The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 2 April 2016.
Since I have some time, I'm going to explore a little more about the cult/LGAT. After giving them a lecture on the major themes of existentialism, I showed my students the Sizzler promo commercial and asked them to analyze it.
There seemed to be two major interpretations:
One was that this was a kind of heaven for übermenschen, ones who are capable of facing the full extent of their freedom. I know Sartre said that rational human beings, faced with the full extent of their freedom, rightly experience nausea and anguish. But we entertained the notion that perhaps they had somehow transcended that and were now Nietzschean “birds of prey,” triumphantly reveling in their restaurant within a restaurant, laughing fearlessly as they are confronted its dizzying array of options. There are a few characters in the video that support this interpretation. I think of these two and the dismissive way the Italian guy looks at the camera, showing a Nietzschean scorn for the timid, insipid values of the imagined viewers. Another point in favor of this view is the many vertiginous elements incorporated into the camera work (for instance, here and here), suggesting that, although the inhabitants of this world seem to relish their experience of contingency, we the plebeian viewers are nauseated.
The second and more popular interpretation was that all these people are living in bad faith, that, terrified of the full extent of their freedom, they instead accept “mediated choices” (thus, “Sizzler is the one that gives us choices”). The “restaurant within a restaurant” implies that they have buffered themselves from their freedom and subjectivity even further. The doubling, as mentioned in the previous email, suggests that this method of escaping one's subjectivity can be repeated ad infinitum, as one flees endlessly down this tunnel toward a theoretical dimensionless restaurant within an infinite series of restaurants where one would finally and definitively objectify oneself. The dizzying array of choices available in Sizzler's restaurant within a restaurant can be explained as another attempt by the herd to appropriate the values and prerogatives of the ruler caste. The paradox of fleeing one's freedom while ostensibly embracing an ever-expanding array of options is simply the inherent hypocrisy of the “lie to oneself.” Indeed, following this line of reasoning, the dimensionless restaurant at the end of this long line of nested restaurants would promise an infinite array of choices. The vertiginous camera work can be explained in that, even as they try to situate themselves within the seemingly stable environs of the restaurant within a restaurant, their efforts are doomed to failure: the anguish of repressed freedom can never be fully repressed; they are, as Sartre puts it, “condemned to be free.”
In looking at how any of this could provide inspiration for Knology, I like the idea of Farthington being an übermensch who has found a way to package and peddle the values and lifestyle of the ruler caste to the herd. I honestly think that this is exactly what people like Werner Erhard and L. Ron Hubbard did.
They did it by serving up the paradox of the restaurant within a restaurant ad infinitum.
Showing posts with label nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nietzsche. Show all posts
Monday, June 27, 2016
Friday, June 17, 2016
A Wounded Name
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 March 2016.
Honestly, the last few months of relative silence has kind of sapped my enthusiasm for the project. We were having that deep conversation about how could social media possibly prepare one for the “Profound Aloneness,” and had some deep answers to that question, but the answer seems to be quite a bit more mundane: you get used to a certain amount of interaction and excitement and the affirmation that comes from that, and when it dries up you feel more alone and depressed than you did before. It's just the simple mechanism of addiction and withdrawal. No big whoop.
Yeah, it's “circus animals desertion” time for me. I've got nothing for this project. I don't see its purpose and my goal at this point is to see it through to its end. Liza's incredible illuminated book will air in April, mostly Farthington's voicemail and my own unanswered emails to the group in May and June, and then a trickle of voicemails with a final one on July 4, 2016.
The end.
Back in college, I took on the task of transcribing the Civil War journal of my great-great-great-great uncle, Augustus Cochran MacKenzie, who was a doctor on a boat participating in the blockade of the South. I don't remember much about the first half of his journal, just getting used to the idea that his f's were actually s's. There was some entry about shooting at fish and going ashore to “find some woman to make love to.” At the very end of the journal, he seems to have gone nuts. He had some of his recipes for medicine, but just before that he had some scrawlings like “GOT THE THING BY THE THROAT” and a couple other such things. He ended up spending the latter part of the war in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the same hospital where I was born some hundred years later. Somehow he pulled himself together enough to go up to Negaunee and become one of the early doctors of the UP.
And of course, all of those transcriptions are on a dead PC in a landfill somewhere. I think the journal is still over at my parents' place, but I'm not sure where.
Anyway, this journal has apparently influenced me profoundly, because for some reason I feel that this is the way that books are meant to end. I've never finished anything, never gotten past the preliminaries of any full-fledged project. And yet--on some deeper level--I feel that, in accomplishing nothing, I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to accomplish. Like my great-great-great-great uncle, I don't even get to the halfway point, leave the second half blank, and scrawl a little insanity at the end (perhaps with some preliminary notes about the next project). I'm just hoping that someone will happen upon this years later and find it vaguely unsettling. Same thing with The Principles of Theory: some vague sketches of something bad happening and a disturbing epilogue.
Perhaps this is one of the problems with fame is that it fills in too many of the blanks, provides too much historicity and not enough mystery. Most of my favorite writers seem to have a good amount of mystery surrounding them. Sometimes I feel like I would root for Emily Dickinson to have successfully burned all her poems.
As George Eliot put it, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts.”
That desire for impotence, for emasculation, for passivity, for misrule, for ahistoricity, for oblivion is part and parcel of the Female King idea. Nietzsche's Hamlet “understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate…he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”
Maybe one can do better than that, better than Arthur, better than Ophelia, as in these lines from Hamlet:
Perhaps one who has gone out over the waters, who has groped his way through the dark, who has his sea-gown scarfed around him, can return to his room again and write it fair. In order to do that one needs to both come to grips with oblivion and then pull himself together enough to devise a new commission, to write it fair.
Contrast this with Ophelia, who sounds a little more like us (me?):
Although I think it's true that Ophelia does provide the model and criterion for Hamlet's heroism, she nonetheless demonstrates some flaws that are hammered out by Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet's sea-gown is scarfed around him, Ophelia's tattered land clothing is what drags her down to muddy death. Whereas Hamlet finds it in him to devise a new commission and write it fair, Ophelia only musters snatches of old tunes. Both of them have the sea within and the sea without, but with differences that only the subtleties of symbolism can express.
Hamlet gets it right. But no one gets out alive, no one gets out without a wounded name.
 |
| Ophelia by John Everett Millais |
Honestly, the last few months of relative silence has kind of sapped my enthusiasm for the project. We were having that deep conversation about how could social media possibly prepare one for the “Profound Aloneness,” and had some deep answers to that question, but the answer seems to be quite a bit more mundane: you get used to a certain amount of interaction and excitement and the affirmation that comes from that, and when it dries up you feel more alone and depressed than you did before. It's just the simple mechanism of addiction and withdrawal. No big whoop.
Yeah, it's “circus animals desertion” time for me. I've got nothing for this project. I don't see its purpose and my goal at this point is to see it through to its end. Liza's incredible illuminated book will air in April, mostly Farthington's voicemail and my own unanswered emails to the group in May and June, and then a trickle of voicemails with a final one on July 4, 2016.
The end.
Back in college, I took on the task of transcribing the Civil War journal of my great-great-great-great uncle, Augustus Cochran MacKenzie, who was a doctor on a boat participating in the blockade of the South. I don't remember much about the first half of his journal, just getting used to the idea that his f's were actually s's. There was some entry about shooting at fish and going ashore to “find some woman to make love to.” At the very end of the journal, he seems to have gone nuts. He had some of his recipes for medicine, but just before that he had some scrawlings like “GOT THE THING BY THE THROAT” and a couple other such things. He ended up spending the latter part of the war in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the same hospital where I was born some hundred years later. Somehow he pulled himself together enough to go up to Negaunee and become one of the early doctors of the UP.
And of course, all of those transcriptions are on a dead PC in a landfill somewhere. I think the journal is still over at my parents' place, but I'm not sure where.
Anyway, this journal has apparently influenced me profoundly, because for some reason I feel that this is the way that books are meant to end. I've never finished anything, never gotten past the preliminaries of any full-fledged project. And yet--on some deeper level--I feel that, in accomplishing nothing, I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to accomplish. Like my great-great-great-great uncle, I don't even get to the halfway point, leave the second half blank, and scrawl a little insanity at the end (perhaps with some preliminary notes about the next project). I'm just hoping that someone will happen upon this years later and find it vaguely unsettling. Same thing with The Principles of Theory: some vague sketches of something bad happening and a disturbing epilogue.
Perhaps this is one of the problems with fame is that it fills in too many of the blanks, provides too much historicity and not enough mystery. Most of my favorite writers seem to have a good amount of mystery surrounding them. Sometimes I feel like I would root for Emily Dickinson to have successfully burned all her poems.
As George Eliot put it, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts.”
