You Will Set the World Ablaze

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

Captain Nemo playing the organ aboard the Nautilus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recall John Paul's Letter to Artists:

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

Not to mention this:

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

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

My Formula for Human Greatness

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

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Leonello Spada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deliciously Different!

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

Woody has mellowed over the years

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

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

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

The Vernor's Dude

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

Woody the Gnome

Will:

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

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

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

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

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

Art:

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

Will:

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

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

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

The Paralysis of Perfectionism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 14 November 2015.

"Edyrn with His Lady and Dwarf Journey to Arthur's Court" by Gustave Doré

As to the project's trajectory, I agree with everything you've said.

Like you, I want to avoid the paralysis of perfectionism. I want to do what we can do. We're doing that now by emailing like this. But we need to do that with music. I don't want to put too many unnecessary obstacles in our path.

The only thing I would add to your "getting the music out to people as quickly as possible" idea is that I want it to be you, Max, and Father hammering it out instrumentally. For several reasons that we've talked about ad nauseam, I want to recede from all instrumentality, defined as "the fact or quality of serving as an instrument or means to an end." John the Baptist's I must decrease, King Arthur and Camelot's implied nonexistence, etc. I really would like Father to take over on keyboards and have him or John Paul play bass.

I want to facilitate that process so Arthur White can just be the voice crying out.

As I've thought about it some more, I'm open to the July 4, 2016 Joe Lazarus album still. But my openness stems from the idea that it will be you, Max, Father and ideally John Paul at the fore, learning, polishing, and recording the songs. I don't think I'm being a diva in saying I think it behooves the project to have Arthur White remain on the fringes of anything instrumental or otherwise project driven.

So, what I'm thinking of doing is creating that same type of linked set list for the Joe Lazarus album. Then ask Father to learn and develop keyboard parts. I'm not sure you can approach John Paul about participating. I'll try to record a non-drum version (click track at beginning) for you since you can't use Garage Band anymore.

Another part of my openness comes from the thematic material of these songs. I think "Selling My Gold" is especially prescient. The other ones likewise seem to be gaining greater prophetic heft by the day.

Finally and most importantly, we need to keep praying.

The Story of Making the Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 November 2015.

Steview Wonder

In general, I'm all for getting the music out to people as quickly as possible, and I'm less worried about it being flawless as you have been at times. I think of Stevie Wonder's music. Almost all of it is brilliant and beautifully executed, but he still leaves little mistakes and happy accidents in it all the time.

They are hard to notice because he's so fantastic, but Music from My Mind through Songs in the Key of Life all have little problems like sticks hitting microphones, spontaneous laughter, vocal bends into the right note, timing issues on the hi hat or drum fills that are close enough but not on, etc.  I'd also say that he has a mix of timeless songs and songs that are really stuck in their eras (although some of the ones that are stuck make me yearn for the old era—unlike The Secret Life of Plants and In Square Circle, which still are important albums but a little cringeworthy in how fully of their eras they are).

I think through it all, Stevie prioritized getting the songs out over perfecting them. There are all these stories of him telling lyric writers to write a few verses and they'd agonize for months, and then they'd show up in the studio really happy with the lyrics they made and he'd say great! I need a fourth verse in two minutes. A Time to Love and Conversation: Peace are great albums and A Time to Love especially captures some of the 70's magic, but his albums aren't quite as magical when he takes ten years to work on them. Of course, in those periods he tours like crazy and his concerts are fantastic, which supports the idea that it's better to be up and doing than planning and organizing. Don't wait for the all the necessary pieces to align.

One concern with the recording in terms of the storytelling—that is, the only medium we've found for telling the story is the blog, which tells the story of making the story, not the story itself.  I'm wondering about a Will Witkowski podcast that uses a visit from an artist who has been inspired by Arthur White, a song, and a call and/or performance from Arthur White as a counterpoint to the blog.

It still wouldn't tell the story of Arthur White from start to finish, but it could tell a different short story each week from at least three vantage points: the fans', Will's, and Arthur's. Between music, the blog, and the podcast, we'd have three avenues for telling what part of the story we can without the pressure of creating a series of complete, unified texts.

Taking What the Defense Gives You

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 13 November 2015.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As I wake up from my 2-hour nap and confront my ubiquitous pile of papers, I'm having a few thoughts about Arthur White.

