Characters Replaced by Chyrons

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



Wow!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richly and Radiantly Signed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 17 August 2014.

"Holmes reichenbach" by Sidney Paget (1860-1908) - Strand Magazine. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Yeah, I just read McLuhan's bit about Sherlock Holmes up here. I appreciate your unique ways of connecting the dots. I think dialectic is a critical feature of this project, definitely in the Socratic sense, and possibly at times in the Hegelian and early-Nietzschean sense.

Okay, this doesn't respond to everything you talked about in your two emails, but here goes.

I draw a clear line from Nietzsche's "Socratic man" to McLuhan's Sherlock Holmes. Nietzsche traces the death of culture (and a persistent, centuries-long death--originating at the end of the 6th century B.C.) to the one-two punch dealt out by Socrates and Euripides. Sherlock Holmes can be seen as Socrates/Euripides/Plato taken through to their logical conclusion. When you banish art and the irrational/artistic/mystic means of "understanding" the world, culture (and inevitably even philosophy and religion) dries up and dies. What's left, centuries later, is Sherlock Holmes--a shriveled Socrates, so to speak. Like Holmes, Socrates had so little interest in or patience for literature ("Nil" as Doyle puts it). Socrates only appreciated Aesop and Euripides--nothing ineffable like Aeschylus, thank you very much. Plato burned all his own tragedic writings in order to be his disciple. According to Nietzsche, this was the beginning of the end for the greatest culture to ever grace the face of the earth. And every subsequent culture, holding up this degenerate moment as their gold standard, has likewise bumped up against this ceiling.

In a Christian sphere, this degenerate state has looked like brittle moralistic religion. What's left to the ordinary Christian but the nuptual embrace--the one place they can experience the ineffable, that chaotic, drunken substratum. Then your orthodox Christian buckles in to his apologetics and rote prayers, and hands out fliers for Fireproof ("Fireproof your marriage!"), because he's constantly battling an addiction to pornography. And the answer to all this is, at best, "accountability," as in an "accountability partner" or "Promise Keepers." As Nietzsche points out, "the god" (or daemon) who guided Socrates only spoke to prohibit him from doing things, never to inspire. Is that what modern orthodox Christianity worships, a God of negative moral precepts?

Yes, part of this issue comes from the fact that the Internet has made certain sins so readily accessible, but as McLuhan points out (I think in Mechanical Brides but I can't find it), what the machine serves up is merely a projection of our desires. So what is our spiritual state such that this is what we see when we gaze into the electric pool? Acknowledging Hubert van Zeller's image that morality and orthodoxy are the "cooler embers" that shore up the inner mounting fire of mystic union, is there not another sense in which mysticism is the constitutive element, the substratum, the protective hedge? As I mentioned in an earlier post:

Like a classical garden, this predominating aspect of Arthur is the moss-covered fountain of Pan, through which water from the wilderness is brought in to irrigate the well trimmed rows and patterns of the garden.

Without this influence (literally, flowing in) of untamed wilderness and creativity, the ordered, well-trimmed rows dry out and die--in fact, they fall out of existence entirely.

Both impulses are necessary to art, but the Dionysian is the more constitutive of the two.

This is (again) why I balk at the idea of a morality play as our approach to the project. To me, a religion that demands that even art serve the end of "moral education" is a degenerate religion, a religion in decline. Because Christianity is not, first and foremost, a moralistic religion. Christianity is the scandal of St. Francis of Assisi stripping naked and walking out of town. Christianity is that experience of freedom, of being unmoored, of ecstatic embrace.  Is God the ground of being or not? The artist and mystic aim to find out. It has nothing to do with skepticism; on the contrary, stepping out onto the waters--as opposed to onto solid ground--involves greater risk, and as such requires the greater faith. The ideal Christian artist is, for the most part, naked when he leaves town. There is definitely something in his heart that differentiates his self-exile from that of the atheistic artist. But I doubt this something is in the realm of a moralistic scaffolding that he sets up prior to commencing his labors.

I suppose this is not unlike a Thoreauvian sentiment:

I wanted...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it was sublime, to know it by experience.

A Christian artist probably has a lot of faith that what he finds will be sublime, but he lets go of that presumption due to his overflowing optimism and his hunch that the ineffable gets skittish around such foregone conclusions.

