A Von Trapp Family of Arthur's Kids (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt from a 14 September 2014 email exchange between Art and Will.

Art:

I guess my affinity for the violent Agnieszka is that I find the idea of staging an attack like that funny. The band has been rocking "Tunnels within Tunnels" for a few minutes and Arthur is finally triumphantly trotting up through the crowd toward the stage (I imagine him in an all-white jumpsuit thing with a little sequined cape). Agnieszka broadsides him and starts beating the crap out of him. She finally leaves, and Arthur, trying his best to save face, slinks up on stage to join the band.  

But I think your "cut all ties" idea is just as plausible. 

Yes, I agree maybe there's a myth of those "immaculate" conceptions. Perhaps this is a myth that Will perpetuates for some reason--maybe legal. For obvious reasons, I don't think Arthur should actually have that power, which would never be a God-given thing (twofold meaning of the conjugal act, Humanae Vitae). 

I do think The Sound of Music would be worth mining as kind of template that would be distorted in Arthur's life. Will is, in some ways, more like Georg Von Trapp than Arthur is, what with his patriotism and strict demeanor. But many of the same elements are present in both stories. In some ways, Arthur and Will are Maria and Georg, respectively, temperament wise. Like Maria, Arthur is convinced he has a calling, one that his association with Will pulls him out of. In Maria's case, that turning point was precipitated by love. It's almost the opposite in Arthur's case. But Will is also like the manager in the film who first realizes the possibility of fame and riches. 

Maybe we should keep these ideas in mind for a musical.

Will:

Three clarifications:  

1. I also think the violence is hilarious. There's no reason why we can't have fits of public violence followed by the cutting of all ties.
2. Yeah, of course Arthur can't really have that progenerative power. That's why I've never taken it seriously. But Will perpetuating the myth, maybe not only for legal reasons but to make the levitation seem less possible by surrounding it with a bunch of other ridiculous claims while simultaneously creating extra buzz makes sense.
3. I was just thinking of Agnieszka as a single mother trying to force a Von Trapp thing out of the kids. Having Arthur and Will be a part of it wouldn't make much sense with their crowded schedules, but it would play up the similarities between Will and Agnieszka as profiteers and exploiters of family. I was kind of thinking of a way to deal with a distortion of Spartacus I have in my head. Arthur hears a heavenly call to bring his music back to the masses and scrape out some sort of meager tour even though nobody has heard of him. Suddenly, there is a whole flood of people claiming to be Arthur White.  

The History of Arthur White: Brand New Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Will moved Arthur back into the family home and spent a few months nursing Arthur back to health.

He saw Arthur's downfall as his own fault and decided that he would do a better job this time around fulfilling his promise to their mother. He went to their local parish and got the name of Fr. Bernard, a priest with a counseling degree who was an accomplished musician and started bringing him by the house to counsel Arthur. Fr. B also spent a lot of time talking with Will and helped him realize the mistakes he had made with the Sweet World. Will decided that if he helped Arthur put a band together with people he liked who were living good, Catholic lives, and if he held back the pressures of touring and recording, Arthur would be able to become the person he was meant to be. Arthur loved the idea and named the group Brand New Life, which Will modified to Arthur White's Brand New Life.

The early days of Brand New Life were some of the best Will and Arthur had together. Will rented a home in the country and moved the whole band in together. Everyone, even Will, went to daily mass. Everyone played music, cooked meals, did chores. After a while, Agniesczka even visited with the children. Will was able to keep an eye on the company, which helped resolve some tensions with Anthony, who was still angry that Will completely dropped out of the picture during The Sweet World days. Arthur especially bonded with Joe Lazarus, a guitar player and recovering drug addict. The two of them became accountability partners and, for the first time, Arthur had a male friend he could trust other than his brother. He and Arthur both took to their therapy of praying while making felt banners, and together they made the album cover for the first Brand New Life album. The band played softball with the Rockets and other Detroit bands, which Will loved because it gave him a chance to goof around with his old buddy Johnny Bee Badanjek.