Our current idea is to record the Joe Lazarus album. I'm beginning to think this is a bad idea. I just don't think I can hack it.

But I've been thinking that we've gotten away from a central principle in the project. Here's Hello Liza and Allison!: "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!"

Well, this is the cross, so to speak, and once again we're imagining utterances that require a huge infusion of money, time, and resources. In other words, Camusian suicide. This is why The Benefactor is such a nefarious figure: he wants to GoFund our suicide.

Here's another good quote, this one from A Polylogic Epistolary Novel:

There are times when I can't play music, times when I can't sit down at the computer, times when something is broken, times when I don't have time, times when I force the issue. Going along with the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return...I've tried to wall myself up in those moments and circumstances and not go out to some transcendent horizon where I will have all the tools at my disposal. I think we try to make whatever utterance we are capable of making, communicating with one another the best we can. Trying to make it as good and coherent as possible, of course, but not waiting for anything like clarity.

And I can't quite wrap my words around what I'm saying here...but with all due reverence...this is how the project can in some way participate in the mystery of the cross.

I'm thinking along the lines of the seven last words of Christ: continuing to speak words of that strive at meaning, recognizing but never acquiescing or capitulating the limits it encounters.

What I'm talking about right now may be as simple as what coaches call "Taking what the defense gives you."

Anyone Can Fire Our Neurons

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.



Have you read McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village?

He's pretty insistent in that and in several interviews that renewed tribalism brings more war, not less. He says the cost of electronic culture is civilization. It would be lovely if stretching our consciousnesses all over the world resulted in one village, but it doesn't. Stretching our nerves everywhere means anyone can fire our neurons. Our tribes are just not as geographically organized as they were before, that's all.

Two seconds scrolling through a Facebook feed shows that we aren't all in one tribe, and that the enmity between tribes is accelerating. Also, the way people reduce tribal conflict on Facebook is to defriend anyone who create conflict, which paradoxically reinforces tribalism, since one limits one's interactions to those with people of the same tribe. 

It makes sense to address the issue of tribalism, as the 70's begin with the end of the 60's dream of one tribe, we get the age of cults, then we end with the digital age trying to absorb the power of The Lodestone. 

I see Arthur as tribal, too. He's torn by the family tribe and the universal tribe of man, as well as a personal relationship with God.

Molten or Molded?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 10 November 2015.




I read this article, which makes me wonder if our method of "caressing" the content of this project could be Snapchat.

If you have a chance to read this, it kind of clarifies why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even the blog are not appropriate. Implicit in "Return" is "Disappearance." In other words, whenever Arthur's world returns, it means that it has previously disappeared. If we believe Hegel that "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit," then we need to understand why youngsters seem to prefer things that disappear like they do on Snapchat.

Why do youngsters increasingly NOT care to make themselves look good and eternal when they arguably have all the necessary tools to do so? Instead, they are increasingly okay with being authentic and transient (and authentically transient?). Liza's recent set of "unfinished" illuminated texts partake of a similar impulse.

Why is summer the only time that I can muster the time and effort necessary to caress, shape, and pattern my existence sufficiently for Instagram and Facebook? Why should it take time to share reality with one another?

With Snapchat, we are more in touch with the "do it for the Fat Lady" ethos. But at that point, are we even "a thing"?

Perhaps this discussion is too abstract, too remote from the reality of being a band. Everyone needs to compete, to assert themselves in that arena, right? But the effort required strikes me as very linear, rationalizing, Gutenbergian, insincere. It's so wearisome this effort to become universal, definitive, infinite, immortal—seeking tîmê and kleos like we still live in an age of heroes.

As Herodotus pointed out, Zeus put an end to all that with Helen. That thematic decline of heroes continues through Odysseus and Oedipus until it is finally transformed in Christ. We are no better than the chorus. We are the chorus.

Actually, inasmuch as we don't have Christ's hypostasis, the thematic decline of heroes is transformed in Mary. Her Magnificat is now the model and pattern for all other utterances of transcendence.

So there's the negative: that kind of heroism is no longer possible. On the positive side, think of the French onomatopoeic, Gutenbergian word, cliché, "the sound of a mold striking molten metal." Do we want to be molded or remain molten? I have a hunch that the two are mutually exclusive.

