The Saline Avenger (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.

Jason Voorhees drowns in Crystal Lake

I'm taking notes and then writing when I have a spare moment. This is unrelated to Liza's newest batch of illuminated texts (thanks for keeping the lights on Liza!).

I wanted to take up Will's thread of morality plays.

In particular, I wanted to spend a little time within the American tradition, which is alive and well. In recent years, this tradition has largely taken the form of horror movies.

Unlike Japanese horror, which just involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time, American horror has to do with strict Puritan notions sin and punishment.

Perhaps the best emblem of this tradition is that of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise. Jason, a mentally disabled, deformed child, drowns when two camp counselors go off to have sex. In Friday the 13th, it's Jason's mom who does the killing, but the stage is set for the archetypal vengeful angel who—in his unassailable innocence—returns to punish these transgressions. It's telling that Alice, who fends off the sexual advances of a male camp counselor earlier in the film, is the heroine and only survivor of the first movie (she is summarily dispatched by Jason himself at the beginning of the second).

I don't have the Jung that I've been reading with me, but I love how he issues this total smack down of the Enlightenment and its supposed exorcism of spiritual realities. Modern man is sorely mistaken when he thinks he has exchanged centuries of darkness for the bright light of positivistic, optimistic, empirical thought. All he has done is suppressed the underlying realities, which means they inevitably return, only this time in neurotic or psychotic forms.

I love that Jung explains that the only therapy required for Catholics suffering from modern malaise is to get them connected back up with the Church. The path is much more difficult for Protestants, who initiated the whole de-mystification project culminating in the Enlightenment. Of course, Nietzsche and Wagner and Jung and others had plenty to say in opposition to this wholesale sellout to rationalistic, Apollonian, Alexandrian, Socratic thought, but the celebration has mostly continued unabated down to the present day.

The total banishment of religion from the public square is just one symptom of the larger problem. Again, the Jungian axiom: anything banished returns, only this time in neurotic or psychotic form. What returns feels no guilt. What returns is unabashed, undaunted, intractable, incorrigible. What returns cannot be reasoned with. In the best horror movies, what returns doesn't speak: Jason, Michael Myers, all the various entities in It Follows.

The premise of It Follows is particularly interesting. By having sex with someone you take on the curse: an entity will pursue you at a walking pace until it catches up and brutally mutilates you. This entity is inexorable in its pursuit and invisible to everyone else. Guilt and punishment cannot be mitigated by reference to the consensus loose morality of our times, staying within the brightly lit public square so to speak. Inevitably, you are flushed from your rationalistic hiding place into the dark, inarticulate, isolating, intimate, collapsed world of your guilt.

Long story short, I've been thinking along these lines with regard to the End of Arthur White. If this is a morality tale—and an American morality tale at that—by what instrument, by what mechanism is the justice administered? In Dante, the sin is inextricably bound up in the punishment; there is no separation between the two. This is probably the more accurate, more mature view. But inside the puerile Puritan tradition that is our heritage, we've needed to embody the punishment as something outside ourselves.

I'm thinking of a resolution akin to the one that occurs in Geek Love, where the telekinetic Chick destroys the entire Fabulon camp in a firestorm.

Introducing Liza!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 17 April 2015.

Hello Allison, Arthur, Carlton, Will, Will, and any of the others hiding amongst us,

What a full room we have here!

Here I am, at long last. Here I have been all along.

As you will soon see, my presence in this project will be much like that of a fly on the wall. Even in the long intervals that are likely to pass by without any buzzing on my end, know that I am watching, reading, interpreting, and reflecting on your messages. Once I've digested them as best I can, I will swoop in, impose my character(s)' rationality on what Art has called the “primordial wildness of [your collective] scribbles," and fly off once more. Never mistake my silence for disinterest. On the contrary, understand that it is only through the emptiness of the silence that I discover the joy of the noise. Though Allison is light-years ahead of me on her journey through The Sweet World, I’d like to think the degrees of our excitement are equally matched.

While on the subject of Allison – hello! Though we’ve never been in direct communication with one another, I already feel, in some sense, like I know you. Instead of filing my taxes last night, I spent my evening bouncing back and forth between Civilization and its Discontents, Leaves of Grass, and your thesis. I’m yet to make a significant dent in it, but I can already tell that every atom belonging to me as “legend” also belongs to you.

To all of you, really. What great company I’ve stumbled my way into.

I’m tempted to call you members of what Vonnegut’s Books of Bokonon would describe as my karass, but I won’t. Whereas Bokonists derive their life's meaning from foma - shameless untruths - I attribute the entanglement of our lives to our mutual interest in deriving life's meaning from transcendent Truth. A force exists in our communication that is far beyond us; there is a deeper meaning in it than any of us can perhaps currently fathom.

I dig this idea of understanding the meaning through the medium. As we discuss our potential roles in this project, I've been thinking a great deal about how the indefinite process of contextualizing the essence of these roles in turn enlightens our existence both inside and outside the Sweet World. Through this lens, it’s interesting to consider the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian - this sense that we clarify our confusion in the journey through the interplay of these oppositional forces.

In response to a message I sent to Will last night regarding my own bewildering journey to restore order to the chaos that saturates our public education system, he sent me a passage from Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday that further highlights this unifying duality. What I’ve ultimately deduced from all of it is that the meaning of each of our respective roles in this project and beyond has been distorted by what Chesterton calls “an engine of torture."

The purpose of the Sweet World - from my own understanding at least - is to provide us a space in which to translate this meaning not despite this distortion but through this distortion. If the lodestone that Art mentioned confuses our identities, then it is really the most clarifying force there is in our route to understanding our identities.

When I wrote last night's message to Will, I had not yet read through the entirety of this e-mail thread. Now that I have, the line between my purpose in life and my purpose in this project has been reduced to a dash. It is through my daily struggles to contextualize my transcendent purpose amongst grave misfortune that I’ve discovered an inherently meaningful connection to the contextualization of my role in this project.

After writing said message, it dawned on me that I didn’t so much write it as I did sit down at my typewriter and bleed it into being. Though most writers seem to disagree on the attribution of this paraphrased quote, they (maybe) unanimously agree on its merits.To write in such a way, we must abandon our mortal vulnerability  by ripping open our wounds. To look upon these wounds with rapture instead of lamentation is to have paved a clearer channel between the earthly and the divine. It is to, as Coleridge says, "build that dome in air."

I often think Detroit could be one of our earthly channels into the divine. Whenever I hear someone refer to it as a "blank canvas," I want to shake my fist at the sky in horror that they don't see it for what it really is: the Sistine Chapel of the Midwest.

Though Nietzsche uses this blood-writing metaphor to promote earthly elevation of the Übermensch over the Untermensch, I’ve decontextualized parts of it below in order to support the above idea:

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood and thou wilt find that blood is spirit."

"He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.”

My decontextualization of this is that our willingness to suffer into Truth is not for worldly pleasure - that of the head - but rather to satiate our yearning for the divinely transcendent - that of the heart.

The text concludes: “Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.”

So, in a sense, this is how we define ourselves in opposition with ourselves: we can either give into the temptations of man, exalting ourselves to übermensch, or we can remain steadfast in our rejection of these temptations, isolating ourselves as the untermensch.

