodical and accurate in my description of this "loss of faith"—even that phrase isn't right. Your description of Sartre likely approximates the truth. And you're right, it isn't a mystical atheism. Nothing in Greene gets at this—trust me, I checked. Negation is the right method here: I know what the loss of faith is not. And it is decidedly not John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. There's no embrace for which I yearn.

I've changed so significantly in the past two years—in many more ways than one—I feel a strong urge, as a necessity, to go "home," to square one, to where I started before everything changed. Your friendship and mentorship has meant more to me than you can know, and in many ways is my mental home. You gave me many of the terms by which I think and write. 

It's funny, because you did teach me to think, and because you provided me with certain habits of mind that burned new pathways in my neural framework—that got me through college, that got me the job I have, that got me into grad schools—I must infer and really do feel that my thinking about God was influenced by you, as well as my thinking about the very atheism that has taken the place of my former belief. Your mentorship laid the foundation for a lot that goes on in my mental world—the stuff you surely would have intended, and the stuff you maybe wouldn't have, or at least the stuff that might have given you pause. Anyway, I'm excited and anxious to see you soon.

Art: I'd have no problem posting these wherever, and certainly have no problem with anyone in the group reading them. I'm honored (and a little surprised!) that you'd like to keep reading, and that you think others would as well.

I've been trying to write about this for the past two years.The big shift in me, the loss of faith, happened or at least was catalyzed when I went to India two years ago. A lot happened there, both on the streets of New Delhi and in the desert mountains of Leh, a city in the Himalayas, and I've been trying to capture it. The sights and sounds and smells of India are inextricably bound up with the contours of my own spiritual story. But I've never trusted anything I've put on paper about it. Now, for some reason, I feel like I can finally write about India and everything that happened after. I'm hoping our emails can provide some of the foundation for that. And, along the way, I'm hoping you and Will can read what I write and respond. 

À la recherche du temps perdu

The following is an email sent from Joe to Will and Art on 30 March 2016.

Marcel Proust

It's funny you bring up the Myers Briggs, Will. After having accepted my designation as an INFJ for years, I began to realize just recently how significantly I have changed in the past twenty-four months. It's mostly because of my job: I've been required by social and professional and even intellectual necessity to cultivate savoir faire and sociability—to do my job even remotely well, I've had to run with traditionalist conservatives and social conservatives and libertarians and tenderhearted center-leftists and democratic socialists and gender-and-race theorists, as well as hipsters and vegans and young Republicans and every other variety of millennial. I've come not just to like this sort of living, but to derive all my energy from it. So, I decided to take the test a few days ago to see what I've become. Verdict: very pronounced E, pretty pronounced N, only 6% preference for F, and a meager 1% preference for J.

That's a roundabout way of getting at my interest in politics, Will. Not accounting for the interest I developed in political philosophy as an undergraduate, nor for the attraction to political and cultural criticism that I've developed only in the last two to three years, the root of my urge toward the political life is an acquired preoccupation with politics in the Thucydidean sense: not the politics of casting ballots necessarily, but rather the activity of discoursing and debating with other people on every social level—in small communities of thinkers, throughout a university, and in the wide world.

At the same time, I must acknowledge that partisan politics became interesting to me right around the time when I lost my faith, which was about two years ago. There's much to be said about that topic—and frankly, if it does not prove too often to be a non-sequitur in our conversations, I'd like to haggle over and piece through it a bit with you both. I want that mostly because you both knew me when I was at my most, shall we say, faithful: my most Catholic in the spiritual and social senses. You knew me when I felt certain that I would live a devoutly Catholic life, when my main preoccupation was how truly to be Catholic in a secular world. And now you are among the only people in my life who can critique me, who can remind me of faith in ways others just can't (not to re-convert me—I am not asking for that, have no real interest in it—but to remind me). This is admittedly selfish. I hope in return that my agnosticism might be of some use to you and the project. If it's not, I'll stay out of it. But I do remember that my character is an angry, disaffected agnostic. Now that's a character I can play.

Presently, there's something about my agnosticism (let's be honest: functional atheism) that troubles me. Because my agnosticism is so easily incorporated into secular life, especially among academics and the sets toward which I most naturally gravitate, I am not required to contend with the claims and virtues of my old Catholicism. In other words, it would be very easy for me to ditch the former Joe—the one who was devout, the one whose mental horizon was populated with Christ and the Church and Aquinas and Dorothy Day—for the new Joe—the one with new political interests, new moral sensibilities, who can run head-first into the sort of life offered by the 21st century educated cosmopolitan milieu that runs The New York Times, most universities, and with whom I generally feel at home.