But perhaps this line of thinking is unnecessarily absolute.

Certain things persist. As we've mentioned before, people still buy CDs and records and books. But Arthur at least seems further along this path. He has remained molten in spite of Will's attempts to mold him.

Will, I know that this doesn't really respond to your recent email, but I feel like we have a different definition of tribal. I feel like Arthur is tribal. Like McLuhan, I consider the return to tribalism to be a positive development, one that will result in our being more in tune with the rest of humanity, as in his "global village" concept. In your email, you seem to see it as a negative development, presided over by the lodestone. I point to Gutenberg and the Reformation as evidence that widespread alphabetic literacy has resulted in widespread militarism, specialization, individualism, malaise, alienation, schizophrenia.

This is the opposite of the tribe, and yet, it is what has caused the fragmentation.

The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.

The Saline Avenger (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 20 September 2015.

Arthur and Mordred by William Hatherell

I'm knocked out by all the brilliant stuff!

I've also been prepping for the Kairos retreat I'm directing starting tomorrow. Please forgive my gap in communication!

So, if the vengeful angel is Will's son, we end up with Will as a dark distortion of King Arthur and his bastard son, Mordred?

If we run with a character as disturbing as you've described, I think we would need a figure of a God 's love in the story who reflects the grace of God more strongly than the vengeful angel reflects Puritanical justice.

That character should probably be Arthur, which I think is a tough move for you, given your relationship with the character. I think I've written all of the miraculous stuff into his character, and you've written all of his foibles! In so many ways, you are nicer to Farthington than you are to Arthur, which I get from playing Will. I can put my shortcomings into Will, but I still don't feel like he's that much like me. I'm not entrepreneurial, brash, or patriotic. You may have a little Puritan modesty going on, which might really be self-deprecation, since anything that makes Arthur an impressive figure might be read as a reflection of you.

2-Year Plan

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to Will on 7 September 2015.

I do think I came up with something for "Old Habits Die Hard." If you can, send me the lyrics again and I should be able to put it together.

My year is shaping up to be quite a bit busier than expected. I wanted to float the following idea: start the recording July 4, 2016. Have someone take high contrast black-and-white photos, film everything. In short, get as many artifacts out of it as possible.

I want our core group to be totally ready to play the songs well at that point. I may want to just use what I've recorded on keyboard as a spine and have you guys record your parts, then me come in and do the vocals.

At any rate, that's not the main point. The main point is that I don't want what we do next year to be the finished product. I want to take that raw recording and meditate on it for the following year. Then, I'd like to find the remaining pieces and return to the studio in summer 2017. At that point, we'd have identified lead guitarists, background vocalists, keyboardists, horn sections, etc. to add the finishing touches.

Now, we could put out whatever we do summer 2016, saying it was the raw unfinished takes from that Joe Lazarus collaboration--the Joe Lazarus tapes. And now, with the permission of the Arthur White estate and/or Joseph Lazarus III, we're trying to fully realize those recordings. Actually, that might facilitate some actual participation via the blog and social media--inviting feedback, suggestions. Would-be collaborators could upload videos of guitar solos, etc.

So I'm liking that 2-year plan, and now that I'm thinking about it, it might be a perfect opportunity to finally allow our audiences to participate in something: the 2016-to-2017 process of working up the songs.

And maybe we could use that as a way to earn some money for that next session. Make it available on Bandcamp for "whatever you want to pay" and by buying the 2016 tracks on Bandcamp, you've preordered your copy of the 2017 album.

The Doo Doo Chasers

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 August 2015.

Bootsy Collins

I've been watching a documentary on P-Funk, and there's a big section on the influence of the group on other groups that makes me think of their influence on us in this project.

I think P-Funk, Frank Zappa, and Devo were the first major bands in my life that made me love high-concept in music. I've seen P-Funk and its different permutations more than any other group in my life. The best show I ever saw was Bootsy's New Rubber Band at Industry in Pontiac. I was in the front row, and Bootsy saw I was so into it, he came down off of the stage mid-song and hugged me, then hopped back on stage. I was baptized in Bootsy sweat. At one point, he told us all he was going to run around the room and and hug everybody. He said his security guards said you can't do that--you need protection. He said this is Detroit. These are my people. They're all the protection I need. At the end of the show, they shut off all the instruments and led us in a chant of "Keep the funk alive." All the members of the band came off the stage and gave the women in the audience roses. They left in darkness. There was no encore--we wanted one, but we also knew there was no way to add to what they already put on stage.

