A Distinctly Feminine Attack on History

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 6 June 2015.

La Liberté Guidant le Peuple by Eugène Delacroix

Regarding social media, I agree with everything that you all have said. I'm not so worried about it anymore.

Reminds me a little of that passage from Walden, where he talks about what's the use of a big, fancy house when the inside hasn't been improved. Of course, our project satirizes this exact phenomenon, the fact that--to a greater and greater extent--this is how we all live our lives, especially now in cyberspace. That the great mass of us are red giants with no inner integrity, all ready to collapse at any moment. Something about that goes along with David Brooks's favorite sociological study (cited in his book The Narcissism Epidemic):

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves a "very important person?" Twelve percent said yes.  By 1990, that number had jumped to a whopping 80% who said, “Yes, in fact I am a very important person.”

I might argue that the number has actually come down in the last 5 years, although I don't have the data for that.

The bottom line is, as with all things in the project, it will happen if the Nietzschean dammed-up lake reaches the requisite depth. What I was doing was flowing away to some imagined destination, longing for Camusian suicide.

On a similar note, I continue to be interested by George Eliot's statement that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts" (cited in "The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse").

As Eliot L. Gilbert goes on to explain,

Such a conclusion follows inevitably from the idea that history, simply by existing, exhausts possibilities, leaving its readers with a despairing sense of their own belatedness and impotence. And this despair in turn leads to anxious quests for novelty, to hectic avant-gardism, and in the end to an inescapable fin de siecle ennui.

The Female King is a solution to this in that he "triumphs over time by never having entered time" (Rosenberg, "Tennyson and the Passing of Arthur"). His "abdication" of the traditional kingly role, his passivity and emasculation invites and initiates a kind of female misrule, a distinctly feminine "massive and very deliberate attack on history," symbolized most strikingly by Delacroix's bare breasted Liberty, "striding triumphantly over the bodies of half-naked dead men" (Gilbert, 58, 70):

The Dionysian guillotine haunted the imagination of Europe; a mechanical vagina dentata, it produced, with its endless emasculation, an unstoppable blood flow, an unhealing menstual wound curiously like the one suffered by the maimed king in the story of the Grail.

Our project considers this sense of impotence and belatedness, and examines the modern notion that oblivion and un-historical acts (suicide?) might be the best gift we can give to our world. In recent decades this has been the subtle (not so subtle?) message of the environmental movement as well. And yet, our faith tells us that we are ends in ourselves, that God loves us for our own sake. And that, far from winding down or being exhausted, our universe seems to be accelerating, drawing energy from some unidentified and limitless source.

It's interesting to me that Arthur White was conceived at a time when emasculated indie bands were de rigueur, and that, inspired in part by the large-group awareness training organization I was in, I said screw that. And that, in a related development--unlike my kingly namesake--I have sired a veritable quiver-full of children, leaving an unapologetically large patrilineal footprint and singlehandedly melting the country of Iceland.

So I see how Arthur both is a manifestation of this feminizing tendency and its opposite.

The Living Arrow

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 28 May 2015.



I love the idea of Arthur as the "living arrow" in the sisters' quiver.

Probably unrelated, but I picked up The Once and Future King this morning and turned to this exchange between Lancelot and Arthur:

"We don't see many arrows thrilling in people's hearts nowadays," remarked Lancelot one afternoon at the archery butts.

"Thrilling!" exclaimed Arthur. "What a splendid word to describe an arrow vibrating, just after it has hit!" Lancelot said: "I heard it in a ballad." They went away and sat in an arbour, from which they could watch the young people practising their shots.

"It is true," said the King gloomily. "We don't get much of the old fighting in these decadent days."

I also like the arrow verses at the end of Kahlil Gibran's "Your Children":

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I think what you wrote could be a key to the puzzle: "To [the Savage Sisters], this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.  To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game."

ECT, originally intended to make Arthur more shallow and thus more profitable, ended up turning him back into a child. This is God's unlikely triumph and perhaps a model for how a decadent society will not just incrementally improve (i.e. "the pendulum swinging back") but be utterly transformed by grace. And the reason why this victory is so unexpected and definitive is that it utilizes on the enemy's own arsenal. Just as he gloats over Christ crucified, the king of this world doesn't realize that--in crushing humanity's soul--he unwittingly catapulted it into definitive glory.