Put otherwise, I see something wrong or unwise in the prospect of sliding unthinkingly and comfortably into postmodern secularism and en vogue secular cosmopolitanism. Granted, I already sort of fit into these categories.  There is just something fundamentally unsatisfying about what would be most comfortable: a quick change of worldviews from Catholicism to 21st century secularism, the stripping off of my Catholic clothes and putting on of the ready-to-hand jumpsuit of the liberal secularist, the NPR-listening educated Democrat, the good citizen.

Because I have this ill-defined fear, I head to mass once in a while, usually at a church where I'm anonymous, to try to re-enter the mental space of my old Catholicism—to smell the incense, hear the organ and, à la recherche du temps perdu, be brought vividly back to my old mind and soul. But occasionally these attempts at anonymity fail, and I run into someone I know. Many such people are aware I don't go to church anymore; many also heard rumors about me, circulated among Grand Rapids Catholics a couple years ago and that seem never to go away, which insist that I'm some kind of rank hedonist, or Hitchensian anti-theist, or sexual adventurer. So I'm often looked at with a mixture of hesitance and curiosity and mild, pious concern. Indeed, this very sort of thing happened on Good Friday, when I went to Tenebrae at the Cathedral of St Andrew. The questioner, a Catholic Central grad, asked what brought me to church? I told her it was the aesthetics.

I said that because I think Joyce once said it, and anyway it's true: the aesthetics, the beautiful physicality of the icons and deep sorrow of the chants, stir into life certain old feelings and associations. But their function is nostalgic, and I'm becoming less interested in nostalgia. So why do I still go to church every now and then?Well, that's a question I want to answer. I think talking with the group, being part of this project in some manner, might help me continue to ask the question.

It's funny, it's only been two years since I stopped believing in God—or rather, it's been two years since the moment I noticed that the belief in God had exited me. That's not a long time. But the exit was so dramatic, so complete, that all I felt in its wake was a spiritual vacancy that, after a short while, I regarded with only mild interest and numb concern. That vacancy has filled, in some manner, with other things. I don't sense it anymore, and because I don't sense it, I find it hard to remember what my belief even felt like. Is that because I never believed? Or because I have a short memory? Or because the postmodern malaise is so hegemonic that it not only invades you but blinds you to the possibilities and promises of faith?

Anyway, this project might helping me remember. To what end, who knows? But I prefer the struggle of memory to the blissful ignorance of dementia.

You Will Set the World Ablaze

The following is an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 29 March 2016.

Captain Nemo playing the organ aboard the Nautilus

I'm trying to remain positive, but I haven't been in a naturally positive place.

Saw my uncle yesterday and we talked about a young recording artist that he knows—and about the near impossibility of breaking in to anything with that style of music. Then he brought up his usual question, what is your niche, what are the three things that you can do that no one else can?

And while questions like these tend to bounce off of me like so many cannonballs off the hull of Captain Nemo's Nautilus, I suppose he has a point.

Maybe those are the right questions to ask. Maybe those questions miss the point entirely.

Maybe we need a different category of question. One other possible category is what positives does the project engender, both in our own lives and in the lives of others? One thing is that the project has gotten me to read a lot more, practice a lot more, stay in touch with others a lot more. I'd even say it's deepened my faith life. I honestly don't know what others get out of it.

That brings me back to the question from before: what are the three things that we can do that no one else can? Just speaking for myself, I won't be remembered as a musician, songwriter, playwright, performer, philosopher, or theologian. Those are not my niches and it's too late to catch up at this point.

As I think about it, I see a key to this question in the story of Arthur White. Arthur White was a mystic whose brother tried to fry it out of him with ECT. How many mystics have had their mysticism fried out of them by our electronic age!

I think our niche may be that we believe our primary job is to penetrate the mystery of our lives. That none of the facts of our existence are mere coincidences, that God has a special message and mission for each one of us. And that everything will follow from penetrating to the core of that message written into the very substance of our being. Thus, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt 6:33).

I say penetrating the mystery of our lives is the same as seeking the Kingdom of God because of Luke 17:20. Tolstoy's translation for his book is “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The New American Bible is “The Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20). Obviously, the latter is more Catholic in that it implies that the Kingdom of God is found in community, not in each separate individual.