I think that story plays into our desire in the project to bring everybody into it...to turn people into characters in the drama. So much of the framework of P-Funk is rooted in this idea that artists must draw people into a total environment (visual art, music, ritual, writing, etc.) that incessantly shines a flashlight on the falsity of the world we live in and guides people toward the transcendent. Allegory, myth-making, and ritual draw people into the mothership that guides people toward the transcendent...they meet people in both places that we all live and make us look at both...the earthly and the heavenly. I think my desire to take on a character is rooted to some extent in Starchild and Sir Nose. Will is largely a Sir Nose character, and Will and Arthur's story is sort of an inversion of the story of Sir Nose and Starchild...through much of the story, instead of Starchild curing Sir Nose by hitting him with the Bop Gun, our Sir Nose zaps our Starchild with electroconvulsive therapy after years of trying to keep him from swimming. But the two stories will end up the same...our Sir Nose is eventually horrified by his actions and repents and tries to follow the lead of the mangled Starchild.

I was listening to "The Doo Doo Chasers" this morning, and it is interesting to me how in Funkadelian terms, our project is a bit constipated. Free your mind and your ass will follow, but in our case, it seems like we let our minds wander really, really free, and as I've mentioned before, they too frequently detach from our asses. There's something in George Clinton's model where he just constantly was in motion, writing music, recording performing...and then within all of that action, the ideas came together and grew around the action. Our action tends to follow the thought, but our thought to action ratio is very high to very low--or the thought is the action, in the case of the blog. I'm really excited for the album. I really liked the last show, too--it had that atmosphere of total involvement, or close to total involvement for the people who didn't leave after Iceland! Even that is a type of involvement, though...the first show didn't have that as much, and the open mic was kind of a spectacle--sit back and watch the weirdos until the next acoustic guitar act comes up (which was also super fun--don't get me wrong!). I think that idea of Arthur White vacation tours makes a ton of sense. I also wonder about how most of our medium is the Internet and small stage rather than the radio, record player, and concert hall.

I should get to work. There's more to think about, though.

All Things New

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Also, I was trying to figure out in the last show why Arthur still cares about Carlton Farthington or Iceland.  I was content with the idea that we don't really know the nature of Arthur's mission right now, that it is inscrutable and that hearing the beauty of his music and seeing him come back into his powers would make more sense than some logical explanation for his behavior.

But in light of "Behold, I make all things new," maybe the idea is that Arthur is part of God's plan in transforming everything Farthington set in motion, everything the lodestone set in motion. In this regard, this intuition I've had that Arthur becomes the new lodestone makes sense. It also fits the Arthurian notion, that Arthur isn't so much a heroic protagonist as the figure around whom things happen. Maybe recreating the Iceland concert heralds "all things new" when the original concert heralded "turbulent reversals."

As far as the morality play goes, here is the closest thing I see to an allegorical structure.  Of course, we don't have simple allegory and shouldn't, but whatever...I'll just say what's on my mind.

• Arthur:  the herald of "all things new"
• Stan, Will:  the rise and fall of the American Dream
• Farthington:  science, psychology, and media ecology as false religions
• Steffi:  digital existence and postmodern nihilism
• The Benefactor/Victoria Woolf/Leif Erikson's sister/the lodestone: the hold and resurgence of myth and paganism

Back to Arthur--some priest friends of mine have explored the idea privately (they are worried this might not be theologically accurate, but it seems pretty valid) that Christ seems to say over and over again that he prefers repentant sinners to people who have never fallen in the face of sin. It would probably make sense that if Arthur is the herald of All Things New, that he himself must walk a path of being made new, that his youth should be full of promise and blessing, and that all that promise and blessing must be smashed through his own failures and the sins of his people and culture. Then he should be brought to glory through Christ, not through some modern notion of "getting back on track" or "being his best self."

A transformation in Arthur, then, would not so much be about getting his act together, but in getting a glimpse behind the curtain that God has ordained his life to be a witness. In this regard, we end up with the existentialist issue with the absurd, which is why we must engage the French (and Kierkegaard and the Russians and Nietzsche of course).  We also engage Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory: the notion that evil is so evil that good seems to be a lie, and good is so good that evil seems to be a mistake, and the notion that even a dark, fizzling out world can be the shadow of a glorious divine plan beyond our comprehension.

