This is Hell

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 20 July 2015.

The Massacre of the Innocents by Giotto, Lower Church, Assisi

My question is how is Arthur White's predicament/plight like everyone else's in the electronic age? Except, perhaps, for those who have found some "narrow way."

I started this thought process contemplating our revelation of God through the Catholic faith. In my weakness, I tend to conceive of this in a Plotinian way:

• God the Father as The One, the Indivisible Source of All Being
• Then his only-begotten Son, what Plotinus called the "Intellectual Principle," the Word Made Flesh, consubstantial with the Father
• Then the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, Plotinus' "Soul," allowing us to cry out Abba Father in a spirit of adoption. It also begins the final age, a process of reintegration so to speak, first evidenced by the mass of humanity, scattered since Babel, hearing the apostles speaking in their own tongue.
• Then us, the Church, the Body of Christ. But also at this point becoming like little gods (Jn 10:34), radiating out, being fertile and multiplying, creating, procreating, proliferating. The ecstasy of this moment is captured by an exuberance of metaphors. Yes, we are the Body of Christ, but we are also the Bride of Christ, and this is the nuptial moment.
• Then "when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be All in All" (1 Cor 15:28).

Just like that. The whole story of the universe. Of course, this is one of those times bullet points just don't do it justice. But make it all cyclical and interpenetrating and mysterious and we should be in the neighborhood.

I think Arthur White examines the opposite path. Of course, there is no opposite to God, no dualistic universe. But if you'll pardon the semantic necessity, it goes something like this:

• Instead of God as the only source of our being, "God is dead"
• Instead of the Incarnation, the massacre of the innocents
• Instead of an infilling of the Holy Spirit, an emptying of minds, hearts, wombs, homes, public squares; our only principle is the steadfast maintenance of emptiness, a cacophony of inarticulate voices echoes in that emptiness
• Instead of fertility, spousal and conjugal imagery, we are left with the image of the clone, parthenogenesis, a recapitulation of my empty projects within my empty self, echoing that emptiness to all the world. A close second is the image of the cannibal--I'll leave you to work out the anti-Eucharistic meanings. Repost, retweet, embed!
• And instead of All-in-All, this all collapses back to the empty individual self, who, once all has been cannibalized and cloned, becomes next-to-nothing. This is Hell.

Without God as our source of being, we return back to the nothingness from which we were created (again, pardon the semantic difficulty of having to attach words like "from" to nothingness). But that which has been created cannot be fully destroyed. Thus, as C.S. Lewis somewhere explains, we exist in a state of next-to-nothingness.

I recognize it may not be entirely clear how all this relates to the project. I may try to explain what I'm thinking in a more practical sense in a later email.

Shakespeare's Sister, Biyaches!

The following is an excerpt of a 27 February 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilees

Will:

I love the idea! 

I am so sick today...just out of nowhere! 

I've been running ideas by musicians. 

Also, Allison and Liza are both in. Have you read any of Liza's responses yet? They are pretty cool. I like the possibility of a Leif Erickson's sister idea, kind of like Victoria Woolf's Shakespeare's Sister, except more of a badass.

Art:

Hope you feel better, Will! Virginia Woolf, I assume, although I think Victoria Woolf is hilarious (probably for some politically incorrect reasons, though). I just like the Glasnost that is happening. Breaking down this iron curtain of inscrutability, this wall of wiliness. Do we need a Ronald Reagan? "Mr. Witkowski, tear down this wall!" No, I think we need more people like Victoria Woolf's sister! 

I have read her responses and I'm enjoying them. I'll have to chime in soon, but I wanted you two to do your thing for a while. From the way she talks, I wonder if she is Steffi Humboldt. That's basically the same thing as Victoria (never going to stop using that, by the way ) Woolf or Shakespeare sister. 

We floated the possibility that Steffi was a little more familiar with the tunnels than expected. That hers is the hand that holds the apple. A fact that Farthington may have found out too late. A fact that Will realizes as he descends into the tunnel looking to dispatch Farthington.  

There are no apple orchards in Burma. Farthington is nothing more than Steffi's mouthpiece. 

And now, thanks to Will, Steffi has no mouth..."not that a mouth can ever be taken away." Farthington may or may not be dead. 

"Farthing" suggests that Farthington never was much to begin with. Or at least that he came to nothing...or next to nothing. Cult leaders are a dime a dozen, so to speak...nod to Lewis's The Great Divorce, Arthur Miller's Willy, Eliot's Hollow Men, Conrad's Kurtz. 

I'm not against Liza being Leif Erickson's sister, but she seems so right for the role of Steffi Humboldt. 