As the fly on the wall, it seems apparent that Art and Will are not writing The Sweet World into existence, but rather bleeding it into existence. In my decontextualization of Nietzsche, this is indicative that God is dancing through you.

With this dance as my aim, I prioritize the process over the purpose. Through a certain lens, this process is our purpose. The difficulty then lies not in understanding, but in discovering the courage through our confusion to present our woundedness to the world as Jesus did. Though this will inevitably yield more wounds in the short term, the moment we fixate our gaze on the gore despite our worldly instinct to avert our eyes is the moment we will see Beauty and know Truth. As Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters [us].”

In keeping our veins open, we will come to see the light that will guide us into the caves. It is this light that will not only illuminate The Benefactor's horror-raps etched on the crumbling walls, but that will keep our eyes steady on them despite all impulse to look away. Though this is all lofty idealism at best, I have trouble envisioning a better alternative than this in combusting “the engine of torture."

On that note, it appears as though I’ve rambled my way to the edge once more. Perhaps the edge of the cliffs is where the Sweet World exists. After all, if you're an outlier of the world, you're an inhabitant of the Sweet World.

As my favorite secular-humanist once said,

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Until my next swoop,

Liza

Hello Liza and Allison!

The following is an email sent from Art to Liza and Allison on 12 April 2015.

Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice by Nicolas Poussin

I have been going back and forth for a long time trying to figure out how to approach this first email. I do feel some need to formally welcome you to the project. No pressure as far as your involvement, but I have to say that I'm kind of overly excited about the prospect of your respective contributions and it's bringing up all sorts of past experiences of rejection, when my heart was all a-flutter and things didn't work out, in large part due to my unabashed enthusiasm. So I learned the lesson of Orpheus, by which, in the words of John Updike, "we achieve our desire by turning our back on it." Be that as it may, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm psyched. And of course you have full permission to leave at any point (but I guess by analogy that means that you fall back into the underworld). One paragraph and I've already made things weird!

I understand that you are both up to big things, but I wanted to summarize what I understand about your potential roles thus far, expressing some of my own thoughts and providing links to past posts that may or may not be helpful to you.

Allison, I understand your role as one of exegesis/analysis. In some ways, this puts you on Will's Apollonian, rationalistic end of the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. I gathered from lurking somewhat on your Facebook page that you're pretty familiar with Nietzsche having written a dissertation that synthesized his and other people's work and that you ultimately hope to help people to live their lives better...my point being, I assume you get the reference! I think "The Eternal Loop of One's Own Rationalism" would be a good place to start in terms of conceptualizing what you're doing (you would be Actaeon, by the way). You become a Nietzschean protagonist of sorts who tries to rationalize the formless horror. Eventually--spoiler alert--the Dionysian shows its superiority. Your own Apollonian endeavors are not for naught; they are paradoxically "energized and raised aloft" through glimpsing the formless horror. So, yes, you get eaten alive by your own hounds so to speak, but something cool comes out of it. I mean how many people get turned into a stag? That's pretty cool in and of itself.

I should back up and say that I know you're not intending to be one of the characters, but, like a lot of people who have had some involvement, you may end up fitting into one or more roles. I visualize you as an early Steffi Humboldt, whose "Forward" is used for The Principles of Theory. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that she didn't just "go back to Oberlin." The post, "Eve vs. the New Eve" may also be a good place to find out what may have happened to her.

At any rate, whether you identify with Steffi at all, I like the idea of you trying to come up with a thesis as to what the project is. Everything can and should be tentative, probably indefinitely. We use the word "maybe" a lot. That's unlikely to change. Any even preliminary ideas, drafts, intuitions would be welcome--whatever aspects of the project do you find philosophically interesting. Interestingly, when I start posting some of that material, your thesis will have to accommodate it: the eternal loop of one's own rationalism! Thank you in advance for any contribution you can make!

Okay, moving on to Liza. Liza, I posted your first post today and it's generating some excellent traffic (by the way, shares, reposts, retweets, etc. are all appreciated and, in fact are part and parcel of the cult)! You seem to be more on the Dionysian side of the spectrum with me and Arthur and Carlton Farthington (those are all me, by the way). That means that you can pretty much write whatever you want. I think you've already intuited that we grant ourselves wide latitude when it comes to unintelligibly in this project (or as we like to call it, indefinitude): text-to-voice, voice-to-text, to English-to-Icelandic transcription, and just good old fashioned not making ourselves understood, we have pretty much free rein to say whatever we want! Being on this side of the spectrum means that your life--like mine--has been touched by the lodestone. Thus, our identities become increasingly confused, fused, diffuse, etc. Definitely should read "Epic Finale" - Part 1 and Part 2.

And yes, I'm thinking of you as a latter-day Steffi, who now goes by other aliases like Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister, The Überfrau, etc. Of course, you could also be Leif Ericsson and/or The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever. Here's something I wrote to Will a couple days ago:

Maybe indefinitude is the ultimate goal of Knology. Maybe it's what Farthington promised his followers. And yes that has a meaning in terms of time, but it also has a meaning in terms of identity. Maybe that explains why all our characters blur outside their boundaries, or at least the ones that have been touched by the lodestone, The Benefactor, Knology, etc. Ones like Will seem to lack that transcendence, but have clear facticity. There's a trade off.

And--I'm not even sure if the two of you know each other--so I apologize, but even your two names introduce an interesting conflation and confusion of identities. Again, from a recent email to Will:

I also like that we have a Liza and Allison coming on board. Having a field day with those two names, their meanings, and the potential relationship of those meanings to one another. No etymology on hand now but just the "a-" meaning not and the "-son," which is so odd for a girl's name. Liza is the one that is apparently free from those affixes, accretions. Perhaps further along the path toward indefinitude...

Of course, Will and I are not immune from this same treatment. At a most basic level, our names are nothing more than Nietzschean concepts.

Okay, enough of me. I've probably scared you off. So reply to our emails, feel free to get involved to whatever extent and in whatever capacity you'd like, maybe even call Carlton Farthington at his home on Topsail Island, North Carolina (910-541-3455). We believe that, inside the swaddled/crucified existence, whatever utterance you're currently capable of making is the best utterance. Don't wait until come down off the cross--you'll be dead then!

Will, anything to add?

Art

That Ineffable, Inarticulate Source

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 February 2015.

Lake Sils, Upper Engadine valley, Grisons, Switzerland

Home again today, resting up.

Quite honestly, "my heart leaps up" when you say "I could grab a couple locals guys out here and put the songs together, book a Saturday gig, and then you could come up Saturday morning, we could play through the songs, play Saturday night, and you could head home Sunday."

That feels right, not just from a logistical but from a philosophical perspective. I think we are necessarily doing something very interesting with the whole concept of "band." With so many bands out there and us being way past our prime, there's no way we can afford not to be original to the extreme. The anachronistic costuming and performance dimension by itself is just a gimmick.