That confirms for me some of the best things that have come out of the project. It goes along with the Married Couple's Prayer ideal of a “holy rivalry.” Just to keep up with you all, I've read a lot of the books you've read (I'm reading The Power and the Glory now). Now Liza is introducing a new standard, that of being a true artist and contemplative.

So, I'm getting some ideas about our “niche.” One is a belief that God has a special message and mission for each one of us, written into the very substance of our being. Two is a belief that the Kingdom of God is found among us, not in our isolated individuality.

We necessarily steer this question of niche back to the issue of God's will. The niche emerges insofar as we penetrate the mystery of our lives. I would say that's true for everyone, but most especially for us. On some level, we've always held that as our criterion. What does this mean for the project? Liza models this for us in her dispersed excursion to the Keweenaw and in her countercultural lifestyle generally.

I recall John Paul's Letter to Artists:

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.

Not to mention this:

...if you are what you should be—that is, if you live Christianity without compromise—you will set the world ablaze.

I've got to get to bed, but I'm beginning to think that the next step in the project would be to go on retreat and ratchet up our spiritual lives. The power of the project lies in rivalry.

A Wounded Name

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 March 2016.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

Honestly, the last few months of relative silence has kind of sapped my enthusiasm for the project. We were having that deep conversation about how could social media possibly prepare one for the “Profound Aloneness,” and had some deep answers to that question, but the answer seems to be quite a bit more mundane: you get used to a certain amount of interaction and excitement and the affirmation that comes from that, and when it dries up you feel more alone and depressed than you did before. It's just the simple mechanism of addiction and withdrawal. No big whoop.

Yeah, it's “circus animals desertion” time for me. I've got nothing for this project. I don't see its purpose and my goal at this point is to see it through to its end. Liza's incredible illuminated book will air in April, mostly Farthington's voicemail and my own unanswered emails to the group in May and June, and then a trickle of voicemails with a final one on July 4, 2016.

The end.

Back in college, I took on the task of transcribing the Civil War journal of my great-great-great-great uncle, Augustus Cochran MacKenzie, who was a doctor on a boat participating in the blockade of the South. I don't remember much about the first half of his journal, just getting used to the idea that his f's were actually s's. There was some entry about shooting at fish and going ashore to “find some woman to make love to.” At the very end of the journal, he seems to have gone nuts. He had some of his recipes for medicine, but just before that he had some scrawlings like “GOT THE THING BY THE THROAT” and a couple other such things. He ended up spending the latter part of the war in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the same hospital where I was born some hundred years later. Somehow he pulled himself together enough to go up to Negaunee and become one of the early doctors of the UP.

And of course, all of those transcriptions are on a dead PC in a landfill somewhere. I think the journal is still over at my parents' place, but I'm not sure where.

Anyway, this journal has apparently influenced me profoundly, because for some reason I feel that this is the way that books are meant to end. I've never finished anything, never gotten past the preliminaries of any full-fledged project. And yet--on some deeper level--I feel that, in accomplishing nothing, I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to accomplish. Like my great-great-great-great uncle, I don't even get to the halfway point, leave the second half blank, and scrawl a little insanity at the end (perhaps with some preliminary notes about the next project). I'm just hoping that someone will happen upon this years later and find it vaguely unsettling. Same thing with The Principles of Theory: some vague sketches of something bad happening and a disturbing epilogue.

Perhaps this is one of the problems with fame is that it fills in too many of the blanks, provides too much historicity and not enough mystery. Most of my favorite writers seem to have a good amount of mystery surrounding them. Sometimes I feel like I would root for Emily Dickinson to have successfully burned all her poems.

As George Eliot put it, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts.”

That desire for impotence, for emasculation, for passivity, for misrule, for ahistoricity, for oblivion is part and parcel of the Female King idea. Nietzsche's Hamlet “understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate…he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”

Maybe one can do better than that, better than Arthur, better than Ophelia, as in these lines from Hamlet:

Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again… 

Being thus benetted round with villanies,
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down;
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.

Perhaps one who has gone out over the waters, who has groped his way through the dark, who has his sea-gown scarfed around him, can return to his room again and write it fair. In order to do that one needs to both come to grips with oblivion and then pull himself together enough to devise a new commission, to write it fair.