This is a completely messed up thought, but we might be on the verge of making the What's Going On of our age!  How crazy that this is the path that may lead us there.  It absolutely fits.

Laughing Song

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Laughing Song by William Blake

Thanks for the clarification. I envy how well-read you are! My dream this summer has been to lie on the beach with a stack of books for a few days on end. Hasn't happened yet! I think I'm relying to frequently on biases I formed a decade or two ago...when I got what I perceived as the big picture, I stopped looking at the details, to my discredit.

I really like the shift you made in "Hey Rome" toward the idea that Rome goes from the seat of the oppressors of Christ to the seat of his Church on earth, that Christ can use all of human absurdity and turn it into divine justice, mercy, and love, all of which appear absurd from the context of our own absurd perversions of these things.

Your discussion actually verges on two things I was hoping for a long time ago in the story: some sort of truth that Arthur White the character can deliver to mankind both in the story and through the project, and some sort of homage to medieval morality plays.

At this point, I don't think Arthur has to have some profound wisdom, but as an enigmatic and seeming focal point in the story, there should be something in him that consistently points toward God's grace. If there is a phrase for it, it's my favorite line from Revelations: Behold, I make all things new. Rome is one of the great emblems we have of Christ's words. In that regard, this album should point upwards and carry this message of the man-made collapsing and being transformed through Christ.

I see a few things happening here.

One is that Will, through decades of suffering, is in the process of reconsidering most of his assumptions and has the humility to encourage his brother to make the album completely on Arthur's terms to the point of bowing out of it if that's what Arthur wants. And then, to steal from The Wife of Bath's Tale, Arthur invites him in, so that Will plays a supporting role instead of a controlling one. I think "Centerstage" makes sense on this album within the theme of "Behold, I make all things new." My songs tend to rip on America, but they don't hit the personal enough. "One and Only" might also work.  By the way, "One and Only" is very Songs of Innocence to me: "In my dreams I heard the sweet song of a bird, and it left me reeling with a happy feeling."

LAUGHING SONG

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!’
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha ha he!’

Characters Replaced by Chyrons

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 23 July 2015.



Wow!!!

I'm working my way through Kate Levy's videos. And I worked my way all the way through your incredible "handwritten response." I think you should use this for the Detroit Public Library commission.

Will, I guess I'm just talking about what you and I (Will and Art) have done in developing these characters. Back inside the story, yes, Arthur White is somehow graced with the power to stop this insanity. But it's just the way that I've hollowed myself out and created a third-order simulation that was

• first, a reflection of a profound reality (myself--everyone at first is a profound reality)
• second, a masking or denaturing of that profound reality
• and third, a masking of the absence of any remaining profound reality

I do think there's a possibility of moving into the fourth stage--that of the image having no relationship to reality whatsoever, of the simulcrum preceding reality--even in our project. I guess that might be the scenario if some real killer started dressing like Carlton Farthington in the mascot suit (cf. the Slender Man murders), but I'm not sure it will ever involve my identity per se. Arthur White is unmoored from the profound reality that was me (that I embalmed and keep in the glass coffin), but it is based on something. It is not (and will never be?) its own pure simulacrum.

But I see the ways in which a lot of us in this age manage to hollow ourselves out and then create a Disney version of ourselves, one that is easier to find Facebook profile pictures for. So, now, instead of seeing some 20-year-old kid sobbing through the night at a Vipassana meditation retreat, I can instead get some sleep, and show up as this character Arthur White, who can levitate! Instead of dealing with actual pirates, we have Pirates of the Caribbean! Instead of Detroit, we have--well, yes, Gilbertville--but also (sorry if this sounds too harsh) a resuscitation of the moribund principles of the Left, "simulation of scandal for regenerative ends":

Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality--that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism. One imputes this thinking the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn--it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc."--as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffice that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange).

The irony may be that, to the extent that our characters succeed, our own transition into the posthumous existence characterizing third-order simulation will be complete. We will be like the screaming characters near the end of Too Many Cooks who have been replaced by their chyrons. But our point is that this happens to everyone nowadays.

