An Unrivaled Fulfillment

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

For the sake of brevity (that's my favorite joke), I'm limiting the scope of this reply to your e-mails preceding December 2nd. The rest I'll take on tomorrow.

At a glance: engulfing tidal waves, Detroit as a microcosm for every city everywhere, burying harsh realities under static isolation and willful ignorance, childhood innocence and purity, the mechanicalization of human life, the stigmatization of creativity, creation’s destruction, the paving of Black Bottom, retribalization, the global village, power absorption, silenced horrors, the lodestone, irreverence toward the natural world, Edenic exile, Gluck’s "Daisies," Gibran’s "On Children," Don Gilber, Detroit trash, human sacrifice, the Most Authentic Detroiter ever, etc.

Anyhow, thanks for the accidental introduction, Will. I look forward to reading more of Gustafson's word-magic, as well as finding a way to integrate all of my new, mostly dead friends' words and images into my classroom. What was Gustafson’s funeral like? I hope there was a jukebox, with quarters clanging in every pocket.

Art, thanks for the clarification! This may have been referenced or elucidated in previous correspondences, but my understanding is still partially clouded.

A few questions:

1. Does the Benefactor's creation story have any roots in Luke 22:24-27? 
2. Is he, in part, an incarnation of the authoritative pagan kings who exploited their power by placing self-interest over public-interest?  
3. More specifically, was the Benefactor’s character inspired by Ptolemy III Euergetes?  
4. THEREON BE FACT? Or BE THERE NO FACT?

While brainstorming my previous round of Benefactor related questions, I began scribbling a series of short, mostly cryptic anagrammatic poems wherein each line is composed of the reorganized letters found in “The Benefactor.” I did something similar when I last sat down to sketch the Sea Devil, but stopped once I became so absorbed in the letters that I began to feel crazy. It’s a maddening process, yet I still find an unrivaled fulfillment in making do with what little you have; in discovering the many hidden potentials that lurk beneath the surface.  

This Irradiation of Identities

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 1 December 2015.

Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis by Henry Fuseli

Liza,

This is the most beautiful thing that has ever emerged from the primordial swamp of the project.

Quick take on one solitary question from your minor masterpiece: Yes, I do believe that Steffi, Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's and Leif Erickson's Sister are "the same person." Possibly incorporating aspects of you and/or Allison (no offense: Will and I became a Nietzschean dichotomy).

I put "the same person" in quotes because what Steffi has done is achieve indefinitude, the end goal of Knology and the process catalyzed by the Lodestone.

And no, I have never considered the Benefactor part of this irradiation of identities, although the fact that Will seems to think so makes me wonder. What Steffi achieves is the ability to engulf, usurp, subsume, sublate other identities into her all-comprehending framework. Eventually, even Farthington disappears in this way.

In that sense, she is Charybdis. In another sense, she is Scylla, in that she is endowed with these multiple heads or identities.

I always thought the the Benefactor was some kind of evil avuncular character.

Okay, I need about 5 weeks to process this. Wow.

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.

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.

Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.

Harbaugh

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 October 2015.

Jim Harbaugh

Google and Facebook will cause the civil war, robots basically, by the way they serve up content. Based on my recent interests in news stories, my Google app is serving me up all Breitbart and Fox News. I imagine those on the other side are being served up the exact opposite. So when we have killed each other and the humans are weakened from years of civil war, the robots will take over.

And I think the robot's style of government will, in the early going at least, be Skinnerian. Check out his Beyond Freedom and Dignity if you want a glimpse of what that will look like!

I take that back: it already is Skinnerian!

I take that back: it's also serving me up stories about Harbaugh.

Is this what the lodestone does?

Chinatown

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 August 2015.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

Art:

What a great movie. I'd never seen it before and I was interested in it because Baudrillard was interested in it. But I started watching it from the standpoint of some of the things we've discussed in the project.  

What I liked about it was how J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is such the epitome of that cocky, rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject, and how the vaguely exotic "Chinatown"—though never visited until the final scene—plays the stereotypical role of the inarticulate, fathomless backdrop against which he suffers.  

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a modern Ophelia of sorts, one who has fully plumbed the depths of the formless horror, demonstrated by the fact that she has multiple Chinese servants and a daughter through an apparently consensual act of incest with her father. 

Interestingly, she also has a Oedipal hole in her iris (later, through her eye). Gittes' memories of his own time in Chinatown suggest that he witnessed something—both within and without—that he has since tried to forget. Gittes has tried to "uncollapse" that experience; Evelyn lives within that collapse. 

In short, it's another Nietzschean/Baudrillardian tragedy. And J.J. Gittes reminds me a lot of Will Witkowski.

Will:

Crazy! I just started watching it on Netflix for the first time the other day! Unfortunately, I put it on at 3:30 a.m. and fell asleep while watching it. Time to watch it again! 

Come to think of it, from what I saw, there is also a parallel in the backdrop of at least the beginning, which is that a major metropolis will face total collapse (lack of water). You know, it's San Francisco instead of Detroit, so the crisis is more direct and less interesting than Detroit's looming threat (the lodestone), but still. 