Contrast this with Ophelia, who sounds a little more like us (me?):

When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Although I think it's true that Ophelia does provide the model and criterion for Hamlet's heroism, she nonetheless demonstrates some flaws that are hammered out by Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet's sea-gown is scarfed around him, Ophelia's tattered land clothing is what drags her down to muddy death. Whereas Hamlet finds it in him to devise a new commission and write it fair, Ophelia only musters snatches of old tunes. Both of them have the sea within and the sea without, but with differences that only the subtleties of symbolism can express.

Hamlet gets it right. But no one gets out alive, no one gets out without a wounded name.

My Formula for Human Greatness

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 27 February 2016.

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Leonello Spada

Something has been consolidating or coalescing in my brain recently that I wanted to throw out there for your consideration. Today's reading about the prodigal son helped me put several things into partial perspective.

It hit me with this passage where the prodigal son returns:

…his father ordered his servants,
‘Quickly, bring the finest robe and put it on him;
put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
Take the fattened calf and slaughter it.
Then let us celebrate with a feast,
because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again;
he was lost, and has been found.’
Then the celebration began.
Now the older son had been out in the field
and, on his way back, as he neared the house,
he heard the sound of music and dancing.

I'm putting this all together with several different things, some of which we've discussed before. I'm just going to list them off here:

1. Nietzsche's amor fati/eternal recurrence/lake that dammed itself up
2. Camus's Sisyphus
3. Hamlet's inaction
4. The wisdom of Silenus
5. Arthur White's motif of long delays and our distrust of the Benefactor

And if you can believe it, I'm formulating a Christian version of all these things, one that finds a formula for human greatness and heroism.

What the prodigal son did in this reading is ask for his inheritance early. What he really asked for was a horizon beyond his father's house, beyond his life—a kind of Camusian suicide. Upon receiving his inheritance ahead of time, he “collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Like Nietzsche's lake, he flows off to a distant horizon and, in so doing, drains and dissipates himself.

This is no formula for human greatness, no matter how resplendent the horizon, no matter how grand the enterprise. As Horatio puts it, we follow ghosts “to the dreadful summit of the cliff.” Similarly, what Christ is saying in this reading is that the horizon of action, of accomplishment, of ambition is the primary occasion for our perdition. It is how we become next to nothing, so that all that is left is to hire ourselves out to tend swine.

Chances are, we've already done this countless times in life. But we can always dam ourselves up and become a healthy sized lake, whatever altitude we're at. Smaller streams draining off to this or that enterprise seem to be an appropriate part of a lake's ongoing health, but not the eager gushing of our whole selves off to some counterfeit consummation. Herein lies the difference between “dying to self” and Camusian suicide. The former not the latter is the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” as Hamlet only later realizes. When the prodigal son returns to the father's house, he again experiences its riches—the finest robe, the ring on his finger, the sandals on his feet, the sound of music and dancing, etc. But he has died to the idea of a horizon. Which is scary because most of our lives are hell bent on the horizon.

I can't help but read Camus atheistic text from this Christian perspective:

Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory.

It is in the father's house that the present moment subsists. Only in choosing to live in the father's house can we hear “the myriad wondering little voices.” In my case, those “wondering little voices” are often actual children. When the roaring torrent of my own ambition isn't deafening me, I can hear those little voices, smell their hair—in short, exist. But that is only after the idols have been silenced.

And this isn't a prosperity gospel I'm talking about, but in the father's house, we are rich. At the same time—like Hamlet, like the prodigal son, like Camus's Sisyphus, like Nietzsche's lake—the hero of the story strains against and even overleaps its bounds, usually to his own detriment. Thus Jacob wrestles with God. Thus Jesus says of the skeptical Nathaniel, “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.” Thus, the older son is not the hero of the story.

But outside the father's house—traveling off toward some horizon, following those ghosts—we don't own anything, and we end up slaves or at the bottom of some cliff. When Hamlet returns from his voyage out over the waters, the ghost is gone. Only then does the story tilt quickly to its denouement. I have a feeling a similar criterion has emerged in The Return of Arthur White.

So with some edits, I agree with Nietzsche that “this is my formula for human greatness.” Not love of fate or fortune, but of God's will, “which shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will.” Not saying our project will ever partake of that greatness, but I want to set that up as its criterion.

My Horn is Exalted

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 22 December 2015.



I'm picking up an old thread regarding achieving success and fame in the context of Christianity. Eschewing any false "prosperity gospel" perspectives, it seems that the Christian is exalted only IN GOD.

I'm looking at today's psalm:

My heart exalts in the LORD,
my horn is exalted in my God.
I have swallowed up my enemies.
I rejoice in my victory.