That desire for impotence, for emasculation, for passivity, for misrule, for ahistoricity, for oblivion is part and parcel of the Female King idea. Nietzsche's Hamlet “understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate…he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”
Maybe one can do better than that, better than Arthur, better than Ophelia, as in these lines from Hamlet:
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again…
Being thus benetted round with villanies,
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down;
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
Perhaps one who has gone out over the waters, who has groped his way through the dark, who has his sea-gown scarfed around him, can return to his room again and write it fair. In order to do that one needs to both come to grips with oblivion and then pull himself together enough to devise a new commission, to write it fair.
Contrast this with Ophelia, who sounds a little more like us (me?):
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Although I think it's true that Ophelia does provide the model and criterion for Hamlet's heroism, she nonetheless demonstrates some flaws that are hammered out by Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet's sea-gown is scarfed around him, Ophelia's tattered land clothing is what drags her down to muddy death. Whereas Hamlet finds it in him to devise a new commission and write it fair, Ophelia only musters snatches of old tunes. Both of them have the sea within and the sea without, but with differences that only the subtleties of symbolism can express.
Hamlet gets it right. But no one gets out alive, no one gets out without a wounded name.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
My Formula for Human Greatness
The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 27 February 2016.
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:
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:
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:
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.
 |
| 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:
- Nietzsche's amor fati/eternal recurrence/lake that dammed itself up
- Camus's Sisyphus
- Hamlet's inaction
- The wisdom of Silenus
- Arthur White's motif of long delays and our distrust of the Benefactor
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.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
This Irradiation of Identities
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 1 December 2015.
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.
 |
| Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis by Henry Fuseli |
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.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Taking What the Defense Gives You
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 13 November 2015.
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:
 |
| 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.What I'm talking about right now may be as simple as what coaches call "Taking what the defense gives you."
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.
Saturday, December 19, 2015
The Saline Avenger (Part 1 of 3)
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.
I'm taking notes and then writing when I have a spare moment. This is unrelated to Liza's newest batch of illuminated texts (thanks for keeping the lights on Liza!).
I wanted to take up Will's thread of morality plays.
In particular, I wanted to spend a little time within the American tradition, which is alive and well. In recent years, this tradition has largely taken the form of horror movies.
Unlike Japanese horror, which just involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time, American horror has to do with strict Puritan notions sin and punishment.
Perhaps the best emblem of this tradition is that of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise. Jason, a mentally disabled, deformed child, drowns when two camp counselors go off to have sex. In Friday the 13th, it's Jason's mom who does the killing, but the stage is set for the archetypal vengeful angel who—in his unassailable innocence—returns to punish these transgressions. It's telling that Alice, who fends off the sexual advances of a male camp counselor earlier in the film, is the heroine and only survivor of the first movie (she is summarily dispatched by Jason himself at the beginning of the second).
I don't have the Jung that I've been reading with me, but I love how he issues this total smack down of the Enlightenment and its supposed exorcism of spiritual realities. Modern man is sorely mistaken when he thinks he has exchanged centuries of darkness for the bright light of positivistic, optimistic, empirical thought. All he has done is suppressed the underlying realities, which means they inevitably return, only this time in neurotic or psychotic forms.
I love that Jung explains that the only therapy required for Catholics suffering from modern malaise is to get them connected back up with the Church. The path is much more difficult for Protestants, who initiated the whole de-mystification project culminating in the Enlightenment. Of course, Nietzsche and Wagner and Jung and others had plenty to say in opposition to this wholesale sellout to rationalistic, Apollonian, Alexandrian, Socratic thought, but the celebration has mostly continued unabated down to the present day.
The total banishment of religion from the public square is just one symptom of the larger problem. Again, the Jungian axiom: anything banished returns, only this time in neurotic or psychotic form. What returns feels no guilt. What returns is unabashed, undaunted, intractable, incorrigible. What returns cannot be reasoned with. In the best horror movies, what returns doesn't speak: Jason, Michael Myers, all the various entities in It Follows.
The premise of It Follows is particularly interesting. By having sex with someone you take on the curse: an entity will pursue you at a walking pace until it catches up and brutally mutilates you. This entity is inexorable in its pursuit and invisible to everyone else. Guilt and punishment cannot be mitigated by reference to the consensus loose morality of our times, staying within the brightly lit public square so to speak. Inevitably, you are flushed from your rationalistic hiding place into the dark, inarticulate, isolating, intimate, collapsed world of your guilt.
Long story short, I've been thinking along these lines with regard to the End of Arthur White. If this is a morality tale—and an American morality tale at that—by what instrument, by what mechanism is the justice administered? In Dante, the sin is inextricably bound up in the punishment; there is no separation between the two. This is probably the more accurate, more mature view. But inside the puerile Puritan tradition that is our heritage, we've needed to embody the punishment as something outside ourselves.
I'm thinking of a resolution akin to the one that occurs in Geek Love, where the telekinetic Chick destroys the entire Fabulon camp in a firestorm.
 |
| Jason Voorhees drowns in Crystal Lake |
I'm taking notes and then writing when I have a spare moment. This is unrelated to Liza's newest batch of illuminated texts (thanks for keeping the lights on Liza!).
I wanted to take up Will's thread of morality plays.
In particular, I wanted to spend a little time within the American tradition, which is alive and well. In recent years, this tradition has largely taken the form of horror movies.
Unlike Japanese horror, which just involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time, American horror has to do with strict Puritan notions sin and punishment.
Perhaps the best emblem of this tradition is that of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise. Jason, a mentally disabled, deformed child, drowns when two camp counselors go off to have sex. In Friday the 13th, it's Jason's mom who does the killing, but the stage is set for the archetypal vengeful angel who—in his unassailable innocence—returns to punish these transgressions. It's telling that Alice, who fends off the sexual advances of a male camp counselor earlier in the film, is the heroine and only survivor of the first movie (she is summarily dispatched by Jason himself at the beginning of the second).
I don't have the Jung that I've been reading with me, but I love how he issues this total smack down of the Enlightenment and its supposed exorcism of spiritual realities. Modern man is sorely mistaken when he thinks he has exchanged centuries of darkness for the bright light of positivistic, optimistic, empirical thought. All he has done is suppressed the underlying realities, which means they inevitably return, only this time in neurotic or psychotic forms.
I love that Jung explains that the only therapy required for Catholics suffering from modern malaise is to get them connected back up with the Church. The path is much more difficult for Protestants, who initiated the whole de-mystification project culminating in the Enlightenment. Of course, Nietzsche and Wagner and Jung and others had plenty to say in opposition to this wholesale sellout to rationalistic, Apollonian, Alexandrian, Socratic thought, but the celebration has mostly continued unabated down to the present day.
The total banishment of religion from the public square is just one symptom of the larger problem. Again, the Jungian axiom: anything banished returns, only this time in neurotic or psychotic form. What returns feels no guilt. What returns is unabashed, undaunted, intractable, incorrigible. What returns cannot be reasoned with. In the best horror movies, what returns doesn't speak: Jason, Michael Myers, all the various entities in It Follows.
The premise of It Follows is particularly interesting. By having sex with someone you take on the curse: an entity will pursue you at a walking pace until it catches up and brutally mutilates you. This entity is inexorable in its pursuit and invisible to everyone else. Guilt and punishment cannot be mitigated by reference to the consensus loose morality of our times, staying within the brightly lit public square so to speak. Inevitably, you are flushed from your rationalistic hiding place into the dark, inarticulate, isolating, intimate, collapsed world of your guilt.
I'm thinking of a resolution akin to the one that occurs in Geek Love, where the telekinetic Chick destroys the entire Fabulon camp in a firestorm.
Monday, November 9, 2015
We Go Medieval on the Seventies
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.
Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.
Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.
Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.
We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."
Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.
But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.
At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.
 |
| Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch |
Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.
Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.
Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.
We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."
Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.
But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.
At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Chinatown
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 August 2015.
Art:
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| Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown |
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.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
On the Side of Life
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.
Thank you for sharing Peter Maurin's distinction between liberals and radicals. Of course, the same distinction could be made between conservatives and radicals, which may point to the fact that both are (were once?) rooted in similar bedrock principles. To make matters even more confusing, I used the terms "the left" and "the right" as in socialists and nationalists, which themselves have different meanings.
In defending your own position as not liberal but radical and then pointing out the follies of conservatism, I wonder if you were seeing me as a conservative (I wasn't seeing you as a liberal by the way). I don't think that fits me any more than it did Camus when Sartre and company ostracized him for not getting on the Communist bandwagon, turning a blind eye to its brutality. I am not in married to any ideas about the free market, trickle-down economics, strong military, small government, right to bear arms, greed, Don Gilber, etc.
As Camus said somewhere, "I am on the side of life."
I almost want to just leave it at that, because that's all there is to it for me. It is the simplest, most coherent of all positions, constitutive of all other values.
Now, I may need to understand that position more deeply, to integrate it more completely. But more contemplation, more sanctification, more poverty and/or personal fidelity to the Gospel will never change the fact that I am on the side of life. And not just on the level of the "fundamental option," but categorically (more on that later). Camus, who carried the philosophical project started by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to its most harrowing, coherent conclusions, arrived at this certainty. Dostoevsky seems to have finally arrived at a similar conclusion in his final short story (I read about this today on Brainpickings). And so have all of the saints.
