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.