All Saints

The following is an email sent to Will on 1 November 2014. It should be noted that, after this point, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.


"Allen ginsberg 675" by Michiel Hendryckx - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Hi Will!

On the Solemnity of All Saints, I wanted to contact you and make a ever-so-slight change in our communications.

From now on, I'd like to try communicating with you via Carlton Farthington's address. I think it will streamline things from the standpoint of opening up the single account that I use to blog, upload videos, etc., hopefully consolidating my electronic "identity" in the process.

Of course, I realize that this sudden move may cause some to wonder whether it really is Arthur or Art who is writing these electronic missives or Carlton Farthington.

Some may point out the malproportionisms Farthington is known for using.

Others may spot the presence of a glaring hapax legomenon not found in Art or Arthur's larger oeuvre.

Any sudden change in direction causes anxiety, controversy, and upheaval.

Maybe even you are feeling some of these things. Allow your eyes to turn inward: what do you see? Many people describe colors, usually green and purple shapes.

Not the rectangular one: that's the computer screen!

Now, open them. I hope you read ahead because otherwise your eyes are still closed! I'm screaming at the computer screen, laughing of course because you cannot hear me. Will! Will! I'm "willing" you to hear me, Will! Ha ha, whew! Whoops!

Whew!

Rest assured, everything will go back to normal and fans will continue to find the sure source of inspiration and edification they have come to expect from "The Return of Arthur White."

Gotta run, but one last thought. The Concert for Iceland "tour" will likely occur in Summer 2017, 20 years after Carlton Farthington's ill-fated pilot program ran at the University of Michigan. If not then, Summer 2022 at the 25th anniversary. If not then, Summer 2047 at the 50th anniversary. So on and so forth...75th, 100th, etc. depending on how healthy we all are.

More details to come.

Cheers,

Art

P.S. If nothing else, I'd like to hold a 24-hour film festival of all those great movies that came out in 1997: The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Event Horizon, The Apocalypse, Men in Black, Cube, Volcano, Flubber, Spice World, Free Willy 3: The Rescue, Gozilla (okay, that one was 1998!), and, of course, Cool Runnings (okay, that was 1993!), etc., etc. Gotta go!

P.S.S.What is the meaning of these so-called "gauzy green and purple scarves drawn across the backdrop of eternity"? Why is black synonymous with nothingness? Why not white? Why not drinking-water color sans background of trees or someone's circus-mirror face? Right now, my ice water has a bright yellow lemon stranded in its arctic ice. And its backdrop is the blacktop of driveway paved with asphalt, faultlines fissuring its surface from an overexcess of winters. How inadequate are these words when confronted with fathomless wonder!

P.P.P.S. Whoops on the last P.S.S.--what's that stand for?

P.P.P.P.S. Note to self: Will need letters both to Philip Glass and to the reincarnated Allen Ginsberg, whoever he is...would be about 20 years old by now.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Thinking he would not have made it into Nirvana because he was a latecomer to Buddhism and I don't think any self-respecting Buddha would be a member of NAMBLA. So he would actually be a teenager now having died in 1997.

Epic Finale (Part 2 of 2)

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

Now, fast forwarding past the pilot program, past Iceland, past the tunnels, out to the house out on Topsail Island... I imagine this is the place Steffi and/or Farthington choose to fully enter the waters.

Possibly inside the house there is a hole dug down through the floor of the inner room with a huge, water-filled hollow in the sand below. The implication is that whatever was dwelling in this house has become some kind of monster, entering the waters offshore.

Attacks on human beings would be good at this point and a hunt for a rogue great white might commence. Perhaps they succeed in tagging the beast, which is something a lot worse than a great white. It would be fun to see where and how fast the beast swims. Does it suddenly disappear from the tracker, having dove too deep, and then suddenly reappear directly beneath the boat, headed toward the surface at some ridiculous speed?

Farthington could return at this point with much fanfare (why not?!), claiming to have the skills and knowledge necessary to combat the beast. I've always wanted him to have a submarine, sort of like L. Ron Hubbard had a fleet of ships. The name of his submarine is the Ericsson--Google Voice's mis-transcription of something in my calls, but also significant because it is seemingly a failed attempt to render Leif Erikson's (or Ericson or Eriksson) name, who I say is the progenitor of the American Dream.

He had originally wanted to use the submarine to bring up some kind of glowing lodestone that had been launched into the ocean (or into orbit) by the volcano blast. This could be what the both of them are now after. A critical idea at this point is that there is a beast underground and a beast underwater--I don't know what the significance of that is, but we can't drop the ball with that. Similarly, the lodestone, which was originally in the heart of the volcano, is now in the waters (or in orbit). There, you've got your 4 elements again! What I like is that this lodestone--so primordial, pagan, and nefarious--is the true power behind the American Dream, that it has surfaced in other contexts and epochs in history, threatening the beauty of humanity and creation with utter destruction.

Heck, anything could happen at this point!

Aliens could come back to get the lodestone too and Armageddon break out with angels and archangels battling aliens and devils. And maybe some lone figure standing on the rim of the volcano playing an acoustic guitar. A funny ending would be him/her finishing the song, then launching the guitar into the caldera--all in slo-mo of course, suggesting that this is somehow going to bring an end to the chaos--but then have it land and sink into the lava and nothing happen. Then, you could have a whole succession of things get thrown into the caldera: the tapes, drivers licenses, everyone's clothes, a couple self-sacrificial characters, etc. Maybe something finally works. Maybe the whole earth blows up. The end.