Of course, it isn't fashionable to talk about the negative moral precepts associated with "I am on the side of life," namely, "Thou shalt not kill." After all, we're not supposed to be close-minded. But as Chesterton famously wrote,
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| Albert Camus |
Thank you for sharing Peter Maurin's distinction between liberals and radicals. Of course, the same distinction could be made between conservatives and radicals, which may point to the fact that both are (were once?) rooted in similar bedrock principles. To make matters even more confusing, I used the terms "the left" and "the right" as in socialists and nationalists, which themselves have different meanings.
In defending your own position as not liberal but radical and then pointing out the follies of conservatism, I wonder if you were seeing me as a conservative (I wasn't seeing you as a liberal by the way). I don't think that fits me any more than it did Camus when Sartre and company ostracized him for not getting on the Communist bandwagon, turning a blind eye to its brutality. I am not in married to any ideas about the free market, trickle-down economics, strong military, small government, right to bear arms, greed, Don Gilber, etc.
As Camus said somewhere, "I am on the side of life."
I almost want to just leave it at that, because that's all there is to it for me. It is the simplest, most coherent of all positions, constitutive of all other values.
Now, I may need to understand that position more deeply, to integrate it more completely. But more contemplation, more sanctification, more poverty and/or personal fidelity to the Gospel will never change the fact that I am on the side of life. And not just on the level of the "fundamental option," but categorically (more on that later). Camus, who carried the philosophical project started by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to its most harrowing, coherent conclusions, arrived at this certainty. Dostoevsky seems to have finally arrived at a similar conclusion in his final short story (I read about this today on Brainpickings). And so have all of the saints.
Of course, it isn't fashionable to talk about the negative moral precepts associated with "I am on the side of life," namely, "Thou shalt not kill." After all, we're not supposed to be close-minded. But as Chesterton famously wrote,
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.The Church has always affirmed the existence of negative moral precepts. St. Pope John Paul II states this unequivocally in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor,
In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.He contrasts this commonsense theological understanding with a perversion of the "so-called fundamental option," the idea that "freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one's own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately for or against God." All of this, he says, has been an important and positive development in moral theology. But certain theorists have taken this line of thinking too far:
In some authors this division tends to become a separation, when they expressly limit moral "good" and "evil" to the transcendental dimension proper to the fundamental option, and describe as "right" or "wrong" the choices of particular "innerworldly" kinds of behavior: those, in other words, concerning man's relationship with himself, with others and with the material world. There thus appears to be established within human acting a clear disjunction between two levels of morality: on the one hand the order of good and evil, which is dependent on the will, and on the other hand specific kinds of behavior, which are judged to be morally right or wrong only on the basis of a technical calculation of the proportion between the "premoral" or "physical" goods and evils which actually result from the action. This is pushed to the point where a concrete kind of behavior, even one freely chosen, comes to be considered as a merely physical process, and not according to the criteria proper to a human act. The conclusion to which this eventually leads is that the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior.Of course, the Church teaches that there are certain intrinsically evil acts that cannot be done with your "heart in the right place." Certain acts, by their very nature, constitute a decision against God, a "no" to God. We know these as mortal sins. And though the Church acknowledges certain psychologically complex situations which may mitigate guilt, these are never normative.
Monday, August 31, 2015
We Want Rome, Not Salt Lake City!
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 6 August 2015.
One final word.
I wanted to apply some of this thinking to an explanation of "Hey Rome." One of the concepts that has interested me lately is the fact that ours is the only persecuted religion that did not merely find a safe, uninhabited location to set up shop (e.g. Salt Lake City). Instead, Christ was crucified by Rome, then set up his Church in Rome. At the time, Rome had only one principle from which it derived its privilege and prominence, that of brute power. And this is the important thing: Christianity did not engage Rome on the playing field of this principle, the stacked deck of this principle. Christianity, in other words, did not beat Rome at its own game, did not engage its content.
In reading Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus," I've realized that he is almost entirely right, that he takes the questions raised by existentialism and modernity through to their most coherent conclusion. But this intellectual victory takes place inside the stacked deck of a certain line of thinking, the context in which this content is undeniably true. I can't quite describe the parameters of this context, but I know that, in addition its sole axiom being that of humiliated thought, it also is an overwhelmingly white male club.
I'm likening the unassailability of this philosophical position to the political one enjoyed by Rome.
It sometimes seems like we are going to live with this principle of humiliated thought--which sets the stage for the murderous dictatorship of relativism--forever, putting God and creation further and further in our rearview mirror until it altogether disappears.
I'm sure a lot of people felt the same way about Rome.
But could it be that Christ has a similar takeover in mind, one that will use the basic root and branch system established by the prior order? God uses Cyrus, Caiaphas, Rome, etc., why not juggernauts like Planned Parenthood or Dan Gilbert? I have come to believe that this is the mysterious way God operates; it is one of my most compelling reasons for belief right now. So much more definitive of a victory than beating down one's enemy.
What would it look like if the Church showed up, not in "the promised desert / wasteland that you set aside for me"--i.e. the postmodern version of Salt Lake City--but rather smack dab in the middle of the postmodern Rome of relativism, hyperreality, or whatever, metastasizing through all its mechanisms and making it entirely its own ("one day I'll make you my home sweet home")?
I think McLuhan had some ideas about the end of the Gutenbergian era with its stacked deck individualism, linear thinking, privacy, repression, detachment, specialization, modern militarism, etc.--all of which put non-Latin, Teutonic Europe in the driver's seat of modern history. McLuhan saw modern media as retribalizing us, and, if we can take his devout Catholicism as a data point in his philosophy, he saw the Church as the best bet for transitioning (back?) into this paradigm. Interestingly, he saw non-white peoples (bye bye northern European Übermensch and all your awful offspring) as being more able to capitalize on the values of this dawning era. Incidentally, he also believed that the new tribal values would ultimately be highly conservative but consensus, as they are in non-alphabetic, tribal societies.
Some I am sure are not finding any of this humorous or thought-provoking anymore. Facebook and Twitter pages have gotten very mirthless. Recent events have made almost everyone (myself included) take sides as drummers or warriors such that we can no longer comprehend one another (cf. Tower of Babel). But I continue to think what we are doing on all fronts is important.
I also hope some of this answers your questions about why we are engaging modernity so much. Although you may not like reading Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, or Baudrillard like I do, you do like Don DeLillo, who work posits similar theses. I don't think that's because these musings "spark my intellect without engaging my soul." Rather, it's because we have the universe's most commodious frame, that we can comprehend everything "according to the whole." And that perhaps this is one small way in which God as "All in All" is made manifest. We want Rome, not Salt Lake City!
The idea is to keep hanging around getting fed to the lions until the emperor has a vision.
One final word.
I wanted to apply some of this thinking to an explanation of "Hey Rome." One of the concepts that has interested me lately is the fact that ours is the only persecuted religion that did not merely find a safe, uninhabited location to set up shop (e.g. Salt Lake City). Instead, Christ was crucified by Rome, then set up his Church in Rome. At the time, Rome had only one principle from which it derived its privilege and prominence, that of brute power. And this is the important thing: Christianity did not engage Rome on the playing field of this principle, the stacked deck of this principle. Christianity, in other words, did not beat Rome at its own game, did not engage its content.
In reading Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus," I've realized that he is almost entirely right, that he takes the questions raised by existentialism and modernity through to their most coherent conclusion. But this intellectual victory takes place inside the stacked deck of a certain line of thinking, the context in which this content is undeniably true. I can't quite describe the parameters of this context, but I know that, in addition its sole axiom being that of humiliated thought, it also is an overwhelmingly white male club.
I'm likening the unassailability of this philosophical position to the political one enjoyed by Rome.
It sometimes seems like we are going to live with this principle of humiliated thought--which sets the stage for the murderous dictatorship of relativism--forever, putting God and creation further and further in our rearview mirror until it altogether disappears.
I'm sure a lot of people felt the same way about Rome.
But could it be that Christ has a similar takeover in mind, one that will use the basic root and branch system established by the prior order? God uses Cyrus, Caiaphas, Rome, etc., why not juggernauts like Planned Parenthood or Dan Gilbert? I have come to believe that this is the mysterious way God operates; it is one of my most compelling reasons for belief right now. So much more definitive of a victory than beating down one's enemy.
What would it look like if the Church showed up, not in "the promised desert / wasteland that you set aside for me"--i.e. the postmodern version of Salt Lake City--but rather smack dab in the middle of the postmodern Rome of relativism, hyperreality, or whatever, metastasizing through all its mechanisms and making it entirely its own ("one day I'll make you my home sweet home")?