The success of Brand New Life was a complicated blessing. Arthur's therapy and prayer life helped him so much that he not only regained his ability to return to the Sweet World almost at will, but he realized that the woman was the Virgin Mary and her child was the baby Jesus! Arthur's channel to the divine reopened, and this time around, Arthur could enter it as a healthy adult. The result was that by the time Arthur was supposed to make the second Brand New Life album, he was ready to make an album of prophecy about Christ's redemption of a fallen America--not at all the sort of record Will wanted the group to make. Will was like most Catholic Americans: he believed in a happy medium of heaven and earth in which heaven is the optional cherry on top of the sundae of a productive life. He was like parents who get their kids Catholic educations to get them into college--not heaven. Will would see Kierkegaard's ethical sphere as the highest acceptable sphere of existence, but the religious sphere is just nuts.

Somehow, he never once had an experience of God that disrupted his concrete view of reality even for a moment.

The Comeback

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 December 2012.

The ending of Arthur White only works if it's comic, but there should be two tragic phases.

The first is Arthur succumbing to hubris, worshipping himself, and losing everything. The second is Will, through his best intentions, destroying Arthur.

I think we almost need to invent a new type of tragedy here...not tragedy of fate or tragedy of will but tragedy of culture...the culture of the American Dream. Of course, you've already pointed out Arthur Miller here. Just as a Willy Loman spared the American Dream would have been a talented and happy carpenter, an Arthur White spared the American Dream would have been a Therese of Lisieux.

Instead, he'll have to take the low road as a tortured, disfigured version of what he was made to be. I see the first round of tragedy as the anarchic individualism of the American Dream coming out of the sixties. I see the second round as the homogenizing effects of the American Dream of the mid-seventies and eighties.

I see Brand New Life as having two phases: a very happy, promising early phase, and then a convoluted mess phase...kind of like Love.

There have been something like 70 members of Love. There is the "real" Love from the first three albums (mediocre musicians who made great music), the second Love (outstanding musicians who made lame music), and then whomever Arthur Lee could find until he died. The last decent version was a group called Baby Lemonade who just did perfect covers of the original group's recordings.

I think Arthur White wants the right things out of life but finds little guidance until the early days of Brand New Life, which is full of fallen people on a path to redemption, like Joe Lazarus Sr.

Will thinks he wants the right things in life but doesn't. Still he pursues them like a faithful, disciplined soldier. Joe Jr. has no confidence in any sort of reality, and like Pilate asks, "What is Truth?" Agniesczka is a lioness who protects her kids first, then her husband; she is probably materialistic partly because she wants to protect her kids and partly because she's a little vain. Will isn't all that different: he likes to be known as his little brother's protector.

I see late-seventies Arthur being destroyed for doing the right things musically, and Will being a tragic figure for destroying something beautiful and holy out of a misguided faith in the American Dream.

The story of the last thirty years is that Arthur has pace been healing at a snail's pace, and, over the past year or so, has gotten to the point that he can play music again, recording it on cassette tapes in hopes of getting it to Joe Lazarus Sr.

It's a really sad, pathetic-seeming plan, but Arthur is responding to God's voice telling him to get this last album out to the public. He thinks Joe is the only one who will understand. Unfortunately, Joe is dead, which is even more pathetic. But God gets the tapes to Joe Jr., which can bring him healing and shape a new destiny for him.

For the past thirty years, Will has had to cope with Arthur.

At first, he had him committed so he wouldn't have to deal with him. Then he couldn't afford the bills, so his girlfriend, a nurse, said they could care for him at home. Will stuck her with him, and, as she cared for him, she was converted and left Will to join a convent. Will resented Arthur for that, but has seen the empty place his dream has led him to.  He's just about at that point where he is ready to admit his failures and repent. He just doesn't know how...

That's where the comeback comes in.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

Circe Invidiosa by Waterhouse

I see your point.  I like the Steffi idea, especially since it's a twist and TV needs twist, but archetypically, she could easily default to a Scylla/Circe figure.  Not that I mind that.

I see a lot of promise in Agnieczka as a character...we just haven't talked about her much because of her loose connection to an ex of yours and partially because of the awkwardness that happens if you play Arthur White and have to have a relationship with an actress. The problem goes away if we pursue the TV show option and don't play the parts ourselves.