Only after one has been swallowed up IN GOD—or more precisely, had one's "horn" swallowed up IN GOD—is it exalted. I'm sorry, I've always thought "my horn is exalted" is pretty funny.

And maybe this is too sexual a way of looking at it, but is God the only environment in which we swell, become erect and strong and capable of projecting forth that fructifying seed? Only IN GOD can this life be nourished and flourish into its fullness. Paradoxically, is the point at which we, in turn, are able to swallow up the horns of our enemies? And I don't think this can be thought of a pre-Christian vanquishing of enemies, which would necessitate some malevolent mechanism, an abysmal or toxic womb, vagina dentata, etc. In other words, something antithetical and incoherent with the beneficence that has benefited us.

Yes, bows are broken and the tottering gird on strength, but neither of these mess up the phallic/yonic imagery. The arrows of our enemies remain unbroken and, well, the word gird.

So, we swallow up our enemies in some similarly benevolent sense, nourishing and nurturing them as it were. The victory consists in their enmity being dispersed, defused...made diffuse but allowed to flourish in its inner essence. In the Christian vision, wouldn't those horns also be exalted? Bows broken, but horns exalted. We swallow them up; they gird on strength.

So back to the axiom: my horn is exalted in my God. And this means only in God. This means total self-giving, no guardedness, no prophylactic constraint, no holding anything back. Thus, the watchwords for the Christian artist (or, more precisely, the artist) are prodigality, proliferation, profusion. We pour out the whole alabaster bottle of perfume, keeping none for ourselves, nor even for any charitable purposes (Matt 26:7).

In this environment, the desire for money and fame aren't destroyed, they are just increasingly diffuse, negligible. The desire for money and fame can only solidify in a falsely exalted, frozen state. True exaltation occurs only in an environment of ecstatic love, wherein all falseness melts.

On a somewhat related note, enjoy Klaus Nomi's performance of the aria from Purcell's King Arthur, "What Power Art Thou," in which the Cold Genius is awoken by Cupid and later is forced to acknowledge his power. Incidentally, this was Nomi's last performance before succumbing to AIDS.

What power art thou
Who from below
Hast made me rise
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow

See'st thou not how stiff
And wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold

I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath
I can scarcely move
Or draw my breath

Let me, let me,
Let me freeze again
Let me, let me
Freeze again to death
Let me, let me, let me
Freeze again to death...

The Proverbial Pebble

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 19 December 2015.

Slender Man

I had a few statements and questions in these few moments watching the boulder roll down the hill.

Nick:

I just wanted to formally welcome you to the fold or family or friendship or whatever it is. Will shared your idea with me and I think it's a great one. I only hope we can give you enough raw material for you to move forward with. At any rate, please share any links to your alt-monthly column. And feel free to chime in as little or as much as you want. I'm wondering if I can use any of your past and future communications for the blog as well, inserting you into the collapsed feedback loop of the project as it were. I like your idea for a character—another character attempting to reframe or rationalize or represent the project. A New Journalism-style journalist might have more tools with which to do that. I'm thinking The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test might be the best model in that some subjective disorientation will be critical to the accuracy of your reports. I'd love to see what that looks like, but I assume you might be waiting on an actual recording. As you probably already know, though, one of the main motifs of the project are the empty frames within frames, that is, the idea of talking about something that may or may not even exist. I'd love for something to exist, but I'm no longer counting on that happening. Another interesting possibility is how talking about something actually brings it into existence, as in Slender Man. Regardless, it's not a great idea to wait for the proverbial pebble to drop.

Will:

I've been thinking that it might be nice for us to actually get together at some point prior to going to recording. I know we've accepted the swaddled/crucified existence of the distance between us, but could we start planning a "working weekend" of some kind? This may sound overbold, but I'm just going to put it out there: it'd be great to come up for 2-3 days and pound things out in your basement. You could even be gone if you have some kind of job in the summer, but I could work on stuff and we could run through it together at some point during the day or night, hammering out exactly what we're going to play. Some of these songs I'd like to workshop with you somewhat more, not just go back and forth like we have been. Ideally, I'd just like to hang out, work on stuff for the recording, and maybe do a few fun things at night. We could make it double duty and try to have a show during that same time. The problem with that is that it will probably take away from the recording work, which I consider to be the most important, most neglected aspect of our project (and I understand there are many neglected aspects of our project). We could alter things such that I camp out or sleep on a park bench at night. I'd like to come away from that trip with a solid spine of each song. Everyone would walk into the studio ready to play their exact part. Long story short, we could save a lot of money down the line with the coordination the aforementioned workdays would provide.