I think McLuhan had some ideas about the end of the Gutenbergian era with its stacked deck individualism, linear thinking, privacy, repression, detachment, specialization, modern militarism, etc.--all of which put non-Latin, Teutonic Europe in the driver's seat of modern history. McLuhan saw modern media as retribalizing us, and, if we can take his devout Catholicism as a data point in his philosophy, he saw the Church as the best bet for transitioning (back?) into this paradigm. Interestingly, he saw non-white peoples (bye bye northern European Übermensch and all your awful offspring) as being more able to capitalize on the values of this dawning era. Incidentally, he also believed that the new tribal values would ultimately be highly conservative but consensus, as they are in non-alphabetic, tribal societies.
Some I am sure are not finding any of this humorous or thought-provoking anymore. Facebook and Twitter pages have gotten very mirthless. Recent events have made almost everyone (myself included) take sides as drummers or warriors such that we can no longer comprehend one another (cf. Tower of Babel). But I continue to think what we are doing on all fronts is important.
I also hope some of this answers your questions about why we are engaging modernity so much. Although you may not like reading Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, or Baudrillard like I do, you do like Don DeLillo, who work posits similar theses. I don't think that's because these musings "spark my intellect without engaging my soul." Rather, it's because we have the universe's most commodious frame, that we can comprehend everything "according to the whole." And that perhaps this is one small way in which God as "All in All" is made manifest. We want Rome, not Salt Lake City!
The idea is to keep hanging around getting fed to the lions until the emperor has a vision.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Simultaneously Villain and Savior
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.
I do see why we absolutely must engage the concepts of simulacra, the undead nature of language, and the secular worldview that derives from Camus and Sartre. I get why we need to engage Nietzsche, too, and any time I forget, I've got Planned Parenthood to remind me. Speaking of Derrida, I was thinking about your last major email, and the value in keeping Farthington "of indeterminant ethnicity" (I think those are DeLillo's words about Willie Mink; Jack Gladney also is frustrated by Orest Mercator for the same reason) and of having him set "indefinite longevity" as a goal.
Orwell talks about this idea that when Big Brother needs 2+2 to equal 4, it equals 4, and when he needs it to equal 5, it equals 5, but that's not exactly what Derrida is talking about.
Philosophically, we live in the age of O'Brien: the unborn child is a child when society needs her to be a child, a fetus when it needs her to be a fetus, tissue when it needs her to be tissue, a clump of cells when it needs her to be a clump of cells. But all we're really doing is doublethink: choosing temporary meanings.
Still, our increasing tendency to keep all options open approaches Derrida, where language is like a zombie--resistant to binary oppositions of words like "alive" and "dead." And for some reason, the more digital/binary our existence becomes, the more our communication becomes undead.
I think about this with that horrible Chevy commercial that borrows its plot from Sophie's choice: a mom must choose which child goes in the Chevy and which child goes in the car with inadequate airbag protection. The salesman who gives her the choice is also her savior, because he lets both kids go in the Chevy. So he is simultaneously villain and savior and neither and both...we can't sort the two out.
This undead thing works well for Farthington, who may or may not be alive, and who communicates digitally.
I do see why we absolutely must engage the concepts of simulacra, the undead nature of language, and the secular worldview that derives from Camus and Sartre. I get why we need to engage Nietzsche, too, and any time I forget, I've got Planned Parenthood to remind me. Speaking of Derrida, I was thinking about your last major email, and the value in keeping Farthington "of indeterminant ethnicity" (I think those are DeLillo's words about Willie Mink; Jack Gladney also is frustrated by Orest Mercator for the same reason) and of having him set "indefinite longevity" as a goal.
Orwell talks about this idea that when Big Brother needs 2+2 to equal 4, it equals 4, and when he needs it to equal 5, it equals 5, but that's not exactly what Derrida is talking about.
Philosophically, we live in the age of O'Brien: the unborn child is a child when society needs her to be a child, a fetus when it needs her to be a fetus, tissue when it needs her to be tissue, a clump of cells when it needs her to be a clump of cells. But all we're really doing is doublethink: choosing temporary meanings.
Still, our increasing tendency to keep all options open approaches Derrida, where language is like a zombie--resistant to binary oppositions of words like "alive" and "dead." And for some reason, the more digital/binary our existence becomes, the more our communication becomes undead.
I think about this with that horrible Chevy commercial that borrows its plot from Sophie's choice: a mom must choose which child goes in the Chevy and which child goes in the car with inadequate airbag protection. The salesman who gives her the choice is also her savior, because he lets both kids go in the Chevy. So he is simultaneously villain and savior and neither and both...we can't sort the two out.
This undead thing works well for Farthington, who may or may not be alive, and who communicates digitally.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
A Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.
The Planned Parenthood stuff has been eating at me, too.
I think in the case of the elected officials and billionaires who back them, we've got a case of human sacrifice to evil gods in exchange for power. I also think of Orwell, as usual: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
As far as supporters go, I think we have two camps: one that sees abortion as a necessary evil and the health care services Planned Parenthood provides as an indispensable good (all of which can be swallowed by deconstructing or rationalizing what the preborn are or by looking the other way), and the Nietzscheans, who basically rank weak, dependent life as inferior to stronger, independent life, and an ideal as mattering more than a person.
In this case, we have the left's version of the right's frequent justification of war: if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. In terms of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood, I think their biggest mistake was bring Cecil the Lion into the discussion. They increased the polarization of people who might have been on the verge of converting. I think the videos were eye-opening; it's this stupid memifying effect of Facebook where people rejoice in their rightness and triumph over their enemies' wrongness that really ticks me off.
It's something I'd like to tie to the Sea Devil.
One of the things I love about Catholicism is that we're all sinners, we all have to enter the Church on our knees, and we are all elevated by God the Father's gift and sacrifice of His Son. We've got so many parents who want children and so many kids who are destroyed. I think the right tends to be unjust in not offering up enough support to single mothers, prenatal care, food and medical support, and adoption aid, and the left tends to be unjust in the same freaking way, except they pretend to be sympathetic by saying, "It's okay: we can make the pregnancy go away and offer all sorts of ways of pretending a child isn't a child."
So the right dumps you after you have the kid, and the left dumps the kid and then you after dumping the kid. The left is the more devious: if you look straight at what they are doing, you see the support they are willing to offer women is the extermination of their children.
In my world of paranoia about the ultra powerful, though, I have two thoughts about the right. One is that they need to consistently look like they are fighting abortion and deliberately keep on losing the fight so that they hold onto the Catholic vote indefinitely. The other is the fact that the ultra powerful are currently working on living indefinitely, which means they had to create a gigantic middle class to grow the sort of wealth necessary to fund all the technological advantages they hope to exploit.
And now that America has produced that sort of wealth, they can begin shrinking the middle class again, mainly through college debt. Meanwhile, they have helped rebrand the Nazi-style research necessary to live indefinitely as women's health, nanotech as cancer research, interfaces between human and artificial intelligence as progress, etc. In education, we've had to deemphasize the humanities so nobody has too much attachment to the human experience as we've known it.
The less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death).
 |
| The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake |
The Planned Parenthood stuff has been eating at me, too.
I think in the case of the elected officials and billionaires who back them, we've got a case of human sacrifice to evil gods in exchange for power. I also think of Orwell, as usual: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
As far as supporters go, I think we have two camps: one that sees abortion as a necessary evil and the health care services Planned Parenthood provides as an indispensable good (all of which can be swallowed by deconstructing or rationalizing what the preborn are or by looking the other way), and the Nietzscheans, who basically rank weak, dependent life as inferior to stronger, independent life, and an ideal as mattering more than a person.
In this case, we have the left's version of the right's frequent justification of war: if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. In terms of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood, I think their biggest mistake was bring Cecil the Lion into the discussion. They increased the polarization of people who might have been on the verge of converting. I think the videos were eye-opening; it's this stupid memifying effect of Facebook where people rejoice in their rightness and triumph over their enemies' wrongness that really ticks me off.
It's something I'd like to tie to the Sea Devil.
One of the things I love about Catholicism is that we're all sinners, we all have to enter the Church on our knees, and we are all elevated by God the Father's gift and sacrifice of His Son. We've got so many parents who want children and so many kids who are destroyed. I think the right tends to be unjust in not offering up enough support to single mothers, prenatal care, food and medical support, and adoption aid, and the left tends to be unjust in the same freaking way, except they pretend to be sympathetic by saying, "It's okay: we can make the pregnancy go away and offer all sorts of ways of pretending a child isn't a child."
So the right dumps you after you have the kid, and the left dumps the kid and then you after dumping the kid. The left is the more devious: if you look straight at what they are doing, you see the support they are willing to offer women is the extermination of their children.
In my world of paranoia about the ultra powerful, though, I have two thoughts about the right. One is that they need to consistently look like they are fighting abortion and deliberately keep on losing the fight so that they hold onto the Catholic vote indefinitely. The other is the fact that the ultra powerful are currently working on living indefinitely, which means they had to create a gigantic middle class to grow the sort of wealth necessary to fund all the technological advantages they hope to exploit.