I know this isn't the story story, but by naming our characters after ourselves we almost guaranteed this problem would be a central one. The Baudrillardian collapse, implosion, short circuiting of "the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect, between subject and object" and, I would add, between artist and art.

...and between actor and character. Is this loss of perspectival space what Plato feared, McLuhan welcomed, Baudrillard lamented?

Surging Up in the World

The following is an excerpt of a 20 July 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Jean-Paul Sartre in Venice

Will:

So you mean Arthur White the project, the world Arthur White inhabits--postmodernism, basically--not Arthur White the character? 

Your ideas about cloning in place of fertility remind me of one of my favorite archetypes: Frankenstein (played by Will Witkowski, Farthington, and Steffi Humboldt).

Art:

I do in fact mean Arthur White the character (and the other characters for that matter), who proceeds through something like Baudrillard's sign-order system toward eventual disintegration, a perversion of the Christian/Plotinian process, which instead radiates out from center to final and definitive fulfillment. 

I've just been contemplating the way in which this perverse radiation of identity becomes progressively more false with each iteration. And yes, it's very Frankenstein's monster. 

• First, there's just me at the center of this circle of identity, a confluence of a lot of crazy, improbable stuff 

• Then, I'm named. A lot of allusions and appropriations in that name. Overall, pretty good considering how much identity needed to be straddled; it's appropriately cacophonous, schizophrenic, unpronounceable. 

• Then, there's the Sartrean surging up in the world and defining myself: inclinations, affinities, traits. Some aspects get promoted and amplified such as spirituality, music, Italianness; others are downplayed or hidden. Also at this stage, there's the conscious appropriation/incorporation of aspects of other people's identities. 

• Then, there's these songs that I wrote, a further promotion and amplification of aspects of my personality at the expense of others. More incorporation of others' identity here as well. 

• Then, there's the whole story of Arthur White, which in some cases interpenetrates and/or precedes the previous step, the main idea being that Arthur is a spiritual and musical prodigy. More incorporation of others' identities here as well. 

• Then, there's all the radiations that occur thereafter: performances, posting, reposting, retweeting, etc. Also any interpretive meanings added by others (first by you all and then anyone else thereafter). Hell is other people, Allison?

I'm saying that there's something in this radiation of identity--going from original to faithful reflection to masking to pure simulation--that everyone experiences. I don't think the radiation itself is what is maleficent. But if God is not part of this process, then the process tends toward total disintegration: becoming a bloated, empty red giant that inevitably collapses in on itself. I guess that collapsing can be seen as a kind of reintegration, but not the kind you want. 

If, however, God is at the beginning, middle, and end of this process, then my radiation occurs in a fundamentally different way. I radiate out toward fulfillment without denaturing myself in the process. I radiate because it's in my nature to radiate, like God radiates without compromising His oneness. Luckily for me, God can break in at any point in this process. 

Incidentally, this radiation could also be seen from a more benign McLuhanesque perspective, in which we merely "caress" and make art of the mundane materials of a previous stage (the 70's, but also progressing from one bullet point to the next).

What Kind of Garbage Would That Make?

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

And Steffi's hand, too

Where to begin!

I like all of this. I especially like your idea that the more packaged garbage you buy, the closer you are to qualifying for packaged nothingness. Gold-Member/Street-Cred status. Perhaps with the first batch of packaged garbage, the buyer also receives a packaged Frequent Buyer card. Only instead of punching holes in the same card with each subsequent purchase, we just send out a brand new packaged card with an additional punched-hole in it. Eventually, we'll have punched so many holes in the card that the card will be a hole. Or, in other words, packaged nothingness. How gritty! How raw, how sacred, how holey! Blessed are the hungry, for theirs is the kingdom of garbage.

Thou must waste abundantly in order to be-holed this abundance of waste, ye loyal customers. In proliferating, ye shall eradicate!

This all makes perfect sense to me (but don't worry--not too much sense). Over-consumption of trash, after all, fills us fully with an existential emptiness. This is a wasting that is also an abundance.

"For we on garbage-bins hath fed, and shrunk to ilks of nothingness" (Coleridge, kind of).

The more we eat the more we shrink. The more we replenish, the more we diminish.