Making Things Twee

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 5 December 2015.

The gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks

Making things twee is exactly right. That's the most recent version of emasculation (and I would say defemination). It was even worse in the 90's when indie was dominated by shoe gazing, voice cracking twee men. I don't have any problem with these kinds of twee or elfen men, in fact, I loved a lot of these bands. I also lump the comics of Daniel Clowes in with this whole wonderful era of the subterranean 90's.

Long story short, there is such a thing as an elfen man. I love me a twee elfen man.

So, I shouldn't say it was worse. But there wasn't any place for a more virile expression. And as my voice got progressively lower and my outsized immigrant features began to assert themselves, I realized that I would never be a part of this era of elfen hairlessness.

On to the topic at hand. Will, I think there's no way the sisters would put Woody "in quotes" (I just put that in quotes, fighting fire with fire so to speak). And they would never "let capitalism do the rest." They would never be allied with capitalism in that way.

I see Woody as a robust force of nature just like the Savage Sisters and similarly endangered by the likes of Don Gilber. I think James Vernor locked him in his basement when he went off to fight in the Civil War. Woody probably blundered in there from the subterranean tunnels and fell asleep. As a pharmacist, Vernor spent the entire war dreaming up a concoction that would progressively cause the wild man in his basement to diminish. Upon return, he subjected him to a regimen that resulted in the gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks.

I say true muliebrity doesn't feel need to ridicule or diminish virility. Of course, being a pagan force of nature means you do all sorts of things—cast spells, dismember, flay, cannibalize, castrate, etc.—but all in good fun. It would have absolutely nothing in common with modern movements that seem to think suppression and belittlement and detribalizing can somehow replace the riotous harmonies of pagan life (see modern concerns about Grimm's Fairy tales). How about acknowledging the awesomeness of forces beyond our comprehension? We can't do that intellectually, only ritually, only symbolically, only poetically, only artistically, only through music. The Protestant/Enlightenment approach doesn't have the necessary scaffolding to wade into those realities. Just like when Adrienne Rich becomes too topical, her poetry starts to suck. No value judgment on her politics, it just sucks poetically. That's problem with the Protestant/Enlightenment approach in a nutshell.

Having mowed down all its hedges, this approach doesn't have any means for channeling the archetypal herds, keeping wolves and monsters at bay, etc.

*    *    *

On a totally different subject, after all these years, that is literally the first ICP song I have ever knowingly heard. I had a roommate in college who had a whole group of friends that were active members of this group, one who was a wrestler in their WWF-style wrestling matches. With hardly any knowledge about the group whatsoever, I have to confess a kind of admiration for them. It fit my expectation that the video you sent has been viewed tens of millions of times and has more thumbs down than thumbs up. But, truly in this case, haters gonna hate. More people love Eminem than hate him. More people love Taylor Swift than hate her. These guys can literally say that more people hate them than love them, but, since that comes from a pool of millions of people, they actually have an extremely large fan base, one that has a cult-like devotion to them and their many spin-off enterprises.

It's OK to be Different

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 3 December 2015.

Liza's Classroom Door

A quick note on your most recent messages regarding Vern. At school on Monday, each teacher had to pick a country, research its winter holiday traditions, and then decorate his/her respective classroom door with representations of said holiday traditions. You know, to show how much we really care about diversity, how accepting and tolerant we all are of other people's beliefs, traditions, and cultural background here in America. Oh and also, you know, to celebrate Christmas at school by disguising our celebration of Christmas at school. 'Cause, like, we can take different, we can totally sometimes embrace it even, just so long as it's kept over there. Just so long as we can pick and choose whose difference we take, and to what extent we embrace it.

In case the suspense is killing you, which I'm sure it isn't, I chose Iceland. I'll take a picture of my door at school tomorrow and send it to y'all for a good holiday laugh. It adds a whole new dimension to "sanitized and repurposed" pagan figures.

My Yule Cat looks how I imagine a Belle & Sebastian song would look were it a cat, yet somehow more twee. As for the Yule Lad and the Gryla I made out of construction paper, they've got impish undertones, but they've been mostly Disneyfied.

The teachers and administration at school are currently very generously accepting of me, having taken me in for the purple-haired "hippie" wyrdo I am. Had I thrown in the additional element of children-eating pagans on my classroom door, though, people would have surely began to talk.