I feel like my role should be, first and foremost, songwriter and Dionysian hero. I don't say this out of arrogance. I just mean that, if I'm involved too much in the nuts and bolts, my creativity (anyone's creativity?) will necessarily go downhill. I want to dam myself up, to "boast gladly of my weakness," and see if God/Art rescues me in the midst of that. That's a scary pairing in that last sentence, but it's something that I believe. God is first of all Creator. He is the one who move across the surface of the primordial waters. If there are no Apollonian takers, if there isn't anyone who wants to make something of this music, it just means that I haven't--like Nietzsche's lake--risen high enough (or grown deep enough) to be worthy of notice.

If I want "apostolic fruitfulness," the answer is, paradoxically, to spend more time in contemplation. I feel that God is calling me this Lent to settle into something deeper. It's not even "endeavoring" to become deeper, it's settling into something that is already there. Resting into these Lenten disciplines, damming myself up and not going out to some transcendent horizon of "achievement" or "accomplishment" feels like the right thing right now. A lot of these are already part and parcel of my life: openness to children, times of prayer, recourse to the sacraments. These are all things that I have already, at some point, "signed up for."

They all have those aspects of being preliterate, primitive, primordial, prolific.

I believe that music, perhaps more so than any other artistic genre, participates in this primeval source of creative energies. Singing and playing of instruments and dance. Visual and sculptural art is a distant second. Music and dance are a participation in that ineffable, inarticulate source. Even if dance and music come to nothing, they are the secret source of our regeneration.

To the outside observer, openness to children would seem to have been a great constraint on artistic endeavors. What a surprise to discover almost the exact opposite has been true! First of all, prolificity and/or openness in everything seems to be a precondition for creativity. Secondly, interacting with these irrational, preliterate, primitive beings--although frustrating for my rationalistic, literate, sophisticated self--has worked wonders for my spirit, bringing me closer to that epoch when human beings walked the surface of the earth in wonder.

Religious ritual and devotional practices--especially ones designed for illiterates--fall into the same category.

Okay, so long story short, I want to spend my time deepening this lake of music and contemplation, both through the blog and in the context of life. If you can gather musicians who are willing and able to learn and practice the songs, great! That's a lot better than me trying to coordinate things here. I think the best thing I can do for the project is to dam myself up here and, when and if the lake rises high enough, something may happen.

But, again, that won't be through an ambitious flowing out toward achievement and accomplishment, which impoverishes the life of contemplation, ritual, procreation, creativity, etc.

The Fate of Ophelia

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 February 2015.



I'm sick right now, so l'm feeling a little doubtful about how much Apollonian ambition I can muster. A pretentious passage from Nietzsche will suffice:

For we must know that in the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is a lethargic element, wherein all personal experiences of the past are submerged. It is by this gulf of oblivion that the everyday world and the world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But as soon as this everyday reality rises again in consciousness, it is felt as such, and nauseates us; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature of things,- -they have perceived, but they are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to set aright the time which is out of joint.   

Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion. It is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too much reflection, as it were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action at all. Not reflection, no! true knowledge, insight into appalling truth, preponderates over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. No comfort avails any longer ... In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia, he now discerns the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and loathing seizes him. 

Here, in this extremest danger of the will, art approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress; she alone is able to transform these nauseating reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence into representations wherewith it is possible to live...

I'm seeing the project more and more as Nietzsche's dammed-up lake (from The Gay Science):

There is a lake which one day refused to flow away, and threw up a dam at the place where it had hitherto discharged: since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very renunciation will also furnish us with the strength with which the renunciation itself can be borne; perhaps man will ever rise higher and higher from that point onward...

Is our lake rising higher and higher as we refuse to discharge ourselves into activity? Could discharging ourselves into activities other than contemplation (and any other activities that eschew a transcendent horizon besides Heaven) be the very thing that has prevented us from achieving greatness? This is not an un-Christian concept. And it is different than quietism; the darkness of this state presupposes that we are constrained to act and make choices in spite of the darkness. Other texts like Dark Night of the Soul have observed that, in the depths of perplexity, our actions paradoxically participate in the omnipotence of God. It is only after going out over the dark, primordial waters that Hamlet is able to return and almost inadvertently purify the kingdom.

And it doesn't mean that a show will never happen, but I'm beginning to see the power in our passivity.

Here's St. Paul (2 Corinthians 12:8-10):

Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

I've shared this one before (again from The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music):

In the Oedipus at Colonus we find the same cheerfulness, elevated, however, to an infinite transfiguration: in contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all that befalls him, we have here a supermundane cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere and intimates to us that in his purely passive attitude the hero attains his highest activity, the influence of which extends far beyond his life, while his earlier conscious musing and striving led him only to passivity.

Probably more than you were bargaining for...!

The Eternal Loop of One's Own Rationalism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 13 December 2014. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.

Actaeon by Titian

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try to make sense of one another's notes. There is an ongoing motif of communication and miscommunication in this story, both electronic communication and earlier forms of communication. Messages get distorted, misunderstood, and/or appropriated for dubious purposes.

Intended meanings get buried under frames of interpretation.

If you ever get time, I think it would be interesting to see what sense you make of my scribblings. I would be happy to do the same for you.

I think it could uncover unseen connections for us and perhaps engender some new creative leads. I don't know how much you actually write in journals anymore, but I still do that quite a bit. I occasionally use word processing to help me get out of writer's block, but usually I'm only typing things up as an absolute last step. Whenever I have a thought and I'm near one of my journals I jot it down with the hope that I'll notice it at some later point when I need some "serendipitous" connection.

I need all the help I can get.

I know the picture isn't the greatest, but is there a part of it that you think you understand? What sentences or paragraphs can you write that bring any concepts or connections into focus? If that's too much to ask, can you articulate any questions?

I have students do an exercise where they take another poet's poem (they can also use poems they wrote themselves) and type it up on a computer, double space it, and fill in the spaces with new words, such that those words work with the preceding and subsequent lines. Then, they delete the original lines, single spacing the remaining text (the new words) and hammering it out until it becomes an entirely new poem.

I think an exercise like this one is entirely appropriate given our motif of framing, embedding, reposting, retweeting, etc. As you interpret the original primordial wildness of my scribbles, trying to impose your own rationality on it, the original disappears, like the skittish deer in the clearing who flees at the slightest footfall.

Or better, Diana bathing naked with her nymphs when Actaeon stumbles on the scene.

What's left is your own text, which is, in turn, transformed into the wild stag to be torn apart by hounds, the eternal loop of one's own rationalism.

Sketchbook for the Project (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt from a 17 October 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Philip Glass "20.IX Book of Longing" by MITO SettembreMusica - originally posted to Flickr as 20.IX Book of Longing. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Art:

"Sketchbook for the project" is exactly right. And yes, it may very well be the project, full stop. 

The difference is that we open that sketchbook for everyone to see. This is nothing new; a seed of this has been present from the very beginning of the project and perhaps from much earlier. 

It's only now that we're beginning to understand it. 

We're letting everyone have a glimpse at the formlessness that is, in some sense, a precondition for creation. The sculptural aspects of the blog provide the requisite Apollonian stage through which we can gaze into the abyss and not be destroyed in the process. And Nietzsche asserts that the Apollonian will be "energized and raised aloft" by this encounter--another explanation for why generosity of this type generates something! 