My thinking is a bit scattered right now from a succession of strange, long days, so I’m going to let Bob Moorehead summarize part of what I’m trying to get at here:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less. We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time. 

The quote is quite long, but the following non-sequential excerpts (that I've formatted sequentially--I am a shameful academic) are worthy of mention:

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men, and short character; steep profits, and shallow relationships; more kinds of food, but less nutrition. These are days of two incomes, but more divorce; of fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stockroom; a time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete.

Relating this oppositional accord that Moorehead's laid out to the gar(b)age sale that we've laid out, the less we feel, the more we buy. The more we buy, the less we value. The less we value, the more we waste. The more we waste, the fuller we are. The fuller we are, the emptier we are. And so it goes forever.

It could also be said that the more Carlton cleans up the garbage, the more of a mess he makes. Isn't this, ultimately, what Gilbert is doing to the city of Detroit, too? (More to come on Gilbert's own cunning methods of displacing the city's "garbage" in a future message.)

So, then, it only makes sense that the charity's top benefactors earn their way to packaged nothingness. They have gorged themselves on the garbage until "(n)othing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck (Detroit?), boundless and bare" (“Ozymandias”--and more Gilbert symbolism).  How commendable! I feel like there should also be packaged plaques. Or maybe once they've cleared the trash from their specific lots and therefore achieved nothingness, they get the honor and glory of sending their own trash to the same curb they helped "clean up." You know, to give someone else the same opportunity. To ritualize the process. Maybe, if they're feeling extra high on charity, they could even sponsor a poor neighborhood kid or something. Carlton Farthington, after all, is fo' the chilrun.

Moving along, this all waywardly circles back to that sketch of Carlton from a few weeks back. Art, perhaps it makes a bit more sense now in both its original context (DeLillo’s Underworld) and my recontextualization of it (White’s Sweet World).

The original quote,

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, "What kind of casserole will that make?" We said, "What kind of garbage will that make?"

The recontextualized quote in regards to all of the above:

In the sketch, Carlton doesn’t think about the delicious pie he could make from the apple because he’s too busy thinking about the garbage he will make. And now, as he packages this garbage and sends it off to others, they no longer ask themselves, 'What kind of garbage will this make?' They ask themselves 'What kind of nothingness will this make?' Where once there was garbage, now there is a hole. They see only the absence of the garbage.

Not to probe too much deeper into this, but the sketch could also be interpreted as the way people utilize the gleaming new products that drop from the Apple tree at genetically modified speeds. Though in theory this technology could be used to deepen our connections with others and to engage in the world in innovative ways, we most widely use it to disconnect and disengage. We’ve turned an object with great potential to be an agent of positive social change into an agent of unsocial change. Or, to paraphrase Moorehead, our computers have not taught us how to communicate but rather how to copy. Repost, Retweet, Recycle.

The sexualization of the apple as a women’s body in the sketch also ties into this garbage theme, but I’ll save that for another time.

In the interim, think: degradation, objectification, disposability, the Big Emptiness, womb envy, and on and on.  

Sounds like a riveting segue into my next e-mail regarding my thoughts on the relationship shared between the wild band of savage sisters and Arthur. Hmmm....

All of that, and more, tomorrow!

When
I will sing a song of garbage,

Liza

The Savage Sisters (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to the group on 23 May 2015.

Diana, The Huntress by Guillaume Seignac

I like them being friendly with Arthur. Like maybe he stumbled onto their 100s of acres compound in Detroit, which usually means immediate death or disappearance. But just as the Savage Sisters are drawing their bows, Steffi calls them off since Arthur, though himself allied with Farthington at one point, really had no idea what was going on.

Could we have her dispatch some of her Savage Sisters as bodyguards against Dan Gilbert, who sees the catatonic Arthur as his key to claiming the lodestone for himself and his own adopted city, Cleveland (which, as we all know, wishes it were Rock City). All part of the immortal, apocalyptic battle between Michigan (the best state ever) and Ohio (the worst state ever).

I love the idea of a straight-show with the band surrounded by 4 or 5 Savage Sisters looking distrustfully out at the audience for the entire time with bows and arrows at the ready.