Maybe when she comes into her power, when she reveals herself she becomes Victoria Woolf: Shakespeare's Sister, biyaches! 

Leif Erickson's sister, Victoria's Secret, Virginia Woolf, The Anti-Virgin, Shakespeare's Sister, Primordial Sea Devil, and Steffi Humboldt all rolled into one.  

Eve is remembered in all of those names (primordial pronunciations?):

Leif Erickson → eif

Victoria Woolf → v or ia W

Sea Devil → ev

Or, alternatively, the word evil:

eif Er

ia Wool

evil

I'm not sure if any of what I'm saying even makes sense.

An Endless but Flavorless Buffet

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 5 October 2014.


Saint Wolfgang and the Devil "Michael Pacher 004" by Michael Pacher - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I've pondered your insights and questions, and here's the best I've got: Art is a ministry.

I think this when my wife makes art, when I listen to your music, and even when I play in all my goofball bands. There's a little bit of the Will Witkowski shaper in me, but mainly my role as a drummer is to help other musicians sound their best and meet their visions for their music and to help the audience have a powerful experience that in some way draws them toward God, even if it's just through a reminder that life is good and joyful.

Praise Him with drums and dancing! Praise Him with loud cymbals!

The Arthur White project aims to give more to God and man than any of my other projects and it's hard to feel significant feelings of accomplishment because the scope is so large and we're so small. But my faith here has a German angle to it. We keep going, not out of a hope of reward or success, but because it's the right thing for a story and body of songs so powerful to exist. We keep dedicating everything that comes from the project--whether it's joy, recognition, wealth, or suffering--back to God. And if we fail, we either screwed up, weren't really doing God's will, were being taught our limits, or something else.

But to go full-out Beowulfian, we've all got to enter the cave. If Arthur White doesn't make much impact, we haven't failed. If we and other people called to make art cease to be the sort of people who enter the cave, a fallen mankind falls some more.

The Swedes of mediocrity conquer us, and Screwtape and his minions get an endless but flavorless buffet.

A Unique Disclosure

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

St. Pope John Paul II in 1999

I've been wading into John Paul II's "Letter to Artists" (1999) and am pleasantly surprised so far. I'd like us to meditate on this a little in our correspondance if you're game.

In particular, I'm looking at the following paragraphs:

The special vocation of the artist:

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. 

It is important to recognize the distinction, but also the connection, between these two aspects of human activity. The distinction is clear. It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art's specific dictates. This is what makes the artist capable of producing objects, but it says nothing as yet of his moral character. We are speaking not of moulding oneself, of forming one's own personality, but simply of actualizing one's productive capacities, giving aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind.

The distinction between the moral and artistic aspects is fundamental, but no less important is the connection between them. Each conditions the other in a profound way. In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life...[italics are mine]

I think this passage is so germane to our project, seeing as we are so closely related to our creations. And these creations of ours have been, at different points, unredeemed or at least not very far advanced along the path of moral perfection. As we get further along in this project--whether it really is a project or not--I'm increasingly aware how my narrative choices are "unique disclosures" of my own being, of what I am and of how I am what I am.

For instance, when my back is against the wall with blogging and I can't always micromanage some Wordsworthian "emotion recollected in tranquility" due to the time crunch, I come up with ideas that reveal my personality and the state of my soul.

One example is how I got so wound up recently about how tragedy comes closest to touching on the truths of the faith.

Another example is a recent idea I've had, which I may or may not do, called "Basement Diaries." The idea is I will bring a camera down with me into the basement with all the lights out and try to find my way around while taking a video of me (no picture because it's pitch black) reflecting on various topics related to darkness, being underground, coal, fossil fuels in general, Hell, the project, the labyrinth, etc. I would upload this to YouTube and let Google mess up the transcription, as usual. Then post the video and its transcription.

The idea is take it or leave it, but I think about what it means that I had this kind of disturbing idea (and not some holier one). Why does it resonate with me right now? What does it say about the state of my soul?

I'm not interested in answering those questions in a psychoanalytical way, but I am getting a sense of what John Paul means by a unique disclosure of one's own being. You can't produce something other than what you are. If you are further along the path toward moral perfection than I am, that will come out in your artistic leanings. In some ways, it wouldn't be surprising to see a consummate artist uniquely reveal the destination of his soul in his last works. He would not be able to disclose anything but that truth.

Do the landscapes and settings and narrative we have created uniquely disclose the elements of temptation, damnation, sanctification, salvation that hem us in and define our own inner state--and maybe even more so than your average artistic work due to the highly self-referential aspect we have embraced?

It reminds me of a statement of C.S. Lewis (which I can't find) about how, in certain moments, you can't pretend to be anything other than you are. We may have many moments where we have the time or energy to muster an "appropriate" response--in our case, "What Would Jesus Do?" But in moments of sudden distress or pain, we can't reveal anything but the true state of our soul.