Paradoxically, the best way to get the plastic project up and running is keep "going back to the well," that is, highlighting that moment at which form comes out of formlessness. 

There's always the fear that we might devolve into what my college housemates dubbed a "Mind Party," where we end up wandering the streets with an untuned, 2-string guitar singing snatches of Christmas carols to bewildered neighbors until someone offers us Rice Krispy Treats. 

Or, even worse, "The Whitewater Tapes." Not even going to go into that one. 

Of course, this story originates from those days, when I was getting down to some artistically entropic states that only now, nearly 20 years later, am I "capitalizing on" in any appreciable way. That is the exact moment at which the first Arthur White songs came into being. That's when I built the cardboard tunnels, snaking along the sandy floor of our Michigan basement. That's when my friend and I wrote The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas. 

And none of that material ever saw the light of day, except for The Principles of Theory, which was unceremoniously presented to Philip Glass (without any contact information or way for him to follow up, of course). 

I think the difference between then and now is the persistently Apollonian intentionality of the current project. We need to keep on approaching this formless state with the goal of containing it, of framing it, of shaping it into something, of getting it to annunciate itself more clearly...not letting it languish in its formless, inarticulate fecundity. 

I like the idea of explaining the project somewhere on the site. Maybe we can start working on the wording for that. That said, there's also much damage to be done by following up Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with 2010: The Year We Make Contact. As usual, we'll have to affect the usual Dickinsonian tack of "tell the truth but tell it slant." 

I like the idea of JamKazam too and I think it's a good fit for this current impulse. Keep me updated on that!

I'm CEO

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 October 2014.

"If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is the my father who glorifies me"

(John 8:54).

Bob Lefsetz celebrates the amoral acumen of the "professional," contrasting him with the sorry-ass amateur.

The Social Network (and the true-life story it depicts) shows how only one person wins, only one person gets to say "I'm CEO, bitch."

The latter of these two stories has all the classic raw material needed for tragedy.

What will our success story look like as Christians, and not just in the afterlife, but here? We have willingly and consciously embraced our constraints, or at least considered the fact that they might be expressions of God's will, which is "love and mercy itself." But they do put us at a distinct disadvantage at least from the worldly viewpoint, don't they?

We didn't go to Harvard. We're not the next Bill Gates. Doesn't look like we're going to be the next Mother Teresa either.

The saint finds refuge in the shadow of God's wings, in obscurity, in the hidden life. But how does that intersect with rock 'n' roll stardom?

Job was prospered after his trials, after he acknowledged the greatness of God's power, the inscrutability of God's wisdom. His intercession on the part of his friends (some friends!) is the last step in his definitive surrender. He is similar to Nietzsche's Dionysiac man in that his former freedom and prosperity are eclipsed by the blessings won by his present passivity.

The frequent mention of the Leviathan in Job suggests that our existence finds its foundation at the bottom of these dark, primordial waters. Yes, we are to build our lives on the rock, but we also need to be drowned in Baptism.

The greatest mystery is God's mastery of chaos.

Not mastery in the sense of vanquishing chaos: there is no analogous "captive led captivity" for chaos. Rather, God's mastery takes the form of transforming that element into something holy: the waters of Baptism, the waters of the womb. I just marvel at the thought that when the angels "came to present themselves before the LORD, the satan also came among them" (Job 1:6). And so God gives satan his "blessing" in a certain sense, and in so doing, transforms satan's trial of Job into a blessing.

And this is the miracle: when those whose lives have been touched by evil or chaos or tragedy are somehow blessed by that encounter. Yes, in some cases that happens through reparation after the fact, or even after death. But also it happens in life.

And so, with faith do we go down to defeat and failure, knowing that somewhere in those depths we find our foundation.

Richly and Radiantly Signed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 17 August 2014.

"Holmes reichenbach" by Sidney Paget (1860-1908) - Strand Magazine. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Yeah, I just read McLuhan's bit about Sherlock Holmes up here. I appreciate your unique ways of connecting the dots. I think dialectic is a critical feature of this project, definitely in the Socratic sense, and possibly at times in the Hegelian and early-Nietzschean sense.

Okay, this doesn't respond to everything you talked about in your two emails, but here goes.

I draw a clear line from Nietzsche's "Socratic man" to McLuhan's Sherlock Holmes. Nietzsche traces the death of culture (and a persistent, centuries-long death--originating at the end of the 6th century B.C.) to the one-two punch dealt out by Socrates and Euripides. Sherlock Holmes can be seen as Socrates/Euripides/Plato taken through to their logical conclusion. When you banish art and the irrational/artistic/mystic means of "understanding" the world, culture (and inevitably even philosophy and religion) dries up and dies. What's left, centuries later, is Sherlock Holmes--a shriveled Socrates, so to speak. Like Holmes, Socrates had so little interest in or patience for literature ("Nil" as Doyle puts it). Socrates only appreciated Aesop and Euripides--nothing ineffable like Aeschylus, thank you very much. Plato burned all his own tragedic writings in order to be his disciple. According to Nietzsche, this was the beginning of the end for the greatest culture to ever grace the face of the earth. And every subsequent culture, holding up this degenerate moment as their gold standard, has likewise bumped up against this ceiling.

In a Christian sphere, this degenerate state has looked like brittle moralistic religion. What's left to the ordinary Christian but the nuptual embrace--the one place they can experience the ineffable, that chaotic, drunken substratum. Then your orthodox Christian buckles in to his apologetics and rote prayers, and hands out fliers for Fireproof ("Fireproof your marriage!"), because he's constantly battling an addiction to pornography. And the answer to all this is, at best, "accountability," as in an "accountability partner" or "Promise Keepers." As Nietzsche points out, "the god" (or daemon) who guided Socrates only spoke to prohibit him from doing things, never to inspire. Is that what modern orthodox Christianity worships, a God of negative moral precepts?

Yes, part of this issue comes from the fact that the Internet has made certain sins so readily accessible, but as McLuhan points out (I think in Mechanical Brides but I can't find it), what the machine serves up is merely a projection of our desires. So what is our spiritual state such that this is what we see when we gaze into the electric pool? Acknowledging Hubert van Zeller's image that morality and orthodoxy are the "cooler embers" that shore up the inner mounting fire of mystic union, is there not another sense in which mysticism is the constitutive element, the substratum, the protective hedge? As I mentioned in an earlier post:

Like a classical garden, this predominating aspect of Arthur is the moss-covered fountain of Pan, through which water from the wilderness is brought in to irrigate the well trimmed rows and patterns of the garden.

Without this influence (literally, flowing in) of untamed wilderness and creativity, the ordered, well-trimmed rows dry out and die--in fact, they fall out of existence entirely.

Both impulses are necessary to art, but the Dionysian is the more constitutive of the two.

This is (again) why I balk at the idea of a morality play as our approach to the project. To me, a religion that demands that even art serve the end of "moral education" is a degenerate religion, a religion in decline. Because Christianity is not, first and foremost, a moralistic religion. Christianity is the scandal of St. Francis of Assisi stripping naked and walking out of town. Christianity is that experience of freedom, of being unmoored, of ecstatic embrace.  Is God the ground of being or not? The artist and mystic aim to find out. It has nothing to do with skepticism; on the contrary, stepping out onto the waters--as opposed to onto solid ground--involves greater risk, and as such requires the greater faith. The ideal Christian artist is, for the most part, naked when he leaves town. There is definitely something in his heart that differentiates his self-exile from that of the atheistic artist. But I doubt this something is in the realm of a moralistic scaffolding that he sets up prior to commencing his labors.