And now that America has produced that sort of wealth, they can begin shrinking the middle class again, mainly through college debt. Meanwhile, they have helped rebrand the Nazi-style research necessary to live indefinitely as women's health, nanotech as cancer research, interfaces between human and artificial intelligence as progress, etc. In education, we've had to deemphasize the humanities so nobody has too much attachment to the human experience as we've known it.
The less art, music, and poetry in the world, the less people will value what it means to be human or feel nostalgia about things that exalted the human experience (mainly, God) or that created boundaries around the human experience (mainly, death).
Saturday, July 25, 2015
A Distinctly Feminine Attack on History
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 6 June 2015.
Regarding social media, I agree with everything that you all have said. I'm not so worried about it anymore.
Reminds me a little of that passage from Walden, where he talks about what's the use of a big, fancy house when the inside hasn't been improved. Of course, our project satirizes this exact phenomenon, the fact that--to a greater and greater extent--this is how we all live our lives, especially now in cyberspace. That the great mass of us are red giants with no inner integrity, all ready to collapse at any moment. Something about that goes along with David Brooks's favorite sociological study (cited in his book The Narcissism Epidemic):
The bottom line is, as with all things in the project, it will happen if the Nietzschean dammed-up lake reaches the requisite depth. What I was doing was flowing away to some imagined destination, longing for Camusian suicide.
On a similar note, I continue to be interested by George Eliot's statement that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts" (cited in "The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse").
As Eliot L. Gilbert goes on to explain,
It's interesting to me that Arthur White was conceived at a time when emasculated indie bands were de rigueur, and that, inspired in part by the large-group awareness training organization I was in, I said screw that. And that, in a related development--unlike my kingly namesake--I have sired a veritable quiver-full of children, leaving an unapologetically large patrilineal footprint and singlehandedly melting the country of Iceland.
So I see how Arthur both is a manifestation of this feminizing tendency and its opposite.
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| La Liberté Guidant le Peuple by Eugène Delacroix |
Regarding social media, I agree with everything that you all have said. I'm not so worried about it anymore.
Reminds me a little of that passage from Walden, where he talks about what's the use of a big, fancy house when the inside hasn't been improved. Of course, our project satirizes this exact phenomenon, the fact that--to a greater and greater extent--this is how we all live our lives, especially now in cyberspace. That the great mass of us are red giants with no inner integrity, all ready to collapse at any moment. Something about that goes along with David Brooks's favorite sociological study (cited in his book The Narcissism Epidemic):
In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves a "very important person?" Twelve percent said yes. By 1990, that number had jumped to a whopping 80% who said, “Yes, in fact I am a very important person.”I might argue that the number has actually come down in the last 5 years, although I don't have the data for that.
The bottom line is, as with all things in the project, it will happen if the Nietzschean dammed-up lake reaches the requisite depth. What I was doing was flowing away to some imagined destination, longing for Camusian suicide.
On a similar note, I continue to be interested by George Eliot's statement that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts" (cited in "The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse").
As Eliot L. Gilbert goes on to explain,
Such a conclusion follows inevitably from the idea that history, simply by existing, exhausts possibilities, leaving its readers with a despairing sense of their own belatedness and impotence. And this despair in turn leads to anxious quests for novelty, to hectic avant-gardism, and in the end to an inescapable fin de siecle ennui.The Female King is a solution to this in that he "triumphs over time by never having entered time" (Rosenberg, "Tennyson and the Passing of Arthur"). His "abdication" of the traditional kingly role, his passivity and emasculation invites and initiates a kind of female misrule, a distinctly feminine "massive and very deliberate attack on history," symbolized most strikingly by Delacroix's bare breasted Liberty, "striding triumphantly over the bodies of half-naked dead men" (Gilbert, 58, 70):
The Dionysian guillotine haunted the imagination of Europe; a mechanical vagina dentata, it produced, with its endless emasculation, an unstoppable blood flow, an unhealing menstual wound curiously like the one suffered by the maimed king in the story of the Grail.Our project considers this sense of impotence and belatedness, and examines the modern notion that oblivion and un-historical acts (suicide?) might be the best gift we can give to our world. In recent decades this has been the subtle (not so subtle?) message of the environmental movement as well. And yet, our faith tells us that we are ends in ourselves, that God loves us for our own sake. And that, far from winding down or being exhausted, our universe seems to be accelerating, drawing energy from some unidentified and limitless source.
It's interesting to me that Arthur White was conceived at a time when emasculated indie bands were de rigueur, and that, inspired in part by the large-group awareness training organization I was in, I said screw that. And that, in a related development--unlike my kingly namesake--I have sired a veritable quiver-full of children, leaving an unapologetically large patrilineal footprint and singlehandedly melting the country of Iceland.
So I see how Arthur both is a manifestation of this feminizing tendency and its opposite.
Monday, June 29, 2015
A Character in the Movie Called Life
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Allison to the group on 14 May 2015.
I tend to compartmentalize theories and philosophies from the people that birthed them.
Generally I pick out males, because (1) they dominate the field and (2) as a product of a male dominated major where we were taught the works of white males predominantly, they are what is in my arsenal.
However, I revere my mentor for being an ardent and progressive feminist, who took things like the works of men, critiqued them for having the wrong projections about women, but also taught them because they hold an important space in the academy, namely, more recent philosophy (written by men) has gotten really good at pinpointing the problem with men. But it’s often few and far between, because who is doing existentialism these days? Probably me and like three other people talking about Sartre and Camus at book club. Most people are worried about artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Nietzsche had a sort of female apprentice, Lou Salome, who was brilliant. His sister, though, was kind of a nutcase.
Judith Butler is excellent and I always read her work in conjunction with existentialism and its meshing with our surroundings, namely, the other and the work of drag (as in drag queens). The manipulation of gender roles and identities is so important to understanding how we form our own identities. For her, the other is a given and necessary component of our freely chosen existence. You mentioned violence--Zizek, of course, disagrees and views the other as horrifically invasive and penetrating (intentionally phallic). I am sometimes torn between these two camps. The way I have reconciled it to myself is that we are free to move in the world and take up various identities, but we are never free of the other. However much we may try to embrace our individuality, it is trumped by our human requirement to be in communities.
Now, does this mean the eternal recurrence would only work in an individualistic vacuum? Not at all. eternal recurrence of the same to me falls on a linear vision of time, not a looping spiral. We are a character in the movie called life and if we are to watch the movie (as I like to think we might do in purgatory), we would be able to see ourselves making individual movements contingent on the moves of others. I view the role of others, as I wrote in my thesis, as catastrophic and harmful to the movements, but a necessary evil. In my opinion, most interpretations of the eternal recurrence are too basic--they focus is on how time works, not on the meaning and identity derived over time.
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| Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche |
I tend to compartmentalize theories and philosophies from the people that birthed them.
Generally I pick out males, because (1) they dominate the field and (2) as a product of a male dominated major where we were taught the works of white males predominantly, they are what is in my arsenal.
However, I revere my mentor for being an ardent and progressive feminist, who took things like the works of men, critiqued them for having the wrong projections about women, but also taught them because they hold an important space in the academy, namely, more recent philosophy (written by men) has gotten really good at pinpointing the problem with men. But it’s often few and far between, because who is doing existentialism these days? Probably me and like three other people talking about Sartre and Camus at book club. Most people are worried about artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Nietzsche had a sort of female apprentice, Lou Salome, who was brilliant. His sister, though, was kind of a nutcase.
Judith Butler is excellent and I always read her work in conjunction with existentialism and its meshing with our surroundings, namely, the other and the work of drag (as in drag queens). The manipulation of gender roles and identities is so important to understanding how we form our own identities. For her, the other is a given and necessary component of our freely chosen existence. You mentioned violence--Zizek, of course, disagrees and views the other as horrifically invasive and penetrating (intentionally phallic). I am sometimes torn between these two camps. The way I have reconciled it to myself is that we are free to move in the world and take up various identities, but we are never free of the other. However much we may try to embrace our individuality, it is trumped by our human requirement to be in communities.
Now, does this mean the eternal recurrence would only work in an individualistic vacuum? Not at all. eternal recurrence of the same to me falls on a linear vision of time, not a looping spiral. We are a character in the movie called life and if we are to watch the movie (as I like to think we might do in purgatory), we would be able to see ourselves making individual movements contingent on the moves of others. I view the role of others, as I wrote in my thesis, as catastrophic and harmful to the movements, but a necessary evil. In my opinion, most interpretations of the eternal recurrence are too basic--they focus is on how time works, not on the meaning and identity derived over time.
Friday, June 26, 2015
This Existentialist Boys' Club
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 14 May 2015.
I'm not married to Irigaray either by the way (she's like 85 years old). I just put it out there because (1) it ties together about 10 or 11 threads we've been talking about recently and (2) I'm fascinated that people were writing philosophy in 1991.
You've got to be a straight-up fool to bring that (essentialist) Koolaid to a grown (existentialist) woman's party. I'm guessing a Simone de Beauvoir would have smacked that into the cheap seats.