Linda is a heroic figure, but she's kind of saved by Arthur, which lends her to a few stereotypes...the redeemed fallen woman Mary Magdalene type, which again, is not a huge problem for me since the men are fairly archetypical, too.  I'm not on a quest to eliminate archetype...I don't think any of us are.  I think we just want to sharpen the archetypes.  Archetypes are really useful for helping people process truth...they just fail when they are presented in a hackneyed manner, unless the point is farce.

Arthur's parents are interesting contrasts. There's probably that problem of the Victorian thing where the wife is the moral head of the household and the dad is the economic head, but I do like the idea in which Arthur's mother's ambitions toward heaven rival and even outstrip his father's economic ambitions.

The big female character you left out is the Virgin Mary. In my eyes, the whole story is about Arthur's relationship with Mary...she's the central figure of his mystical connection to heaven.

In so many ways, Arthur lives in a feminine world, and there's a little bit of a feminist undertone I see in the way that Will and Farthington's aggressive masculinity screws so much up, and if the world could accept Arthur on his own terms instead of trying to butch him up and measure his music in terms of money, it would be a much better place. It's not that Arthur is effeminate...it's that the world can only recognize his gifts--creativity, intuition, love, a profound appreciation of beauty, a life-giving disposition--in feminine terms. Really, though, they are divine.

The idea of Steffi adds an interesting spin on maleness.

One other crazy idea: Joe Lazarus, Jr.  could be Josie Lazarus. Sorry, Joe! But really, there's your female on a heroic quest if we just change his gender.

3-D White Guys

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014. 

"native and indued unto that element"

You know, as I'm looking at our pictures, I'm realizing that we don't have many well-developed women written into this story.  There's The Woman in the Sweet World; Lena, Will and Arthur's mom; Agnieszka, Arthur's wife; Linda, Will's girlfriend in the later years...

This concern comes out of my AP English class where I noticed that most of our tragedies consist of a 3-D white guy suffering against the 2-D backdrop of non-white and non-male characters. I wonder if it would make sense to develop a convincing Virginia Wolff- or Simone de Beauvoir-type character, who, maybe just by her presence, satirizes the seriousness of what is going on with these self-important men. I'm having a real hard time imagining who it could be, but I think that shows just shows my narrow-mindedness.

The same narrow-mindedness that had the original (female) teacher of the class choose all books that are by white men, about white men.

The "stage" is already crowded with men angling to be the tragic hero. One thought is that current-day Carlton is Oberlin student/cult member Steffi Humboldt. In that case, Carlton Farthington did die and only appears in public dressed as the mascot. Steffi is the one who has taken over all of his material, including the material that he appropriated from Arthur White and Will. Maybe Steffi has some connection to Arthur that she would want to appropriate him, taking him into herself as it were, and bringing forth new life (okay that's problematic, but I'm trying here!).

But it does make sense to me that she or some other woman could be the sea devil. It might be interesting if we were able to write an entire story for her, where our story becomes just one small part of her universe. Unfortunately, my mind can only envision her having an Ophelia/Edna Pontellier/Virginia Wolff-type demise: she walks back into that element to which she is "native and indued." I suck.

Have a great day!

The History of Arthur White: The Sweet World

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

In the early seventies, music was evolving at a rapid pace, and both Arthur and Will understood that Arthur White and The Five Wits' brand of hard-rocking Motown covers were too old-fashioned.

Arthur was heavily influenced by the new directions of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield. Will just knew it was time for something new, and that the Five Wits weren't the right vehicle for Arthur's songwriting anyways. Luckily, the other Wits were off to college or were too busy with their assembly line jobs and wished Arthur luck. Arthur and Will put out ads and assembled the new group, which they both decided they should call The Sweet World of Arthur White. Arthur liked the name because all he had ever wanted to do was tell the story of The Sweet World, which still occupied his dreams even if it wasn't as vibrant as it used to be. Will liked the name because it was a big middle finger to everyone who had ever messed with his brother, and because it capitalized on the success of the Arthur White brand.