I suppose this is not unlike a Thoreauvian sentiment:

I wanted...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it was sublime, to know it by experience.

A Christian artist probably has a lot of faith that what he finds will be sublime, but he lets go of that presumption due to his overflowing optimism and his hunch that the ineffable gets skittish around such foregone conclusions.

Contrast this with the brittle optimism that preemptively lowers the deus ex machina onto the stage as a kind of idolatry, a savior god of our own making:

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.

They have mouths but do not speak;
they have eyes but do not see;

They have ears but do not hear;
nor is there breath in their mouths.

Their makers will become like them,
and anyone who trusts in them. (Ps. 135:15-18)

I love this from McLuhan ("Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press"):

The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge signatures of existence. 

As Christians, we know who has "richly and radiantly signed" existence! But even though we "know" that, we can't go ahead and sign His signature. Such is the high and uncompromising calling of the ideal Christian artist.

The Eternal Essence of Things

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


"Gustave Doré - Dante Alighieri - Inferno - Plate 4 (Dante meets Virgil)" by Gustave Doré (1832 – 1883) - Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell - Purgatory - Paradise. Illustrations by Gustave Doré, Translation by Henry W. Longfellow, Published by Arcturus Books, 2007. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

As Dante descends back down the slope guarded by the panther, lion, and wolf, he meets Virgil. As Arthur's prospects for stardom dwindle, he discovers Farthington.

Both guides believe that the next step is to bring their charges through the underworld. At that midpoint in life, it's safe to guess that both were trying to attain something that had evaded them up to that point. Dante's banishment from Florence had weened him of his primary focus on politics, and La Divina Commedia seems to reflect an attempt to reorient his life accordingly.

But, again, as he exits the dark wood of confusion and begins to ascend the mountain (representing some new ambition, perhaps literary achievement?), his ascent is halted by prowling animals. Interestingly, his subsequent path through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is set up by St. Lucia, Beatrice, and probably the Virgin Mary--all women. I'm not sure why that makes so much sense, but it does. Men and male characters--with the exception of maybe Hamlet--just go for the gold, which almost always turns out to be fool's gold. As usual, I'm fond of Nietzsche's characterization:

This is something that the Dionysiac man shares with Hamlet: both have truly seen to the essence of things, they have understood, and action repels them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world. Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion--this is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act. Not reflection, not that!--True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysiac man alike...now he understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate...

I feel that I myself (not Arthur) am more like Dante in this regard. Arthur doesn't have any of those worldly ambitions. But a common midlife realization--sometimes taking the form of a midlife crisis--is that our male modus operandi is not getting us anywhere, not accomplishing anything. So we are subjected to this experience that seems so counterintuitive to us, that terrifies us: to be dragged in the opposite direction of our dreams and ambitions, toward the "eternal essence of things." And yet, paradoxically, that is how and why the great work finally gets written. Who knows what would have happened if Dante had gotten past the three beasts, grisly counterparts of his benefactresses in Heaven. Safe to say it wouldn't have been as good as the Divina Commedia. And so, we need to turn our attention away from the hideous aspect of the three beasts and toward the benign influence that frustrates, hampers, and ultimately coaxes us away from Hell-bent ambition and self-sufficiency. Then and only then, having traveled that seemingly opposite path through to its end, do we have the possibility (not the guarantee!) of receiving the original object of our striving, like Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith.

Looking at the present status of the project, it does seem like we have an opening, a way forward. But to what extent will it consist in trying to weave our way past panther, lion, wolf? I want out of the woods as much as the next guy, I want to finally find some way to ascend! This other path--the one I have described--seems darker, obscure. And yet, in a way, that's where the dream was conceived: in darkness. "What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops" (Mt. 10:27). And so we proceed into the light of day, but inwardly embrace that experience of darkness, which leads us on an entirely different journey. Because we want our proclamation to be somehow true to the original whisper, the original darkness. But how can the dark beauty of those words be preserved in the light of day? Should we shout them up from the bottom of a well?

On the surface of things maybe nothing looks different. It's the anguish of the Kierkegaardian guy who has an existential crisis about whether or not he should go to Deer Park, and then ends up going to Deer Park like all the other plebs in Copenhagen. But because of his experience of inwardness, his action is subjectively different than the others who go to Deer Park as a matter of course, because it's the thing to do. What the Dionysiac man, the Knight of Faith, the thwarted Dante, the middle-aged man, and Hamlet have in common is that they are deprived of knowing the propriety or essential rightness of this or that course. But balanced on that fulcrum, they may finally spy a kind of freedom, something that makes them more than just a "pipe for Fortune's finger."

Whether or not actions in this dark, perplexed, anguished, angst-ridden, hidden, swaddled, crucified state have greater efficacy matters not. In some cases, such an experience of inwardness seems to produce a better result: Dante wrote his Commedia, Oedipus at Colonus bestows divine blessings. In other cases, it produces the same result: Abraham got his nation, Hamlet avenges his father and purifies the kingdom. In still other cases, it does not produce the desired result: Kierkegaard never got back his would-be bride.

Nietzsche thinks it's a good thing:

[Oedipus at Colonus], afflicted by an excess of misery, abandoned to every misfortune that comes his way as a passively suffering man, is confronted by a superterrestrial cheerfulness that descends from the gods, which suggests to us that the hero, through his passivity, has found his supreme activity, the effects of which will resonate far beyond his own life, while his conscious strivings in his former life led him only to passivity.

Most of the above discussion has been in tragic terms, but per our earlier discussions I would say this experience of darkness is ultimately and fundamentally comic, no different from the Sweet World, the Forest of Arden, the Garden of Eden. How silly to think of ambition and self-sufficiency sub specie aeternitatis, in the arms of a loving Creator and Redeemer! Do the three sainted women just appear like prowling beasts, mortal enemies of our ambition?

How tragic that would be--and yet at the same time, how comic!

Mimesis Not Diegesis Effecting Catharsis!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 July 2014.

Apollo and Socrates (at the Academy of Athens)

I am also interested in bringing up a new topic, that of mimesis vs. diegesis. I began thinking along these lines when you brought up Drunk History, which is a pretty unalloyed modern example of diegesis, although the actors, of course, engage in (deliberately pitiful) mimesis. It must be first admitted that the writers of Drunk History would--without the slightest doubt--be forcibly and immediately expelled from the Republic, because their narration does absolutely nothing to promote values and virtues of youth.

That said, the only poets who would be allowed to remain in the Republic were the diegetical ones; mimesis is considered unacceptable because, among other things, "human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one part only" (The Republic, Book III). I don't have a fully formed idea here, but there seems to be an intersection between this and the idea of multiple identities that occur after the turbulent reversals. Actually, it seems to intersect in a lot of ways, but I haven't figured them all out.