But it sounds like you're bringing in a lot of men to take her out. Are they just rigidly trying to recapitulate their shriveled old male projects in themselves (excuse my French)? Or is it all an even playing field and they just happen to be men? I somehow happened across this quote in recent weeks, from even more radical feminist, Andrea Dworkin:
But I have to admit, I see how this idea that Nietzsche's eternal return could be seen as striving toward a fundamentally sterile, asexual, or even--as Dworkin might assert--homosexual recapitulation of oneself and one's projects.
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| Andrea Dworkin appearing on the television programme After Dark on 21 May 1988 |
I'm not married to Irigaray either by the way (she's like 85 years old). I just put it out there because (1) it ties together about 10 or 11 threads we've been talking about recently and (2) I'm fascinated that people were writing philosophy in 1991.
You've got to be a straight-up fool to bring that (essentialist) Koolaid to a grown (existentialist) woman's party. I'm guessing a Simone de Beauvoir would have smacked that into the cheap seats.
But it sounds like you're bringing in a lot of men to take her out. Are they just rigidly trying to recapitulate their shriveled old male projects in themselves (excuse my French)? Or is it all an even playing field and they just happen to be men? I somehow happened across this quote in recent weeks, from even more radical feminist, Andrea Dworkin:
We think that we live in a heterosexual society because most men are fixated on women as sexual objects; but, in fact, we live in a homosexual society because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men; all transactions based on equity and individuality take place among men. Men are real; therefore, all real relationship is between men; all real communication is between men; all real reciprocity is between men; all real mutuality is between men.As I look at the all-male, all-white AP English reading list that has been bequeathed to me by my two female predecessors, I sometimes wonder about this existential boys' club with its rigidly white male philosophical subject/tragic hero suffering against the backdrop of nonwhite, non-male minor characters. I like this Dworkin quote too:
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes--love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself--and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others--should we call it "joy"?Although I'm way beyond my depth now, I see some essentialism creeping into these articulations in the phrases "render them fully human" and "introduce a new theme...'joy.'" And I think I know exactly what she is talking about here too, but I will likely sound like an a-hole trying to express my understanding of what she means, because elsewhere she seems to express herself in very non-essentialist terms.
But I have to admit, I see how this idea that Nietzsche's eternal return could be seen as striving toward a fundamentally sterile, asexual, or even--as Dworkin might assert--homosexual recapitulation of oneself and one's projects.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Grace Slick's Baby
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 13 May 2015.
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| Grace Slick, mother Virginia Wing, and daughter China |
Guess she's one of them. I'm going to puke now...
To answer your question partially (partial credit?), I think all sorts of things can exist in the present, but none of them - sadly, sadly - have anything to do with stardom or storing up treasures. Music, contemplation, loving service, bricks, breathing, kissing the ground, crucifixion - yes, all these things can exist here and now. But I sense none of these is what the mind - fed on past and future, on virtual realities and on dreams of indefinitude - craves in its craven state. So it cowers in the darkness of the postscenium, becomes another rib in the radiating proscenium.
seeking the indefinite not the infinite
seeking knology not knowledge
seeking parthenogenesis not rebirth
We begin to hint at that insidious phenomenon by which we devalue those lovely beings that can populate the scenium, the individual bricks by which we build the Kingdom of God - music, prayer, breathing, service, children, faith, hope, love - in favor of some dream of permanence that doesn't exist anywhere and which young people rightly realize cannot be built.
And by what slight of hand does this firmest of ground become illusory, impractical, implausible, ethereal? Said another way, by what slight of hand do we depopulate the present?
And by what slight of hand do we disappear into past and future, into post- and proscenium, into regrets and ambitions, such that dreams of status and storing up treasures seems so real, so practical, so sensible, so sane, and not what it truly is sub specie aeternatis - utter and absolute insanity? Insanity of insanities!
I'm asking everyone, but this reminds me of Allison's work!
Formula for human greatness not amor fati but amor alterius?
I read this yesterday as I was researching Groundhog Day for AP English, which we're watching in the days after the exam (yes, that's where I got the word parthenogenesis). Some might reject her feminist reading of Nietzsche as too essentialist:
This gives us a clue that Luce Irigaray (1930-) is perhaps the right philosopher to furnish us with the key for unlocking the mysteries of Groundhog Day. Irigaray agrees with the conventional view of Nietzsche that his eternal recurrence concerns the return of the same, but objects to this view on the grounds that it’s a sterile thought that excludes any notion of ‘the other’. She writes, “The eternal recurrence – what is that but the will to recapitulate all projects within yourself?” (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1991). In other words, recurrence is entirely self-referential, akin to a cloning process. We might think of it as a type of parthenogenesis, or ‘auto-birth’: it provides men with the ability to give birth to themselves over and over again, thus denying the role of the female as lover and mother.
Irigaray wishes above all else to promote the value of the other, which she largely conceives in female terms, in opposition to the traditional philosophical subject that she considers rigidly male and masculine. She says, “For, in the other, you are changed. Become other, and without recurrence.” In Groundhog Day, it’s Phil Connors’ love for Rita, his female colleague (played by Andie MacDowell) that proves decisive. By immersing himself in ‘otherness’ – by learning everything that makes MacDowell’s character tick – he is transformed. He sheds his old sexist, masculine carapace, and emerges as a far more rounded human being, in touch with his feminine side (his ‘inner other’). As soon as he has fully achieved this, he’s released from recurrence, thus seemingly endorsing Irigaray’s view.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Robert Fripp-Caliber Equipment
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 14 April 2015.
Some quick feedback on your thesis!
I've been doing my usual discursive style of reading and found something (not the only thing!) on page 84:
And it's a critical concern of the project, striving toward this totality, especially as we attempt to communicate it. The form that it normally takes is endeavoring to express some transcendent ideal in the midst of perplexity, limitations, insecurities, regrets, and/or constraints (or, in my case, babies and malfunctioning musical equipment). The critical moment, though, is not a "transitional conflict," as Mooney suggests in the context of Kierkegaard's spheres, but rather the very medium through which our transcendence is expressed.
I'm a little more Camusian in my "acceptance" of these mostly frustrating facts; more constant revolt than amor fati, and worlds away from Christ's seven words. But nonetheless I understand that these constraints have been the OCCASION for my self-expression, more so than any Robert Fripp-caliber equipment, a live-in nanny, and life-time tech support on all my electronics.
The cross is where that seemingly impossible reconciliation happens and, inasmuch as we are baptized into that reality, we mystically participate in it, especially when it comes to communication.
Enjoying it by the way!
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| Robert Fripp with his equipment |
Some quick feedback on your thesis!
I've been doing my usual discursive style of reading and found something (not the only thing!) on page 84:
"The individual is both dedicated to its existence in the life-world...and to an unachievable end or telos."To me this statement strains toward the mystery of the cross. And being that Christ is the Word Incarnate, our attempts at communication--more so than any other activity--participate in this mystery. To me this is the critical moment in Camus's Sisyphus, Nietzsche's Yea-Sayer, but most definitively in the person of Christ.
And it's a critical concern of the project, striving toward this totality, especially as we attempt to communicate it. The form that it normally takes is endeavoring to express some transcendent ideal in the midst of perplexity, limitations, insecurities, regrets, and/or constraints (or, in my case, babies and malfunctioning musical equipment). The critical moment, though, is not a "transitional conflict," as Mooney suggests in the context of Kierkegaard's spheres, but rather the very medium through which our transcendence is expressed.
I'm a little more Camusian in my "acceptance" of these mostly frustrating facts; more constant revolt than amor fati, and worlds away from Christ's seven words. But nonetheless I understand that these constraints have been the OCCASION for my self-expression, more so than any Robert Fripp-caliber equipment, a live-in nanny, and life-time tech support on all my electronics.
The cross is where that seemingly impossible reconciliation happens and, inasmuch as we are baptized into that reality, we mystically participate in it, especially when it comes to communication.
Enjoying it by the way!
Friday, June 5, 2015
A Polylogic Epistolary Novel
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 13 April 2015.
Allison,
I'm looking forward to reading your thesis. Thanks for sharing that!
I concur with Will that you should structure things whatever way you want. One of the preoccupations of the project is a McLuhanish concept of how different modes of communication influence the message ("the medium is the message," but not quite as much of an equation in our case). For me, my communications have included
Like you, I think I "understand it for the most part," and I strive to communicate my understanding inside each of these modes of communication. The effort involved in trying to explain myself to others is salutary, both to the project and to me personally. I choose the one that seems to get me closest to expressing the truth, a collision between the facts of my current situation and the transcendent vision I imagine. Actually for a while there, my main mode of expression was Farthington's voicemail, calling on my way home from work or while walking around with Francis. While that medium might not have made for the most exciting blog posts, it did deepen my understanding of the project.
Of course, we can also take into account all sorts of human considerations: insecurities, perplexity, compulsivity, constraints--all of these influence the mode of communication. 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 (The Return of Arthur White, after all!), 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. Something in the collision of those two antitheticals is the "goal" of the project. I think this is not unlike what you discovered in writing your thesis: "I wrote the piece not unlike the blog as a reflection of my own grappling with my identity and significance, which I eventually concluded is inherently meaningful in its own end."