You are right that young Will must have been like Gittes. I wonder what failure after failure would turn Gittes into. 

I think about the idea that the Witkowski family is so vastly important, and that all human beings are so vastly important that Jesus dies for all of us. But then we get all this Horatio Algerian rah-rah pablum all the time about following our dreams and being anything we want and determine your own fate and be a self-made man B.S. and we see ourselves as important for all the wrong reasons and abandon our rightful posts as agents of God's light and wander off into Palookaville with our bindles like we're hot stuff and think we're so important when we're just Goofy slipping on a banana peel. 

And meanwhile, God is still working with us where we're at and we're still so important, even though we're Billy Madison coming down late for dinner after getting into a fight with shampoo and conditioner bottles in the bathtub.

Yah Mo Be There

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 27 July 2015.



I have a few more questions that I feel are somewhat final or definitive.

One of the main questions that I've had with the project is whether it is acceptable to introduce yet another rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject to the stage? And, if so, under what conditions is that acceptable or appropriate?

The old struggle against the black backdrop, whether that blackness be oblivion or an actual nonwhite, nonmale cast of thousands. And the recent gambit of "humiliated thought" is a poor excuse for letting another one up on stage. Sartre and Camus were able to get a lot of mileage out of that one (not to mention hooking up with a lot of women way more attractive than they--which may, after all, be the whole point, cf. the whole history of rock and roll).

Is it not rather the case that he should vacate the stage?

He who has supposedly always known his own name and patrilineage, yet has strangely needed to appropriate everyone else's identity as his backdrop and basis.

Have we unconsciously reincarnated this wandering mongrel?

Is this just the old Aristotelian formula that requires the hero to be of a noble or illustrious family, the reason being that it "universalizes" the horror?

Or is this just another aspect of the turbulent reversals? That it isn't appropriate for a hero with no background or basis to be up on stage. In music we've talked about this at length: from Michael McDonald to Justin Timberlake, we've agreed that this is at the very least problematic. We don't need another Oedipus, even if he, like Camus, is able to bear the horror rather than blind himself. We don't need another Hamlet, another Kurtz, another Willy, another Meursault. Screw all of them, myself included.

By seeking to become everything, these figures have become nothing.

I guess a related question would be, do we need to formalize his departure toward Avalon, his disappearance, his entrance into oblivion?

My knee jerk answer is no, he should just leave.

This figure has not built his "castle in the air;" he has built it on the subjugation and objectification of others, on the appropriation of riches--first material, then cultural. Ironically, and as Liza has pointed out somewhere, this has caused him to diminish, to dwindle away to nothing like Kurtz. I would argue that it has paradoxically strengthened the identities of those who have had their cultures subjugated, devalued, usurped, appropriated, and suppressed, such that we are on the cusp of a massive reversal, one which McLuhan (white male--sorry) feared might be violently and overtly suppressed.

We have to look at what we're doing here. Will, you've said you want us to sharpen the clichés and I think it's safe to say that we've not only sharpened them, but also narrowed the field of clichés down to the most essential ones. That's why we're arriving at King Arthur, at Detroit and Iceland, at Dan Gilbert and the Savage Sisters, at the Underachieving Detroit Hipster Guy. That's why our gaze has been drawn inexorably toward black holes, lodestones, hearts of whiteness.

We are brewing up something that should soon be recognizably apocalyptic. We're slouching toward Bethlehem, straining toward Armageddon.

Straining to be worthy of some summit or summative statement: Is is what's being? But is that straining toward summation, that need to unify and universalize all the data of existence, itself the weapon with which Western man has used to subjugate the whole world?

Or is this all just, as Baudrillard might say, the final strategy, that of effacing oneself before the other in order to resuscitate and universalize one's own moribund, degenerate principles (in this case, those of liberalism)?

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.

Packaged Nothingness

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 21 May 2015.

Supermassive black hole at the center of M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy (Hubble image)

I also like the idea of selling packaged nothingness. Still with the "Made in Detroit" label.

I'm for truth in advertising, so it would have to be advertised as nothing, but could there be a better symbol for our project? All packaging, no substance; all pro- and postscenium, no scenium. As Farthington puts it, "Tunnels within tunnels means an infinitude of nothing! And that's a good thing."

Maybe it claims to be part of the black hole that is slowly widening around the lodestone.

Also the Schrödinger's cat and many worlds concept. If you want, you can take off the packaging to find out what's inside. Or you can just leave it in its package. And what disposition toward the inscrutibility of life is suggested by your choice? Maybe we could use the old creepypasta trope that by opening this you will unleash something awful on the world. Like whoever is in the Sea Devil suit will come get you. Or a black hole will start opening in your life--literally or figuratively.

Or nothing.

I leave the rest of you to determine how to best interpret a box of nothingness from Detroit.

I'd want a box of nothingness from Detroit. Or a piece of trash.