In some ways this is looking a lot like the episode from Morte d'Arthur in which Lancelot gets shot in the buttock by the huntress:

...a lady dwelt in that forest, and she was a great huntress, and daily she used to hunt, and ever she bare her bow with her; and no men went never with her, but always women...So it happed this lady the huntress had abated her dog for the bow at a barren hind, and so this barren hind took the flight over hedges and woods.  And ever this lady and part of her women costed the hind, and checked it by the noise of the hounds, to have met with the hind at some water; and so it happed, the hind came to the well whereas Sir Launcelot was sleeping and slumbering.  And so when the hind came to the well, for heat she went to soil, and there she lay a great while; and the dog came after, and umbecast about, for she had lost the very perfect feute of the hind.  Right so came that lady the huntress, that knew by the dog that she had, that the hind was at the soil in that well; and there she came stiffly and found the hind, and she put a broad arrow in her bow, and shot at the hind, and over-shot the hind; and so by misfortune the arrow smote Sir Launcelot in the thick of the buttock, over the barbs.  When Sir Launcelot felt himself so hurt, he hurled up woodly, and saw the lady that had smitten him.  And when he saw she was a woman, he said thus: Lady or damosel, what that thou be, in an evil time bear ye a bow; the devil made you a shooter.

An Object Incapable of Development

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 6 April 2015.

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

We've recognized the importance of making some careful choices regarding instruments.

Were money no object, we would just buy all the era-specific gear and bring it out for the appropriate performances. But there are plenty of reasons for embracing the swaddled/crucified existence instead. The main one is that I don't want to conjure comparisons to all the people who played those organs: Frank Rodriguez, Alan Price, Garth Hudson, Steve Winwood, Matthew Fisher, or even Father for that matter.

Instead of this, I might want to deliberately choose the cheaper route: getting the most basic, MIDI-ready, serviceable late 90's keyboard available. While this might at first seem to our audience a puzzling anachronism, it is ultimately the better choice on a few different levels.

Firstly, it's way more practical. I can record in MIDI, which creates sheet music so I don't forget the songs. Plus, it's portable and doesn't break on the way to shows.

Secondly, it's a commentary on the elitism that has permeated this genre or scene in music. One, we're not going to win that arms race; two, who wants to impress those a-holes anyway?

Thirdly, it allows the idea of Arthur White to flourish more fully. I've been reading a lot about King Arthur (you should expect a deluge of ideas from Arthurian legend and scholarship soon). An essay I read last night was "The Image of Arthur and the Idea of King" wherein the author, Mark Allen, explains that Arthur's majesty and mystery and the grandeur of his court creates "a sense of extension--a presence that embraces all of these figures [individual members of his court and their adventures] and is greater than their sum." Allen writes, "One of the curiosities of [Arthur's] tradition is that the romances have, in relative terms, little to do with Arthur himself, concentrating on his knights instead. We get the strong sense that the king is not one who does, but one who has others do for him."

I've talked about this before: the idea that Arthur's diminution is paradoxically the key to his greatness. Obviously, this has a slightly different, more royal flavor. In order to be exalted as having the great symbolic significance that others seem to see in him, he needs to never be fully attached to, grounded in, or associated with any mundane reality, including any of the many stories that continually accrue to him. Arguably, it is Arthur's ambiguity itself that encourages the proliferation and accumulation of stories. It is the sine qua non of his ongoing splendor and majesty. Ground him in too many specifics, too many measurables, too many details that place him in a certain place or time or tradition, and that all goes away.

Additionally, the MIDI concept is interesting in a similar way. It creates a track that has all the basic information but which will ideally be buried by better instruments at some point and resurrected in a "glorified" form.

So, I'm not saying here that the humbled state is the final word. What I'm saying is that it encourages this phenomenon of development, proliferation, accumulation, grandeur, and majesty. I say that just as Richard the Lionhearted has too much known about him to become the iconic legend Arthur is, so too does grounding Arthur White's identity in mundane actions, conditions, ingredients, possessions, and/or paraphernalia paradoxically turn him into an object incapable of development.

So what might a later, more developed state look like? Well, maybe later Arthur White performances do have him surrounded by a band that does have all those expensive, era-specific instruments and outfits. The thing is, the stories of his knights can be safely developed to whatever extent! We can have a Vox Continental or B3 organ player, a Rickenbacker or Fender Precision bass player, so on and so forth.

But I say that we can't have many of these things adhere to Arthur without endangering his transcendence.