Another critical aspect of the project is that it is dialogic.
The Principles of Theory was written as a series of emails between me and my friend at U of M, [NAME REDACTED]. It wasn't until I reconnected with Will again that the project came back into existence. It does not exist as a monologue. I say that we're working on a kind of postmodern epistolary novel. And now we're moving from it being a dialogic epistolary novel to it being a polylogic epistolary novel.
As far as your audience, that's just us for the most part. But I think you can imagine other audiences...more in that transcendent dimension that refuses to acquiesce to limits it encounters. For example, my Twitter account is basically where I have been trying to engage the people of Iceland, following them and tweeting at them and using the hashtag #Iceland and #ConcertforIceland. This is still very much in its early stages because I haven't had much time to devote to it. To fully engage that audience serves as a counterfeit of communication, one of several abysses into which our varied characters can fall.
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| Christ on the Cross with Mary, John and Mary Magdalene |
Allison,
I'm looking forward to reading your thesis. Thanks for sharing that!
I concur with Will that you should structure things whatever way you want. One of the preoccupations of the project is a McLuhanish concept of how different modes of communication influence the message ("the medium is the message," but not quite as much of an equation in our case). For me, my communications have included
- Emails with Will
- Voice-to-text transcriptions of messages left on Farthington's voicemail
- Text-to-voice transcriptions of The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas
- mp3s of song fragments
- YouTube videos of song ideas (one while eating a bowl of cereal)
- Open letters to Philip Glass and Iceland (the latter in Icelandic as rendered by Google Translate)
- Google+ Hangouts with Will
Of course, we can also take into account all sorts of human considerations: insecurities, perplexity, compulsivity, constraints--all of these influence the mode of communication. 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 (The Return of Arthur White, after all!), 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. Something in the collision of those two antitheticals is the "goal" of the project. I think this is not unlike what you discovered in writing your thesis: "I wrote the piece not unlike the blog as a reflection of my own grappling with my identity and significance, which I eventually concluded is inherently meaningful in its own end."
Another critical aspect of the project is that it is dialogic.
The Principles of Theory was written as a series of emails between me and my friend at U of M, [NAME REDACTED]. It wasn't until I reconnected with Will again that the project came back into existence. It does not exist as a monologue. I say that we're working on a kind of postmodern epistolary novel. And now we're moving from it being a dialogic epistolary novel to it being a polylogic epistolary novel.
As far as your audience, that's just us for the most part. But I think you can imagine other audiences...more in that transcendent dimension that refuses to acquiesce to limits it encounters. For example, my Twitter account is basically where I have been trying to engage the people of Iceland, following them and tweeting at them and using the hashtag #Iceland and #ConcertforIceland. This is still very much in its early stages because I haven't had much time to devote to it. To fully engage that audience serves as a counterfeit of communication, one of several abysses into which our varied characters can fall.
Friday, May 29, 2015
Hello Liza and Allison!
The following is an email sent from Art to Liza and Allison on 12 April 2015.
I have been going back and forth for a long time trying to figure out how to approach this first email. I do feel some need to formally welcome you to the project. No pressure as far as your involvement, but I have to say that I'm kind of overly excited about the prospect of your respective contributions and it's bringing up all sorts of past experiences of rejection, when my heart was all a-flutter and things didn't work out, in large part due to my unabashed enthusiasm. So I learned the lesson of Orpheus, by which, in the words of John Updike, "we achieve our desire by turning our back on it." Be that as it may, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm psyched. And of course you have full permission to leave at any point (but I guess by analogy that means that you fall back into the underworld). One paragraph and I've already made things weird!
I understand that you are both up to big things, but I wanted to summarize what I understand about your potential roles thus far, expressing some of my own thoughts and providing links to past posts that may or may not be helpful to you.
Allison, I understand your role as one of exegesis/analysis. In some ways, this puts you on Will's Apollonian, rationalistic end of the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. I gathered from lurking somewhat on your Facebook page that you're pretty familiar with Nietzsche having written a dissertation that synthesized his and other people's work and that you ultimately hope to help people to live their lives better...my point being, I assume you get the reference! I think "The Eternal Loop of One's Own Rationalism" would be a good place to start in terms of conceptualizing what you're doing (you would be Actaeon, by the way). You become a Nietzschean protagonist of sorts who tries to rationalize the formless horror. Eventually--spoiler alert--the Dionysian shows its superiority. Your own Apollonian endeavors are not for naught; they are paradoxically "energized and raised aloft" through glimpsing the formless horror. So, yes, you get eaten alive by your own hounds so to speak, but something cool comes out of it. I mean how many people get turned into a stag? That's pretty cool in and of itself.
I should back up and say that I know you're not intending to be one of the characters, but, like a lot of people who have had some involvement, you may end up fitting into one or more roles. I visualize you as an early Steffi Humboldt, whose "Forward" is used for The Principles of Theory. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that she didn't just "go back to Oberlin." The post, "Eve vs. the New Eve" may also be a good place to find out what may have happened to her.
At any rate, whether you identify with Steffi at all, I like the idea of you trying to come up with a thesis as to what the project is. Everything can and should be tentative, probably indefinitely. We use the word "maybe" a lot. That's unlikely to change. Any even preliminary ideas, drafts, intuitions would be welcome--whatever aspects of the project do you find philosophically interesting. Interestingly, when I start posting some of that material, your thesis will have to accommodate it: the eternal loop of one's own rationalism! Thank you in advance for any contribution you can make!
Okay, moving on to Liza. Liza, I posted your first post today and it's generating some excellent traffic (by the way, shares, reposts, retweets, etc. are all appreciated and, in fact are part and parcel of the cult)! You seem to be more on the Dionysian side of the spectrum with me and Arthur and Carlton Farthington (those are all me, by the way). That means that you can pretty much write whatever you want. I think you've already intuited that we grant ourselves wide latitude when it comes to unintelligibly in this project (or as we like to call it, indefinitude): text-to-voice, voice-to-text, to English-to-Icelandic transcription, and just good old fashioned not making ourselves understood, we have pretty much free rein to say whatever we want! Being on this side of the spectrum means that your life--like mine--has been touched by the lodestone. Thus, our identities become increasingly confused, fused, diffuse, etc. Definitely should read "Epic Finale" - Part 1 and Part 2.
And yes, I'm thinking of you as a latter-day Steffi, who now goes by other aliases like Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister, The Überfrau, etc. Of course, you could also be Leif Ericsson and/or The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever. Here's something I wrote to Will a couple days ago:
Okay, enough of me. I've probably scared you off. So reply to our emails, feel free to get involved to whatever extent and in whatever capacity you'd like, maybe even call Carlton Farthington at his home on Topsail Island, North Carolina (910-541-3455). We believe that, inside the swaddled/crucified existence, whatever utterance you're currently capable of making is the best utterance. Don't wait until come down off the cross--you'll be dead then!
Will, anything to add?
Art
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| Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice by Nicolas Poussin |
I have been going back and forth for a long time trying to figure out how to approach this first email. I do feel some need to formally welcome you to the project. No pressure as far as your involvement, but I have to say that I'm kind of overly excited about the prospect of your respective contributions and it's bringing up all sorts of past experiences of rejection, when my heart was all a-flutter and things didn't work out, in large part due to my unabashed enthusiasm. So I learned the lesson of Orpheus, by which, in the words of John Updike, "we achieve our desire by turning our back on it." Be that as it may, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm psyched. And of course you have full permission to leave at any point (but I guess by analogy that means that you fall back into the underworld). One paragraph and I've already made things weird!
I understand that you are both up to big things, but I wanted to summarize what I understand about your potential roles thus far, expressing some of my own thoughts and providing links to past posts that may or may not be helpful to you.
Allison, I understand your role as one of exegesis/analysis. In some ways, this puts you on Will's Apollonian, rationalistic end of the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. I gathered from lurking somewhat on your Facebook page that you're pretty familiar with Nietzsche having written a dissertation that synthesized his and other people's work and that you ultimately hope to help people to live their lives better...my point being, I assume you get the reference! I think "The Eternal Loop of One's Own Rationalism" would be a good place to start in terms of conceptualizing what you're doing (you would be Actaeon, by the way). You become a Nietzschean protagonist of sorts who tries to rationalize the formless horror. Eventually--spoiler alert--the Dionysian shows its superiority. Your own Apollonian endeavors are not for naught; they are paradoxically "energized and raised aloft" through glimpsing the formless horror. So, yes, you get eaten alive by your own hounds so to speak, but something cool comes out of it. I mean how many people get turned into a stag? That's pretty cool in and of itself.
I should back up and say that I know you're not intending to be one of the characters, but, like a lot of people who have had some involvement, you may end up fitting into one or more roles. I visualize you as an early Steffi Humboldt, whose "Forward" is used for The Principles of Theory. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that she didn't just "go back to Oberlin." The post, "Eve vs. the New Eve" may also be a good place to find out what may have happened to her.