Socrates would reject what we are doing in imitating our characters. And it doesn't help matters that most of the characters we imitate in this drama are not ones of a praiseworthy sort. Also, some of our characters do the same thing as we do, usurping the identity of others. Finally, we have the more overarching sense in which we all--to a greater or lesser extent--fashion multiple identities for ourselves in this age of avatars.

This same Book III talks about the importance of engendering courage in youth. And the blame is placed on even the poet Socrates revered--Homer--for perpetuating ideas of the afterlife that were contrary to nurturing this all-important virture. The main issue is making it look like everyone--with the exception of maybe Teiresias--has a shitty afterlife, and thus that death is to be avoided at all costs. They've got a point about that one passage in The Odyssey in which the fearless demigod Achilles says he would rather be alive as the basest slave than king of the dead. It's almost as if he regrets the valor that put him constantly in harm's way.

This aspect seems to have a connection to our focus on the underworld and Hell. In some ways, Farthington is doing what Socrates would have him do, that is, make that realm more desireable or palatable, and make life as we know it a thing of lesser value and passing worth, thus engendering courage in his followers. But the followers of Farthington are well on their way to becoming shades, to entering into the anonymous and ignominious part of Hell. More and more, they live the life of a disembodied shade, seeking only to drink blood on the rare occasion it becomes available. Perhaps Farthington thinks that, by leading them into the underworld willingly and while still alive, he is making them kings of that world, himself being the high king.

There is also the issue of exile, the fate which all mimetic poets would suffer in Plato's Republic. Is Arthur and Farthington's trip to Iceland an experience of exile? It sure bears a distinct resemblance to St. John's exile on the island of Patmos and capitalizes on that visionary tradition. I think it is an exile in the sense that neither of them have any place in modern civilization. They have been expelled by Nietzsche's hated Socratic man, who sees rationality, science, and mechanistic thinking as perfectly capable of fathoming the depths of reality.

Apollo and Marsyas

Arthur and Farthington turn this all its head by enacting their modern mythmaking, co-opting the symbols and concepts of empiricism/positivism (think dinosaurs), and allowing the Dionysian to regain superiority.

Arthur is likely from the upstart musical tradition of Marsyas, not Apollo, and is, in some sense flayed alive (or is just among those musicians and poets expelled in The Republic).

Your idea about podcasting also brings up the whole diegesis/mimesis idea. As long as it's just us talking about the characters and the story, we might last longer in a republic ruled by the Socratic man. Of course, I guess that's sort of what we've been doing with the blog as well.

Now with all this hating on Socrates in our story, it's interesting that, in some ways, he also gives voice to its happy ending:

our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession--the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind? 

This seems to be an apt ending for any divine comedy, if we replace "freedom" with "virtue" and "State" with "Church."

A major criticism of our approach is that we delve so deeply into baseness--to an extent that can our work even be considered Christian? Did anyone who attended "An Evening with Arthur White" feel strengthened in their faith? Did anyone feel "encouraged" or "equipped"? And if so, what is the mechanism that allows someone to profit from this? Obviously, Socrates sees no benefit in this approach; I think a whole lot of Christians see no benefit in this approach either--they too have roundly expelled these kinds of poets (just keep that dial locked on Family Life Radio!).

Or is it, as Aristotle says, "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions"?

In other words, mimesis not diegesis effecting catharsis!

Evidence of Wrong Turns

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 26 June 2014.

Yeah, I was thinking about how, in some ways, you are the Apollonian and I am the Dionysian.

If we could afford it time- and money-wise, I would totally just do the garage, DIY version of the project we started with: put on shows, generate footage, get it on the Internet, and let the story unfold that way.

I'd be totally fine with a version of the project where we just pick a show from the timeline and put on that concert, then repeat. I think you go Apollonian when it comes to the records and live performances--you want to make them flawless.  I'm probably more Apollonian about the story, especially when it comes to chronology.

...filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason

I think what sets our story apart from The Office or Parks and Rec is that we don't have an anonymous documentary crew filming for some unknown and presumably useless reason.  I totally agree: there is absolutely no reason for the documentary crew to give a crap about 11 years of some paper company in Scranton.

In our case, if Jo is the frame, then the story is unfolds around her.

She is on a quest to understand her own father amid her own existential crisis, and she quickly learns that the only way to do so is to understand Arthur White, the man who inspired him to risk everything and who inadvertently led him to his death. There's that old cliche that cynics are jaded idealists, and I think that's true for Jo. She has her father's nature and her mother's nurture: her dad was attracted to truth and beauty like a moth to a flame, but her mom raised her in a cloud of cynicism, preaching the gospel of her father's betrayal and the idea that life is pain.

I think where I'm very Apollonian is that I don't really care that much about sharing the story of our quest to create the project.

I had the same problem in all of my drawing classes: my teachers would try to get me to leave all the marks of my process in my work, where to me, they were just distractions, evidence of wrong turns. But I trust your vision here.

Regarding our story, I think we need to see if we still like the strategy of aiming toward a TV show. The advantage is that we can map out the whole story without spending money, rehearsing, acting...all the things that are difficult for us. The disadvantage is the difficulty of getting the show signed and produced. Also, for good or bad, we probably won't end up being Art and Will.

If the show gets signed, we'll probably end up with lots of interviews about the making of the show anyway.  I watch too much cable, and I can't believe how much television is devoted to behind-the-scenes stuff. I've seen more interviews with and stories about the cast of Mad Men than I have episodes, and I've seen all the episodes.

Plus, we still have the blog.

Ill-Advised Arrangement of Cement

The following is excerpted from a 15 May 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

What do you make of the Witkowski cement dynasty in this symbolism of land and water? We've got a substance that begins a liquid, becomes very solid, and washes all through Detroit, destroying neighborhoods and hastening Detroit's decline.

Art

I-75 and Ford Freeway Interchange in 1970, Detroit

Well, if they were involved in building the Chrysler Freeway (I-75 and I-375 through Detroit), they may have been the ones who paved over Black Bottom, originally named for its dark, fertile soil and for being the epicenter of black culture and music in the city of Detroit. 

This works out nearly perfectly for the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, by the way. Black Bottom is totally chthonic/ Dionysian and the impulse to destroy and pave it over in the 1960s was totally olympian/Apollonian. 

It's a complicated issue, but this act really went a long way toward hobbling black culture (and culture in general) in the city of Detroit. From what I've heard, Detroit's particular way of complying with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 more or less ensured that Detroit would never give its inhabitants an experience of true, vibrant urban living. That divided, piecemeal, culturally lifeless experience still persists to this day. And it's quite literally the ill-advised arrangement of cement that guarantees it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

This issue of race is an important one to bring up if our setting is Detroit. 

Isn't it interesting that Arthur White sings black music? Wouldn't it be interesting if his dad's company was the one who paved over Black Bottom? This all feeds into our motif of echoing or appropriating other people's content. Arthur White is not the real deal! Like all these other white wannabes--from Glenn Miller to the British Invasion to Michael McDonald to Rick Astley to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Eminem--no matter how good or bad they were, you have to feel more or less uncomfortable as you consider their success at parlaying another culture's riches into their own enrichment.

This is the exact subject I wanted to talk about next. We spent some time talking about the domination of men in our story--I think we need to continue with that, developing our female characters in the process. 