The Once and Future Child

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group 28 May 2015.

Dan Gilbert

Returning back to Arthur as representation of the children of the world for a moment, I see Arthur as the perfect foil for Farthington. As is perhaps the point.

On one hand, we have Farthington who is a sum of humanity, in a sense. However, he seems to represent the waste of abundance. Having no content of his own, his identity is constructed externally through his reposting, retweeting, and recycling. He's turning other people's intellectual commodities into garbage disguised as a commodity. While he's done no work of his own, he gets all of the worldly gain. Sounds like a lot of people I know.

On the other hand, we have Arthur. Similar to Farthington, Arthur too is merely a sum of all that is around him.  However, he seems to represent the abundance of waste.  Perhaps, as with all children, Arthur is even more moldable and bendable than Farthington. The difference between the two men is that Farthington externalizes the world around him with closed eyes while Arthur internalizes this world with the wide-eyes of a child.

I guess this makes him Arthur White: The Once and Future Child.

Just as Gilbert and other anti-democratic bullies want to exploit the children, Gilbert has plans to exploit Arthur whom he views as small, unimportant, and vulnerable. To Gilbert, Arthur has a purity that must be taken advantage of; he has a trust of fellow man that must be manipulated. So, of course, it only makes sense that the savage sisters, with their fierce motherly instincts, take Arthur in and protect him as though their own child. Seeing no threat in such a small and gentle being, Gilbert's doubt in Arthur is the catalyst for the crumbling of his empire.

Too bad for him. So it goes, Don Gilbert.

Or perhaps in exiting the inner-world and immersing himself once again into the outer-world, Arthur chalks his vision up to a hallucinatory side-effect of some pills some doctor makes him take to make him less crazy. Or, better yet, in telling his vision to his brother and Farthington, they force him to undergo more ECT. Though he sometimes has dreamlike flashbacks of his visit to this inner-world, the majority of his time there is shocked from his brain.

So it goes, Arthur White.

Frolicsome Fawn-Like Movements

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 28 May 2015.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

On the relationship between the savage sisters and Arthur White:

I agree--it seems an effective plot point for the sisters to take Arthur under their pixie sprite wings. Perhaps they interpret his ignorance of Farthington’s evil scheming as an innocence and purity seldom seen in man. To them, this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.

To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game.

Picture, if you will: the savage siren sisters lure Arthur in with their song. As with all invasive species to their natural habitat, the sisters’ intent is to destroy him before he, like his fellow outer-world inhabitants, desecrates the sanctity of their enchanted inner-world. Little do they know at this point, Arthur is not like his fellow man. Yet still, the sisters gleefully watch him disappear into the murky depths of their river.

While all who fell before him had ferociously struggled against the river’s current, however, Arthur neither flails nor flops. Instead, he placidly sinks to the bottom of the water, as though inanimate. There is no fight at all. Bewildered, one of the sister instinctively dives into the river to rescue this enigmatic creature from nature’s grasp. Perhaps, in this moment, she sees Arthur’s innate ability to remain calm amidst the struggle as a trait worthy of protecting from the looming dangers beneath the river’s surface. Or perhaps she sees Arthur’s lack of basic survival instincts as childlike and innocent. Though she herself is not immune to these dangers, like any mother would, she places the safety of this man-child over the safety of herself.

Such a scene reminds me of that moment in Grahame Greene's The Quiet American when Fowler says of Pyle, "That was my first instinct--to protect him. It never occurred to me to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

Arthur, though, is far from dumb. Though deemed insane in the outer-world, this reflects more on the type of society that interprets his childlike wonder as craziness than it does on Arthur. Far from dumb themselves, the sisters are able to interpret this wonder of Arthur's as brilliance and therefore worthy of redemption. They see the woundedness in his wide, blank stare and are dazzled by it. Maybe they even see parts of themselves in Arthur, whose every action in this strange land radiates with the saintly glow of his mother. Maybe in the sisters' gaze Arthur sees parts of his mother reflected back at him (and therefore parts of himself).