At any rate, whether you identify with Steffi at all, I like the idea of you trying to come up with a thesis as to what the project is. Everything can and should be tentative, probably indefinitely. We use the word "maybe" a lot. That's unlikely to change. Any even preliminary ideas, drafts, intuitions would be welcome--whatever aspects of the project do you find philosophically interesting. Interestingly, when I start posting some of that material, your thesis will have to accommodate it: the eternal loop of one's own rationalism! Thank you in advance for any contribution you can make!
Okay, moving on to Liza. Liza, I posted your first post today and it's generating some excellent traffic (by the way, shares, reposts, retweets, etc. are all appreciated and, in fact are part and parcel of the cult)! You seem to be more on the Dionysian side of the spectrum with me and Arthur and Carlton Farthington (those are all me, by the way). That means that you can pretty much write whatever you want. I think you've already intuited that we grant ourselves wide latitude when it comes to unintelligibly in this project (or as we like to call it, indefinitude): text-to-voice, voice-to-text, to English-to-Icelandic transcription, and just good old fashioned not making ourselves understood, we have pretty much free rein to say whatever we want! Being on this side of the spectrum means that your life--like mine--has been touched by the lodestone. Thus, our identities become increasingly confused, fused, diffuse, etc. Definitely should read "Epic Finale" - Part 1 and Part 2.
And yes, I'm thinking of you as a latter-day Steffi, who now goes by other aliases like Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister, The Überfrau, etc. Of course, you could also be Leif Ericsson and/or The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever. Here's something I wrote to Will a couple days ago:
Maybe indefinitude is the ultimate goal of Knology. Maybe it's what Farthington promised his followers. And yes that has a meaning in terms of time, but it also has a meaning in terms of identity. Maybe that explains why all our characters blur outside their boundaries, or at least the ones that have been touched by the lodestone, The Benefactor, Knology, etc. Ones like Will seem to lack that transcendence, but have clear facticity. There's a trade off.And--I'm not even sure if the two of you know each other--so I apologize, but even your two names introduce an interesting conflation and confusion of identities. Again, from a recent email to Will:
I also like that we have a Liza and Allison coming on board. Having a field day with those two names, their meanings, and the potential relationship of those meanings to one another. No etymology on hand now but just the "a-" meaning not and the "-son," which is so odd for a girl's name. Liza is the one that is apparently free from those affixes, accretions. Perhaps further along the path toward indefinitude...Of course, Will and I are not immune from this same treatment. At a most basic level, our names are nothing more than Nietzschean concepts.
Okay, enough of me. I've probably scared you off. So reply to our emails, feel free to get involved to whatever extent and in whatever capacity you'd like, maybe even call Carlton Farthington at his home on Topsail Island, North Carolina (910-541-3455). We believe that, inside the swaddled/crucified existence, whatever utterance you're currently capable of making is the best utterance. Don't wait until come down off the cross--you'll be dead then!
Will, anything to add?
Art
Friday, April 10, 2015
That Ineffable, Inarticulate Source
The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 February 2015.
Home again today, resting up.
Quite honestly, "my heart leaps up" when you say "I could grab a couple locals guys out here and put the songs together, book a Saturday gig, and then you could come up Saturday morning, we could play through the songs, play Saturday night, and you could head home Sunday."
That feels right, not just from a logistical but from a philosophical perspective. I think we are necessarily doing something very interesting with the whole concept of "band." With so many bands out there and us being way past our prime, there's no way we can afford not to be original to the extreme. The anachronistic costuming and performance dimension by itself is just a gimmick.
I feel like my role should be, first and foremost, songwriter and Dionysian hero. I don't say this out of arrogance. I just mean that, if I'm involved too much in the nuts and bolts, my creativity (anyone's creativity?) will necessarily go downhill. I want to dam myself up, to "boast gladly of my weakness," and see if God/Art rescues me in the midst of that. That's a scary pairing in that last sentence, but it's something that I believe. God is first of all Creator. He is the one who move across the surface of the primordial waters. If there are no Apollonian takers, if there isn't anyone who wants to make something of this music, it just means that I haven't--like Nietzsche's lake--risen high enough (or grown deep enough) to be worthy of notice.
If I want "apostolic fruitfulness," the answer is, paradoxically, to spend more time in contemplation. I feel that God is calling me this Lent to settle into something deeper. It's not even "endeavoring" to become deeper, it's settling into something that is already there. Resting into these Lenten disciplines, damming myself up and not going out to some transcendent horizon of "achievement" or "accomplishment" feels like the right thing right now. A lot of these are already part and parcel of my life: openness to children, times of prayer, recourse to the sacraments. These are all things that I have already, at some point, "signed up for."
They all have those aspects of being preliterate, primitive, primordial, prolific.
I believe that music, perhaps more so than any other artistic genre, participates in this primeval source of creative energies. Singing and playing of instruments and dance. Visual and sculptural art is a distant second. Music and dance are a participation in that ineffable, inarticulate source. Even if dance and music come to nothing, they are the secret source of our regeneration.
To the outside observer, openness to children would seem to have been a great constraint on artistic endeavors. What a surprise to discover almost the exact opposite has been true! First of all, prolificity and/or openness in everything seems to be a precondition for creativity. Secondly, interacting with these irrational, preliterate, primitive beings--although frustrating for my rationalistic, literate, sophisticated self--has worked wonders for my spirit, bringing me closer to that epoch when human beings walked the surface of the earth in wonder.
Religious ritual and devotional practices--especially ones designed for illiterates--fall into the same category.
Okay, so long story short, I want to spend my time deepening this lake of music and contemplation, both through the blog and in the context of life. If you can gather musicians who are willing and able to learn and practice the songs, great! That's a lot better than me trying to coordinate things here. I think the best thing I can do for the project is to dam myself up here and, when and if the lake rises high enough, something may happen.
But, again, that won't be through an ambitious flowing out toward achievement and accomplishment, which impoverishes the life of contemplation, ritual, procreation, creativity, etc.
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| Lake Sils, Upper Engadine valley, Grisons, Switzerland |
Quite honestly, "my heart leaps up" when you say "I could grab a couple locals guys out here and put the songs together, book a Saturday gig, and then you could come up Saturday morning, we could play through the songs, play Saturday night, and you could head home Sunday."
That feels right, not just from a logistical but from a philosophical perspective. I think we are necessarily doing something very interesting with the whole concept of "band." With so many bands out there and us being way past our prime, there's no way we can afford not to be original to the extreme. The anachronistic costuming and performance dimension by itself is just a gimmick.
I feel like my role should be, first and foremost, songwriter and Dionysian hero. I don't say this out of arrogance. I just mean that, if I'm involved too much in the nuts and bolts, my creativity (anyone's creativity?) will necessarily go downhill. I want to dam myself up, to "boast gladly of my weakness," and see if God/Art rescues me in the midst of that. That's a scary pairing in that last sentence, but it's something that I believe. God is first of all Creator. He is the one who move across the surface of the primordial waters. If there are no Apollonian takers, if there isn't anyone who wants to make something of this music, it just means that I haven't--like Nietzsche's lake--risen high enough (or grown deep enough) to be worthy of notice.
If I want "apostolic fruitfulness," the answer is, paradoxically, to spend more time in contemplation. I feel that God is calling me this Lent to settle into something deeper. It's not even "endeavoring" to become deeper, it's settling into something that is already there. Resting into these Lenten disciplines, damming myself up and not going out to some transcendent horizon of "achievement" or "accomplishment" feels like the right thing right now. A lot of these are already part and parcel of my life: openness to children, times of prayer, recourse to the sacraments. These are all things that I have already, at some point, "signed up for."
They all have those aspects of being preliterate, primitive, primordial, prolific.
I believe that music, perhaps more so than any other artistic genre, participates in this primeval source of creative energies. Singing and playing of instruments and dance. Visual and sculptural art is a distant second. Music and dance are a participation in that ineffable, inarticulate source. Even if dance and music come to nothing, they are the secret source of our regeneration.
To the outside observer, openness to children would seem to have been a great constraint on artistic endeavors. What a surprise to discover almost the exact opposite has been true! First of all, prolificity and/or openness in everything seems to be a precondition for creativity. Secondly, interacting with these irrational, preliterate, primitive beings--although frustrating for my rationalistic, literate, sophisticated self--has worked wonders for my spirit, bringing me closer to that epoch when human beings walked the surface of the earth in wonder.
Religious ritual and devotional practices--especially ones designed for illiterates--fall into the same category.
Okay, so long story short, I want to spend my time deepening this lake of music and contemplation, both through the blog and in the context of life. If you can gather musicians who are willing and able to learn and practice the songs, great! That's a lot better than me trying to coordinate things here. I think the best thing I can do for the project is to dam myself up here and, when and if the lake rises high enough, something may happen.
But, again, that won't be through an ambitious flowing out toward achievement and accomplishment, which impoverishes the life of contemplation, ritual, procreation, creativity, etc.
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