A saint will continue to love God and neighbor with all his heart, mind, and strength; a professed Christian who has a private Hell opening up inside of him will start exhibiting that somehow. I seem to remember another statement of Chesterton (which I also can't find) about how our lives all give us an opportunity to "leap past Hell."

All of us, in other words, have a gaping abyss somewhere in the landscape of our lives.

And like Chekhov's gun, this abyss isn't superfluous to the plot! I wouldn't say it's there for a God-given reason exactly, although the gift of free will does necessitate it as an option. And we are either going to have to leap into it or leap past it.  Admittedly, that sounds way more dramatic than our current quotidian existence with its blended, blurry options, but God makes that moment possible for each one of us, allowing us to make a clear-eyed, fundamental choice that will persist for all eternity.

So you may have something to say about the paragraphs I excerpted; or maybe you read more of it and find something else. I really see this vision as needing to be central to our project since it's a letter explicitly addressed to artists in the postmodern age! What is the Holy Spirit telling us through this message? What questions of ours does it answer?

A False Vision of God

The following is excerpted from the June 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Saint Augustine in his Study by Botticelli

I like that last part about the "blade of grass." 

That's C.S. Lewis artistically rendering the Augustinian doctrine of evil not having being in the usual sense. Elsewhere, Lewis describes the damned soul as being "nearly nothing." Heaven is literally experiencing the Source of Being in the fullest possible way. So it would be a superabundant, unexcelled experience of being. Hell, since it is the experience of being cut off from the Source of Being, must be as close to nonexistence as is possible for created beings with immortal souls.

The fact that Lena made Will pledge to make Arthur famous on her deathbed makes it a no-brainer that she's going to Purgatory at best. 

Saints don't say those sorts of things!

Will:

True. 

I think what makes Lena seem saintly to a modern audience is that she's always doing good things. But, then again, she's an old-world Catholic. She might have more fear of God than an all-consuming love of Him. 

She might think that she's protecting the family from its wealth through her acts of charity. That fear would be consistent with a false vision of God as a scale measurer, a pretty common misconception. Still, I think she genuinely loves the poor and sees Christ in them, although not perfectly or mystically. Perhaps she does it because of her own childhood poverty. So this loving the person of Christ in the poor keeps her from going to Hell, while her bargaining and manipulating is what needs to be burnt off on Purgatory. 

Although the family doesn't really need Arthur to become a star for financial reasons, maybe she also wants to protect Arthur from the bullies or wants him to show the world. 

Or maybe she has been partially converted to the gospel of the American Dream as preached by Stan.

Just Try to Be a Good Person

C.S. Lewis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 June 2014.

I like it a lot. All of it. Having Stan in Hell works on so many levels, and Will's vision of his torment before committing murder would account for years of Will shutting down, giving up on redeeming Arthur through the American Dream, and viewing himself as damned.

And paradoxically, understanding the reality of Hell could move him to believe in the reality of Heaven.

Also, in a world that has watered down Catholicism to "just try to be a good person," having the "saintly" Lena in Purgatory--not in the Heaven where all mothers go by virtue of being mothers-- fortifies the morality play aspect of the story.

I also love that both lend credence to the glowing lodestone vision of The American Dream!

In the midst of all this, however, Heaven is still much bigger than Hell.  In The Great Divorce, a tour guide on the outskirts of Heaven shows a tourist on his way from Purgatory and Hell that the whole vastness of the Hell he had experienced was only the size of a hole left behind from plucking a blade of grass in Heaven.

That doesn't minimize Hell...it just suggests the enormity of Heaven.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 3 of 3)

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

I like the Scylla/Circe idea...but why not Charybdis? That's an even more blatant cunnic/yonic symbol (okay, can I get my head out of the gutter?).

In some ways, Mary exhibits not only woman par excellence, but mankind par excellence.  And what does she exhibit? Well, something that is germane to our recent topic: becoming nothing in a good or bad way.

We can safely and securely look to Mary as the model for the good, nay, preeminent way of becoming nothing. In one way, she is merely a paragon of humility, the vessel in which God becomes incarnate. Yet she is given to utter the Magnificat. Aside from that, her only message--echoed down through the centuries--is "do whatever he tells you" (Jn. 2:5). She "ponders all these things in her heart" (Lk. 2:19). Like Carlton Farthington, she has no content of her own; she echoes, contemplates, or makes manifest the content of others. But in her case, the only one held within her frame--within the ribs of her proscenium, so to speak--is the Almighty, the ground of all being.

Carlton Farthington exhibits the bad version of becoming nothing.