Upon pulling a calm Arthur from the torrential waters, the sisters soon discover that, much like themselves, Arthur has no fear of the depths. Instead, his (and the sisters') deepest fear is of shallow living.

Or perhaps after pulling Arthur out of the river, the sisters also discover that he was not lured by their song after all. A song that until this moment no man has been immune to. Like Farthington's evil deeds, Arthur was oblivious to their seduction. In this scenario, maybe he instead fell into the water while bending down to bask in the marvelous fragrance of the flowers growing along the shore. Maybe the flowers are the same flowers from that Hamtramck garden, the flowers that he once tended to with great care alongside his mother. Or perhaps they remind him of the flowers he used to pick to adorn the Virgin Mary statue outside of his childhood church. Whatever the case, Arthur feels like he's made his way back home, to the world he inhabited as a child. Though this childlike awe is the source of much of Arthur’s woes in the outer-world, in this inner-world it is this exact wonder that protects him from all potential dangers.

Another possible scenario is that Arthur doesn’t fall into the water at all. Maybe, instead, the sisters draw back their bows because of his reverence toward their world, his delicate demeanor, his frolicsome fawn-like movements. Perhaps, while standing alongside the riverside admiring the beauty, a band of misfit animals gather around him mistaking Arthur as one of their own. Catching a reflection of their world’s natural beauty through Arthur’s eyes, the sisters become certain that his intent is pure and his heart is full.

It is in this moment, perhaps, when the sisters realize that Arthur is the living arrow they've been searching for. He is the ultimate ammunition in their war versus man, in their ongoing battle with Gilbert. If this be so, then the sisters themselves are the weapons--they are the bows. (Take that, societal objectification of women's bodies for pleasure and enjoyment!) If Arthur as the arrow is the sisters' greatest hope for humanity, the sisters then are not only the bow that holds him but also the shield that guards him. They are his protection against humanity.

To borrow from Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children,"

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. 

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. 

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

This could eventually tie into Steffi shooting Farthington in the tunnels. Is Steffi a direct descendant of the sisters? Are they the ones who taught her to shoot?  In her angsty teen years did she rebel against their savagery with a savagery all her own? Is she the fallen angel who forms her own kingdom? Or, maybe, Steffi is still one of the sisters. In becoming a follower of Farthington's (and seducing him along the way) she is able to learn all of his secrets and ultimately destroy him. Perhaps this was the initial plan, but maybe somewhere along the way she began believing the lies. She falls under Carlton's spell, seeking his garbage to fill the emptiness symptomatic of life's cruelty outside of the enchanted forest. In doing so, she betrays her sisters by falling victim to mortal temptation.

Or does she? Maybe Arthur is not the ultimate Christ figure in this story.

Maybe Steffi is.

July 4, 2016

The following is an excerpt of a 23 January 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

Moses viewing the Promised Land

Art:

On another subject, I think July 4, 2016 is the critical date. 

With the more ambitious lineup of high-end players, highly involved props, costumes, and sets, and long-distance practicing arrangements, it will probably take us that long. 

More importantly, that is 40 years after the critical day, the day of the Concert for Iceland, the 200th anniversary of our country's founding. And 40 years is a critical lapse of time due to its biblical associations. Up to this point, we have been wandering in the desert and only now are we going to be allowed to enter into the promised land: Iceland! 

July 4, 1976 was about passover, liberation, promise. July 4, 2016 will be about arrival, fulfillment, conquest. 

Not to say we won't make forays, foretastes, foreshadowings--blips on the radar. 

But, if we do nothing else, we must be ready for July 4, 2016! 

People get ready for July 4, 2016!

Will:

 Everything you've said about July 4th, 2016 makes sense.  Two thoughts: 

• It will be nearly impossible to get an audience. A solution here could be that we broadcast the performance then and release it for download. Another would be that we find a rich person who supports the arts and perform it at his or her barbecue.  

• I'm geeked about doing something this summer. That doesn't have to be Iceland, though.  I'm fine with doing something very stripped down, maybe as a 3-piece if Father is up for it.  If we can add a guitar player, that's cool, too. There are a ton of venues that would work out here, and unlike Lansing, Traverse City's population quadruples in the summer instead of shrinking.