But no story about Detroit can be complete without a discussion of race.

High Meadow vs. River/Ocean

Okkervil River's Will Sheff

I think this Don Henley vs. Okkervil River and Frank Ocean brouhaha might be a good discussion.

Don Henley is all protagonist, all individuation, all tragic hero, all rules and rationality, imposing these Apollonian concepts on the fathomless swamp from which inspiration arises.

Okkervil River and Frank Ocean are all union, all chorus, all lawlessness and inspiration in their clearly Dionysian interpretation of music's origin and destiny.

Both want to deny the right of the other.

Without River/Ocean, Henley dries up.  Without Henley, well...

This generation of artists is much more comfortable with never being a "star" in the sense that flourished in mid- to late-20th century.

In some ways, they win because they know what Henley represents and they don't want any part of it.

Frank Ocean

One of Henley's arguments is "Would you want someone doing that to your work?" And I honestly think that River/Ocean's answer to that question is "We don't care."

They might go on to say, "I am part of this formless flow of music and I would rather have access to it, wherever it flows, than to divert it into my own narrow channels, into my walled villa, and use it to irrigate some classical garden with well trimmed rows and marble statues" (okay, it's pretty unlikely they would say something like that--especially in unison).

Do we need this lawless period to drag these ossified baby boomer protagonists back into the mire whence they came? I thought our generation was the one who finally got out from under that shadow. But this generation are the ones who are finally doing the really dirty, bloody work, ushering in an era of "anarchy and collapse" (McLuhan) so that the culture can renew itself and new genius emerge.

Henley (second from right) was an outlaw once too

The baby boomers had such a powerful dose of the Dionysian...it's so ironic that they are engaged in these kinds of battles. River/Ocean may be wrong, but it's true that they are part of the more primordial, foundational reality in music. And Henley isn't wrong. In his words, though, you hear a kind of measured language not spoken by people who are still tapped into the dark, formless, chthonic source of music. Can't take him to court about that, but can you speak that way and still write songs? When did their last big song come out? 2004?

River/Ocean's? Probably yesterday.

I guess the upshot of all this is how it all relates to our own concerns about copyright. Now, I would have a much bigger problem with someone stealing our stuff if it were some kind of monster corporation (I will always love you, King Ad-Rock), not River/Ocean. So, I'm not saying there isn't a "standing up to the man" component of this impulse that could better harmonize with the artistic impulse. But this trend that Henley is trying to beat back may, in fact, be the Zeitgeist.

And, as Hegel claims, "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit."

Another Arch in the Proscenium

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 20 March 2014.

In some ways, one of the dichotomies emerging at this point is not beauty vs. ugliness, but rather beauty vs. nothingness. This nothingness has no life or existence of its own, but is able to act in "viral" ways, a phenomenon we see all too often on the web. I suppose this is somewhat pathetic for actors who get coaxed into becoming another rib in the proscenium, but it is also tragic for the remaining protagonists, who are progressively trivialized, humiliated, diminished, etc. as their utterances are in inundated by frames.

I guess that may be a good definition of tragedy in general.

And that's a totally different way of looking at it. Is this just a modern version of just the old dialogue between the protagonist and chorus? We know from history that the chorus is the more primordial reality. So, these frames, these arches, these ribs in the the proscenium, these viral elements that have no content of their own are, in a sense, the more constitutive reality (in a way, that makes sense: we were created ex nihilo).  It's again reminiscent of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music in that the protagonist sinks back into the pre-Thespian chorus, the dithyrambic frenzy.  That is the moment at which the actor becomes just another arch in the proscenium (modern theater having largely done away with the chorus).

I think one of the redemptive questions posed by the project is whether we can in some way win some kind of freedom from these viral frames-within-frames, maybe to avoid being turned into just another echo radiating out from an increasingly depopulated stage, just another member of the chorus, just another arch in the proscenium. But that's what the protagonist tries and fails to do--we already know that. And probably rightly so. But there's seems to be choice at that moment of his downfall, one that leads to salvation, the other to damnation:

1. "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20)
2. C.S. Lewis's idea of Hell being "nearly nothing"

So, if we all become these wraith-like viruses drifting through cyberspace, having no lives of our own, echoing the often trivial utterances of the remaining "heroes" on stage, then yes, we have descended into a kind of hell. But if that stage is vacated of everything such that our lives serve as a stage for the one true God, such that our lives echo and amplify his life-giving Word, then we have actually snatched an unlikely victory from the jaws of ignominious defeat.

So, yeah, the soundtrack with clips of animals doing cute things sounds good.

Loopy Longhand

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 12 March 2014.

I have also been thinking about the original reasons for this blog and whether those provide enough rationale to continue. I can always get the remaining few elements in and then "kill off" the blog, like they do characters in television series.

A few last "panicked" posts and then silence.

Here are some of the reasons for continuing:

1. To capitalize on this "goldmine" of discourse and artifacts that have been compiled over the last 24 months by repackaging it for the blog
2. To provide a clearinghouse of materials to facilitate the next performance (cf. the Dropbox folder and Bandcamp page for the May 30th show)
3. To allow fans to follow as we work our way toward one or more "finished" products

I have to say that doing this has given me a strange burst of creativity generally, not just with regard to the blog.  I am feeling a little better about continuing on for a while longer, but I want to focus a little more on items numbers 2 and 3.

I don't want to spell out everything at this point, but buried within this Dionysian swamp will be some very practical tools to use once the time comes to gather ourselves and move forward.  Using the "labels" feature, I want provide the following: (1) finished mock-ups of the songs and (2) videos demonstrating how to play the songs (cf. "Learn Guitar with David Brent").

The fact that this material will be buried but accessible seems better for a number of reasons.  One, I think it impresses on collaborators that we're not your "ordinary band" (for lack of a cooler sounding way of saying that).

Two, I do like an odd mix of obscurity and notoriety with this project in general; in some ways, the dissembling interface of the blog provides me with that comfort zone.  That said, I want certain chosen ones to be able to access the more pragmatic tools within the site.

As far as helping me, I would appreciate any "artifacts" you can provide.

Joe, it sounds like you are still caught up in the blessed busyness of your life!  I don't expect you will be able to provide much.  If you are able to send or upload anything--raw video, stills, photographs, etc.--it would help.  Will, same thing...a rough draft of the May 30th script with your scribbled notes comes to mind.

I may have shared with you that this project reminds me of how much I enjoyed those box sets that were coming out in droves in the 90s.

It really was an art form of its own packaging those things.  And I would go through them for hours.  I'm not sure what I liked better: listening to "Stone Free" on CD or seeing the lyrics of that song scribbled out in Jimi's loopy longhand on hotel stationary!  I agree that no one will want to necessarily see that stuff without at least one awesome finished product.

But I'm hoping we will have an awesome finished product.

As we get closer, the blog may be more a matter of recording practices, posting live versions of songs...heck, maybe someone could do an audio diary or something.  Certainly an upcoming Google hangouts meeting would be fair game.

Oh well, time to go to sleep.  But I'm having a brief uptick in my commitment.  I hope I've conveyed my reasons for feeling that the blog is still relevant at least somewhat clearly.