Cut off from the ground of his being, he seeks to appropriate the being of others. He seeks to be the outer frame, the last arch in the proscenium, the maelstrom that draws in and envelops the existence of others. This, as I've pointed out before, leads to the near nothingness of Hell. Losing all inner integrity, he eventually implodes. Like a collapsed sun at the center of a black hole, he becomes hyper-massive, infinitesimal, concentrated and trapped within himself along with all the other damned ones who have drifted across his "event horizon." Nothing, not even the remaining light within him, can muster the velocity to escape the gravitational field that results.

Could this role be played like a woman? She would basically be a Charybdis at that point. Smacks a little of adolescent, Kerouacian misogyny. I think your second email suggests that maybe he should remain a man and that Mary is the heroine of the entire story. She manages to do what we all were made to do. Everyone else does it in distorted ways. Some of those ways can be rerouted or redeemed.

Others lead direct to damnation.

Cataclysmic Changes (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 April 2014.

Carlton Farthington, as we've been developing him lately, has no content of his own.

He is an emblem of the reposting/retweeting/embedding phenomenon.  Interested fans of the project will go digging for that kernel of actual content but will come up empty handed.  The joke with him is that he is a guru who has absolutely no message!  So siphoning the message off Arthur White would make total sense.

As for the "cataclysmic changes," I'm beginning to like the option that they may have been about to happen, but that the volcano settled down and nothing happened.

That is, if you eliminate the possibility of a "many-worlds interpretation" from the Schrödinger's cat paradox (which I personally do not).  Here's the March 24 email:

So, for example, Farthington's emergence on the campus of Cape Fear Community College could have taken place in 1984 or 2014 or both or neither.  He may or may not be the person in the mascot suit or with the Google account.  The catastrophe in Iceland could have happened in 1976, never happened, or is about to happen now.  Strict timelines can be introduced, but they become less trustworthy as other alternate realities are considered.  Essentially, this opens the door to our competing narratives and creates a frame in which we never have to get it right, never have to put all our eggs in one basket, never have to sell ourselves out to a single storyline.

Why is this happening?

Two possible reasons that I can give:

1. It's the fulfillment of Farthington's prophesy about the "turbulent reversals" 
2. It's all happening in Arthur's mind, which is now "unstuck"

Again, what happens is either nothing, something, or the "turbulent reversals."  You made a convincing claim about what the turbulent reversals might look like when you wrote,

The Principles of Theory is nothing until the technology exists to suck it out of his followers...Essentially, Farthington's power rises as digital culture rises, and the more the culture moves from the pagan, analog, portable village model of rock stardom that the sixties gave us and that faded in the seventies and toward the more sophisticated obliteration of time and space (since digital culture puts us in all times and all places at once and becomes an age of recycling and mosaic instead of innovation)...

What I like about that is that Carlton actually is creating a counterfeit Christianity, a "He must increase, I must decrease" dialectic.

Interestingly, this is the very idea Nietzsche warred against in his master/slave morality diatribe: that the Judeo-Christian worldview was/ is just a gambit to wrest control of this world from the Übermensch (cf. my email on Ibsen's "O for a Viking Spirit").

Without going into that at all, Carlton's counterfeit is actually the type that leads one directly to the nothingness of Hell, not toward the humility that is a precondition for Heaven. I've really been starting to parse out this very fine line between the humility described in the Gospel and the nothingness we approach as we near Hell.

And as for Arthur's mental state, I don't think he needs to be a vegetable.  We can nuance that.  My main idea is that his powers were paradoxically released by this sort of outsider meddling.

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.

A Frame Without Content

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 March 2014.

One other thought about Farthington: he corresponds to Augustine's definition of evil not being anything. Rather, evil is lack, is absence, is privation (even my use of the word "is" loses the sense of evil's non-existence).

Evil is real, but it doesn't exist, because God never created it, and this universe is only made up of good things created by God.  The only reason we can fall at all is because we were, unlike God, created ex nihilo.  Evil, then, is a turning away from the Source of Being and back toward our origin (although I wish I could omit the word "origin" because, again, we didn't exist; our origin is God).

So Farthington is just a frame without content.

He borrows content.  He borrows existence.  He lives parasitically or not at all.  C.S. Lewis describes Hell as the state of being "next to nothing."  Once the thing he feasts on is gone, he seizes on something else.  How many people get coaxed into this sort of borderline non-existence in our day and age?

McLuhan says that the proscenium arch makes us want to be an actor.

I wonder, though, if it ends up turning us into just another arch radiating out from the proscenium, just another iteration leading our eyes back to the few remaining actors on stage who themselves appear progressively more distant and diminished in stature.