It's OK to be different, you see, but not that different. And it's perfectly acceptable to believe in traditions that others may not understand or even totally tolerate, but only if you're believing in that weird stuff in some far off exotic country that I can explore through a screen at my leisure so that I may then decorate my door in homage to your people, in acceptance of your people, way over there, please stay way over there.

An Unrivaled Fulfillment

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 3 December 2015.

For the sake of brevity (that's my favorite joke), I'm limiting the scope of this reply to your e-mails preceding December 2nd. The rest I'll take on tomorrow.

At a glance: engulfing tidal waves, Detroit as a microcosm for every city everywhere, burying harsh realities under static isolation and willful ignorance, childhood innocence and purity, the mechanicalization of human life, the stigmatization of creativity, creation’s destruction, the paving of Black Bottom, retribalization, the global village, power absorption, silenced horrors, the lodestone, irreverence toward the natural world, Edenic exile, Gluck’s "Daisies," Gibran’s "On Children," Don Gilber, Detroit trash, human sacrifice, the Most Authentic Detroiter ever, etc.

Anyhow, thanks for the accidental introduction, Will. I look forward to reading more of Gustafson's word-magic, as well as finding a way to integrate all of my new, mostly dead friends' words and images into my classroom. What was Gustafson’s funeral like? I hope there was a jukebox, with quarters clanging in every pocket.

Art, thanks for the clarification! This may have been referenced or elucidated in previous correspondences, but my understanding is still partially clouded.

A few questions:

1. Does the Benefactor's creation story have any roots in Luke 22:24-27? 
2. Is he, in part, an incarnation of the authoritative pagan kings who exploited their power by placing self-interest over public-interest?  
3. More specifically, was the Benefactor’s character inspired by Ptolemy III Euergetes?  
4. THEREON BE FACT? Or BE THERE NO FACT?

While brainstorming my previous round of Benefactor related questions, I began scribbling a series of short, mostly cryptic anagrammatic poems wherein each line is composed of the reorganized letters found in “The Benefactor.” I did something similar when I last sat down to sketch the Sea Devil, but stopped once I became so absorbed in the letters that I began to feel crazy. It’s a maddening process, yet I still find an unrivaled fulfillment in making do with what little you have; in discovering the many hidden potentials that lurk beneath the surface.  

Deliciously Different!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and the group on 3 December 2015.

Woody has mellowed over the years

That's funny, I didn't realize he was just a gnome. From the beard up, he looks like your traditional wild man of the woods character. If he is a gnome, could it be that he was once a virile wild man—a huge hairy, bearded dude with gnashing molars and thunderous laughter? Perhaps his diminishment is due to that modern process by which we become caricatured, eviscerated, emasculated, defeminated versions of ourselves, suitable only for branding purposes. This could be a kind of Robert Bly, Iron John, men's movement type thing, but not limited to men only. Just the idea that there's no room for that sort of pagan spirit in a Socratic, Alexandrian, rationalistic, deterministic, positivist, empiricist, consumerist, materialist, materialistic society.

I don't think the Savage Sisters would have done this to Woody. No one so clearly secure in their own identity/muliebrity would do this to another. I don't know, maybe they would, but in a spirit of mischief, not malice. Of course, part of the reason they don't rain arrows down on Arthur is his feminine qualities (see "A Distinctly Feminine Attack on History" and "Frolicsome Fawn-Like Movements"). But more than anything else, Arthur is childlike, not unmanly. He's just a different kind of spirit—not the wild man type, but some other unadulterated expression. I would think that the Savage Sisters would recognize that same essence in Woody, even while keeping a safe distance and even battling with him from time to time. Of course, they might turn him into a gnome, but that's just par-for-the-course paganism. Even dismembering him wouldn't be that big of a deal. He'd probably be laughing and bellowing through the whole thing. Like them, he is unhistorical. This isn't Don Gilber.

Probably James Vernor did this to him, trying to sanitize and sell wild man urine!

The Vernor's Dude

The following is an excerpt of a 3 December 2015 email exchange between Will, Art, and the group.

Woody the Gnome

Will:

I'm also up for the traveling notebook and the zine. 

Also, I think the Savage Sisters of Shakespeare should be our project's version of two other Detroit staples: GLOW (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) and Juggalos. By our version, I mean probably not much like those things at all. But Faygo should be involved. 