The Thoroughly Dionysian Underpinnings of This Universe

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 20 February 2014.

I have really been enjoying this Internet vision a lot.  Whether anyone else will enjoy it is another matter, but, for the time being, it giving me a surge of purpose and creativity.

At any rate, I figured it's probably just as well that I manage the blog and other electronic aspects of this approach.  I did, however, want to ask you if I can continue to "curate" your emails alongside my own (I've only done the "Interview with Rustyy" so far).

I'm thinking, for example, of your January 24th message about the Apple rep, which I loved.

What I'm proposing is that you let me edit these a little--breaking up your paragraphs into a more journalistic style that bloggers favor (e.g. occasionally giving a significant thought its own one-sentence paragraph).  The alternative would be that, when I find something that I like, I could send it back to you and you can edit it yourself.

Here's a preview of the post I was planning using that email.  I've also titled it.

Beyond that, I am just laying the thoroughly Dionysian underpinnings of this universe.  The blog, its search tools, and a few other structural components will later provide the requisite Apollonian "stage" through which to glimpse the Dionysian horror without being destroyed.

I'm going to begin working in some of The Principles of Theory material next (interestingly, another story told primarily through emails), perhaps followed by some "song fragments" (pieces Arthur was working on just prior to the Concert for Iceland), and other artifacts.

In all of this--the excerpting of emails, the curating of artifacts, etc.--something makes you wonder if all these people suffered some horrible demise.  And if that's true, who is running the blog?  And how can Arthur White "return"?

Actually, according to The Principles of Theory, the badly mangled body of Carlton Farthington was found in the third-floor subbasement of the steam tunnels beneath University of Michigan's campus 17 years ago this September.

How, then, has he returned to write these upbeat but strangely disconcerting emails?

Webmaster

The following is a January 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

I was thinking...it cracks me up that my alter ego is Will, but that yours is really not just Arthur, but Dr. Farthington.  Farthington, like Will, wants to impose order in Arthur's world, but it's an order that completely disrupts Will's sense of order.   

Simultaneously, his presence in the story tends to be my biggest obstacle...he consistently messes with the vice grip I'd like to have on the story.   

It's pretty awesome!

Art:

Indeed, that is interesting.   

And actually, here's another interesting factor: I have my own "vice grip," an Apollonian side of my own when it comes to certain things...a side that is coming out as I work on this blog (which attempts to bring order to the underlying chaos).  I guess that's Carlton Farthington in a sense, channeling Art and Will's efforts toward his own ends.   

I like a clean, polished, eminently intelligible interface...that's Apollonian.   It's not everything that I want it to be because I'm not a web designer (I want to hire one some day), but it's clearly something that I obsess about.   

Much of my content may be Dionysian, but, with this blog, I find myself searching for different ways of framing and organizing the material (naming conventions, labels, sidebar, and--when we have enough content--a horizontal navigation bar, possibly with drop-down menus). 

I don't want to edit the content of what we've posted, but, in my role as "webmaster," I will exert a strong editorial impulse to make sure everything fits within the organizational underpinnings of the blog. 

I originally thought that maybe we should spend a lot of time brainstorming exactly how to roll things out, etc. but I also wonder if we should just get a posting schedule going and give it a try for a while before evaluating it.  In some ways, I think the overarching architecture of the site will be what makes it all cohere. 

But, as Ezra Pound wrote in his Cantos, "I cannot make it cohere."

We're a Nietzschean Dialectic!

The following is a January 2014 email exchange between Art and Will.

Will:

I think constructing the story of Arthur White fits my Apollonian leanings and throwing it in a postmodern blender fits your Dionysian leanings.   

I'd love to talk whenever you have the chance, but I think it's clear that as far as we and our alter egos are concerned, after we come up with ideas, my job is mostly to impose order and your job is mostly to mess with it.   

I'm most in my element trying to form the legend in my head from start to finish.  I think it's best that you take charge of the architecture of all things stream of consciousness, meta-narrative, disjointed, post-structuralist, tangential, and destabilizing.   

I'm hardwired to write an epic morality tale...that's the strength and the shortcoming I bring to the table.  I'm depending on you to screw that up in meaningful ways...I hope you'll depend on me be the straightening force. 

I think carltonfarthington@gmail.com falls under the purview of your wisdom, not mine.  I think it's a good idea not because I get it, but because you do.

Art:

Yes, I remember now: we're a Nietzschean dialectic!  

Nietzsche was bent bringing back the Dionysian, which he felt had been paved over by the Socratic man, the Alexandrian age, the Enlightenment, his own age...   

But I would like to rewind back to the Hegelian and say, you're right: we need to "know no shrinking or half heartedness" in being the thing we most are.  That's what the all-important sublation/synthesis most needs in order to occur.   The "only wrong" in this dynamic is when "one desires to deny the other power" not realizing itself as just one part of the synthetic whole.   

And I'm referencing Hegel's ideas on tragedy, so there is danger in this.   

As A.C. Bradley explains in his lectures on Hegel, what is tragic about tragedy is that the observance of one power involves the violation of the other (usually with one or more deaths in the process).  But Hegel also pointed out tragedies in which the synthesis is achieved through adjustment of demands/repentance.   

Like how Athena is able to save Orestes by brokering a deal between Apollo (Apollonian/Olympian) and the Furies (Dionysian/Chthonic).  I think we want to go for that latter option, appreciating and making room for the demands of the other...all without falling into half-heartedness.   

And yes, I do look to you to be that other, straightening force!

Will:

It's working...I'm already questioning whether you wrote that response or Dr. Carlton Farthington did!

I Want to Be the Ghost Inside the House

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 3 January 2012.

Our furnace died last week and we're going to have to throw a lot of money at that.  There do seem to be some free organs out there, but I just haven't been able to follow up much beyond the cursory email.  Some of them are rather big, so chopping might be a good option.  My dad has a lot of tools, so maybe he can help.

I'm a little downcast right now due to wave after wave of school-related stuff with the furnace piled on top.  The band does occupy a lot of my free thoughts, but I feel like I'm having to plow through setback after setback this year.  There are a lot of things I'm grateful for too.  

I'm trying to interpret this all within the band.  

If the band is supposed to reflect our underlying lives, what does this mean...how does this show up?  I was thinking about throwing a hundred or two down on something, but now I'm back to square one (or square zero).

One thought is inside that Nietzschean model, where the formless horror of the Dionysian is somehow glimpsed via the Apollonian stage.  

The point I'm making is that I'm seemingly impoverished in anything related to order, articulation, or concrete expression (an exaggeration, yes, but in the service of truth).  That's the reason this surfeit of fertile imagination has lain feral all these years, never surfacing in any concrete, Apollonian way.  

That, too, could explain why I don't want to be a "load-bearing wall."  I seem relatively incompetent, unhelpful, unresourceful in the "plastic" aspects of this project.  

Perhaps that's why I don't want to be the house; I want to be the ghost inside the house.  Thus, my underlying desire to disappear entirely, to leave the music in the sure hands of Apollo.  I'm not trying to get out of work...I'm just trying to penetrate the mystery of my life through the lens of this project.  

Nonetheless, I am looking forward to Friday!!!