The Sweet World combined Arthur's Motown influences with psychedelic and folk elements plus Arthur's mystical lyrics. The band was a huge local smash and Will made getting the band to California, cutting a demo, and getting signed a one-year goal. Will worked hard on this goal and succeeded, but he did so with a type of single-mindedness that kept him from being an empathetic brother. The more the band worked, the more Arthur lost his mystical connection to the real Sweet World. That, coupled with the loss of his mother, led him to get married too early to Agniesczka, a childhood friend  Arthur reconnected with on tour.

Unfortunately, Arthur idealized her for the child she used to be, just as he idealized his own childhood as a way of retreating from the miseries of middle school. One night Arthur touched a woman during one of the Sweet World's more intense numbers, and she had a mystical experience that unnerved him. Will made Arthur make touching a woman's cheek and singing directly to her part of the act, and the sexual-mystical-spiritual confusion that resulted terrified Arthur and also drove him to an early marriage so that he could stay chaste if not celibate.

On top of all that, The Sweet World wasn't like the Five Wits: it hadn't evolved out of the friendship of neighborhood buddies and family members, but out of a search for great players. Those great players brought a lot of habits with them that kept Arthur distant from them. He was always afraid of guys because of the bullying and never was very good at making friends with them and, on top of that, it seemed like the only way to spend time with the guys on their terms was to chase girls and party. By the time the first album was recorded, Arthur was in a steady pattern of running from the band to Will, from Will to Agniesczka and the kids, from Agniesczka and the kids into prayer, from prayer into songwriting, and so on.  Every part of Arthur's life attracted him and terrified him, every part was sanctuary and cause to flee.

Then, a bunch of horrible stuff happened all at once.

Questions for Will

The following is excerpted from a December 2012 email exchange between Will and Art.

What role does Agniesczka play?  

I don't foresee getting an actress to play her.  At most, we might need some old photographs, but even those could be of her and the kids.   

In the old days, Arthur wasn't around much or there wasn't any reason for her to end up in the band footage, so she is mostly just alluded to in the narrative.  In the present day, she is dead or otherwise gone.   

I do hope for a day when we turn the whole story into a musical; at that point, neither of us will play our roles, so we can develop her role more fully then--and that of Will's girlfriend Linda--when there's no need for us to do the acting.  Will spends most of his life in the future and Arthur has a really tenuous relationship with chronological time, so I don't see either of them as big picture takers.

Why would Will use marriage to control Arthur?  

Will is torn between his Polish roots and his New World roots.   

His New World roots can only think in terms of being a swinging single: initially, he tempts Arthur into forming The Sweet World through women.   

He feels guilty about that when he sees how that path nearly destroyed him, so he turns to the Old World alternative: marriage. Will can't think in terms of celibacy, which is what Arthur really needs.  But if Arthur becomes a monk or hermit, he can't be a rock star.  Plus, celibacy just seems to weird and unnatural to a modern man like Will.   

So Will wants to make amends (here again is how we keep Will from wearing a black top hat and twirling his mustache).  Will took a vow that he would make his brother a star. His approach in the Sweet World failed, so he tries another approach, grounded in a very Polish vision of stability (marriage and church) as well as a 70's vision (psychology, counseling, support groups, settling down).   

I think Will feels that if Arthur has stability at home, he can compartmentalize and be a husband and father by day and a rock star by night.  Initially, Arthur sings about domestic bliss, but soon he feels called to subjects like confessing his guilt and the state of America's soul.   

As Arthur comes closer to singing about the things he feels called to sing about, his marriage, band, and relationship with his brother deteriorate.  Will sees everything that he tried to build for Arthur falling apart and resents him for it.  Will can only think in terms of real-world responsibilities, and here's Arthur chasing ghosts while the woods are burning.  

The ECT is a combination of revenge, resentment, a quest for control, love for his brother, and fear that his brother may be right and that everything Will has pursued is wrong. 

Will's hamartia is a type of misguided nobility.  If you want to go as far as a lobotomy, we can; I think he does need to be permanently scarred from his institutionalization, but ECT might be enough.  The treatment severs his ability to easily distinguish between past, present, and future, real and mystical, word and deed.  His capacity to distinguish what is reality the way other people perceive it and what is his own mystical connection to God was never strong to begin with, but it's gone now.   

Will is too salt of the earth to get that, and he just sees crazy.  Joe will figure it out, though, and help Arthur reenter the world.