Whether any of this sticks, I like workshopping some ideas that might be going on in Arthur White's head. In our interview with Scott, I liked how Will and Art were always in separate realities, always pulling in separate directions.

If nothing else, I'd like to get some of this material out in an interview at some point. Maybe that's the only way we hear about the buried worker, the beast, the jawless Steffi or Farthington, the lodestone, the submarine, the apocalyptic battle. Kind of like Narnia is in one sense a child's imagination trying to come to grips with the terrors of war and the reality of evil. This story is a mentally destroyed man's way of making sense of what has happened to himself and to the world.

You could use the deus ex machina that all of this happened in the short span of time during which Arthur was being zapped, sort of like Tobias Wolff's story "Bullet in the Brain."

Epic Finale (Part 1 of 2)

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

Some further ideas about Steffi.

Glaucus and Scylla

She needs to start out very young and innocent seeming, so I don't see her clawing her way to the top at an earlier part of her life. She was an undergraduate from Oberlin at the time of the pilot program, but didn't know (or seemed not to know) what she had signed up for. Overall, she affects a Midwestern sensibility and is the last one you would expect to become a sea devil. But the same could be said about Scylla, who just happened to be loved by Glaucus, who was in turn was loved by the witch, Circe.

Could she show up as an ostensibly naive and wide-eyed girl at an event for Arthur White and express a lot of interest in and admiration for Will and/or Arthur?

It may or may not be known at that moment that she is a Farthington student/cult member. Will lets down his guard thinking that this is some know-nothing groupie and maybe they end up going home, but, at the moment of anagnorisis, Will realizes that she was the one who took something essential (what, I don't know). And why did she take that critical thing? One of two reasons: (1) Farthington put her up to it or (2) she had already resolved to supplant Farthington and was now making moves of her own. In either case, she does supplant Farthington (maybe--I like your idea of him faking his death or disappearance regularly).

I like that moment in the tunnels being unclear, because the whole Schrödinger's cat/mascot suit thing depends on it.

But at least a couple episodes will pass with us not suspecting her at all, just thinking, "Wow, how weird that Will had this random encounter with a Farthington follower." I like that you are confused at this point, because one of the interpretations of the "turbulent reversals" is that everything becomes ambiguous, all narrators become untrustworthy, and the "many worlds interpretation" of Schrödinger's cat kicks in. That's officially the moment at which your exacting explanations cease to make sense and my crazy ones start seeming sensible!

I do like the jawless Steffi and/or Farthington, but I'm not sure how we find that out.

I find it much more terrifying to never see the actual carnage, but to hear about it in one or more ways. By the time one or both of them resurface, it is inside the mascot suit, so we have no idea what the situation is. I like the idea that, at some point, someone has another chance to shoot Steffi or Farthington encountering her/him clad in the mascot suit. I like having to shoot without knowing who is inside the suit. Then, the shooter gets to remove the mask and we get to decide who is in there. I think it would be really cool to see the blood slowly diffusing through the foam face. I like it being someone relatively insignificant, perhaps the worker who supposedly was buried in the cement while building the Chrysler Freeway, which, by the way, Detroit is thinking of rebuilding or ripping out.

Now, going way back, it may turn out that Steffi was not just a young co-ed who got corrupted and then destroyed her master, consuming and assuming his powers in the process. Again, could it be that "hers is the hand that holds the apple" and that, as she siphons away Farthington's powers, she has to prop him up, splicing into his lectures material from her own childhood, a childhood that included killing her own grandparents with apples.

The Principles of Theory: Forward [sic]

The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas is considered the masterwork of Dr. Carlton Farthington and a colleague whose name has since been redacted by request.  The text was culled from emails sent between the two men as they conducted a controversial summer "pilot program" at a prestigious Midwestern university.  This letter, sent by their student, Steffi, was originally used as the work's "Forward" [sic].

October 20, 19--

Dear Professor [NAME REDACTED],

I was there in the tunnels.

This was after the university canned the pilot program and had supposedly sent us home.  I heard about the beast.  They all told me about it.

We didn’t care about college credit anymore.

We had made it to the third subbasement and next floor down was the entrance to the subterranean caves, which, in turn, led down to the center of the earth, safe haven from all the turbulent reversals we thought so imminent.

The whole group of us were down in the tunnels, constructing long corridors of cardboard tied with twine—“tunnels within tunnels” he called them, and via these passageways, he theorized we would pass over safely into the “new physics.”

I myself caught glimpses of the terrible beast Farthington had warned about, sometimes swaggering in the distance up ahead of us in the dim intermittent rays of our flashlights, sometimes turning around suddenly to face us, its human physiognomy smiling to reveal a terrifying array of lion's teeth.

Many of the students stayed on well into the next school year, long after I’d decided to go back to Oberlin.  The university tried its best to cover up what happened to them.  That they had all been devoured by a lion and that the lion had been found and shot and there was a vague mention of a nearby zoo.

That they are dead and gone is indubitable Professor [NAME REDACTED].  But that summer lives on in my memory and in these brief electronic transmissions of which I have honor of laying claim.  May the brilliance of this unheralded mind cast a light through the befuddled corridors of multidimensional learning, what Farthington before his death so fondly referred to as “The Principles of Theory.”

Steffi