Also, somehow I thought the Benefactor morphed into Leif Erickson's sister....that the Benefactor was the Lodestone keeper. For Art, he's the person who ruins the project by funding it, either in real life or in the story. For me, he or she ruined America by funding it with the lodestone's power. 

I think besides Victoria Woolf's being a Freudian slip on my part, she is in my eyes what Steffi becomes when she absorbs the power of the lodestone and the life force of Leif Erikson's sister, who may or may not be The Benefactor or both. 

Also, I think we've got the postmodern revival of the allegory of the cave going on here, with the return to paganism and the arches within arches. And of course, the actual cave.

Art:

How about the Vernor's dude? Could be a new character. Some kind of archetypal figure from Detroit's version of the Schwarzwald. I see him being some sort of pagan figure who gets dismembered or eats children, but is sanitized and repurposed as Vernor's logo.

Will:

I love it. I think a Rumpelstiltskin-type approach would work. I think that any Icelandic magical creatures who end up in the salt mines with Leif Erikson's sister should be refugees from the patriarchical structure of Germanic myth. That means this gnome has somehow fled to be nestled in the lap of a very powerful and wise gynocracy (which was just autocorrected into "gyro crazy," which means we must be talking about the caves under Greektown). 

So I'm thinking his story has to be a strange permutation of the traditional child eater/mischief maker/imp thing. What sort of gnome would the SSS keep for a lapdog, and how would the story morph into bringing the gift of Vernor's to Detroit? What is an Icelandic Pan who enjoys subservience to women all about? Is he the Mordred of the Arthur White universe? 

Also, how much of this salt mine world does he see? Does he see it in dreams? Can he ever distinguish any of it from mystical visions? And as a fairy tale percolates under the city, how does it shape Childe Arthur?

The Outer Frame

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 3 December 2015.

The Interior of a Theatre, Northern Italian School

Regarding the last traveling zine, how would we proceed?

Here's a thought that isn't full fledged, but that is based on your book: what if this is how YOU become the outer frame?

That you and the ethos you espouse—NOT the satellite—are the final curator and caresser of content. I say this not to shirk work, but because you are the one who is actually achieving this feat. And you aren't just reframing, reposting, retweeting, and embedding like Carlton does. How strange to think that your lo-fi, subterranean ethos would encompass, enliven, and make art of the satellite!

Perhaps the satellite is the sphere in which we achieve what Irigaray considered the sterile recapitulation of ourselves and our projects—parthenogenesis, cloning, eternal recurrence, auto-birth. But it is still only by driving our roots down into the earth that we can flourish and proliferate as human beings.

I don't mind contributing my "mapkins" to the cause. If you send a journal or zine my way, I'll cut and paste some stuff into it, scrawl some hieroglyphics. But I think you're the one who has the power and skill and vision to make it all cohere (even if coherence amounts to nothing more than stitching and gluing things together). In some ways, you can do some of this already. In the same way that you've cut up books, you could print and cut up things from the blog, take a screenshot of or, better yet, trace, a YouTube video or picture, use any of these materials as you gain superiority over and bring salvation to our spiraling satellite.

I don't have any more time to write, but, to me, this is the perfect expression of the insights brought up in your book. The whole question of art vs. technology, the enduring importance of "terrestrial and tangible artifacts," the "laudible refusal to accept the speed and sanitation of contemporary culture." I feel like this could be the outer frame—and a benevolent one, not one that seeks to parasitically appropriate its existence.

This Irradiation of Identities

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 1 December 2015.

Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis by Henry Fuseli

Liza,

This is the most beautiful thing that has ever emerged from the primordial swamp of the project.

Quick take on one solitary question from your minor masterpiece: Yes, I do believe that Steffi, Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's and Leif Erickson's Sister are "the same person." Possibly incorporating aspects of you and/or Allison (no offense: Will and I became a Nietzschean dichotomy).

I put "the same person" in quotes because what Steffi has done is achieve indefinitude, the end goal of Knology and the process catalyzed by the Lodestone.

And no, I have never considered the Benefactor part of this irradiation of identities, although the fact that Will seems to think so makes me wonder. What Steffi achieves is the ability to engulf, usurp, subsume, sublate other identities into her all-comprehending framework. Eventually, even Farthington disappears in this way.

In that sense, she is Charybdis. In another sense, she is Scylla, in that she is endowed with these multiple heads or identities.

I always thought the the Benefactor was some kind of evil avuncular character.

Okay, I need about 5 weeks to process this. Wow.