Contrast this with the brittle optimism that preemptively lowers the deus ex machina onto the stage as a kind of idolatry, a savior god of our own making:

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.

They have mouths but do not speak;
they have eyes but do not see;

They have ears but do not hear;
nor is there breath in their mouths.

Their makers will become like them,
and anyone who trusts in them. (Ps. 135:15-18)

I love this from McLuhan ("Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press"):

The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge signatures of existence. 

As Christians, we know who has "richly and radiantly signed" existence! But even though we "know" that, we can't go ahead and sign His signature. Such is the high and uncompromising calling of the ideal Christian artist.

Remastered Classics

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

I like the one-at-a-time approach, that is, one song per podcast episode. We could put these on Bandcamp with a pay-what-you-want option and a special download code, which would be "buried" somewhere in the podcast. I like the podcast to be roughly on a topic related to the song's time period, perhaps with a segment discussing thoughts about the song and its development. We could have the other musicians in at this point! We could also play some songs that were influential in our creative decisions.

But, again, I'm getting hooked on this diegesis (and, really, exegesis) over mimesis idea. It's soooo satisfying to me, both classically and postmodernistically! Classically, we're avoiding being a cause of moral degeneration; postmodernistically, we're analyzing a story that was never written--so much cooler than actually writing the story.

Bret Easton Ellis

Do listen to one of those Bret Easton Ellis podcasts. I would recommend the 7/14/14 interview with Michael Tolkin on the topic of pragmatism in screenwriting. It starts with a moment in Hollywood's history in which the screenwriter almost became a novelist-caliber artist, and why that didn't happen. This American Life and The Moth, likewise, all diegesis. Mostly historical and autobiographical too.

We're better at intellectual discourse than we are at writing and acting out dramatic roles (you're better at that than I am).

As for the "album" idea, I still think a modest 5 songs is a better idea at this point. We could put in a gentle plug for people to help us, by paying more for each released song: the more successful we are this year the more likely we can do more next year. I mean, in a sense, the 5-song release is an album of sorts--an EP, really. And yes, the songs I chose don't have any strong thematic or narrative link that I am aware of, so I guess that would be a "greatest hits."

As we get more of these releases (assuming we keep this cycle up over a number of years), maybe we can come in and do a "box set" of "remastered" stuff. If we have some weak parts that have started to annoy us over time, we can fix them. We can sit down and talk through some ideas for "remastering."

You already know about my love affair with the box set.

I was also a huge fan of crop circles

As someone who came of age in the late 80's and early 90's, the box set of remastered classics was like what an LP would have been for kids of earlier decades. Opening that sucker up, flipping through the huge glossy book while blasting "Immigrant Song" or "Mountain Jam" on my parents' 6-disc CD player "carousel."

Enjoying all the high-contrast black-and-white photographs, the lyrics scribbled on hotel stationary or napkins, the liner notes written by some hanger-on...

Man, that was IT in the early 90's!

So another postmodernist thing is to never have recorded the real albums--just go straight for the box set of remastered classics! And write the story in the form of liner notes (what a grossly undervalued genre!). It'd be nice if we could have little "thumbnails" of the actual albums to include in the massive book. And is it time to start putting out a box set with 4 Compact Discs (yes, CDs) inside as a "collectors item." I think it is!

Well, this is all fantasy way beyond our next steps, so I'm going to stop!

"Catapulted" into the Religious Sphere

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2014.

As for messages getting buried: That was one of the issues that I thought would get handled by taking the emphasis off mimesis and taking a diegetical approach--or at least more diegetical. We can talk about the story just like we do in our emails and, by extension, the blog. I was actually of the opinion we should go totally diegesis in our podcast. I think it lends itself to our strengths of telling not showing and it is a classical, Platonic solution to the problem of having the opposite of our desired, edifying effect on our audience.

Where is Jimi Hendrix located?

In deference to St. Augustine, I'm going to disagree that the ethical sphere is absurd and banal (I'm of the opinion that Kierkegaard got his ideas for the spheres of existence from Augustine's City of God). Augustine just betrays too much admiration for the highly ethical Romans he uses as examples of how close some pagans came to the kingdom. I would say that most churchgoers are actually in the aesthetic realm trying to work around or bargain with the ethical when absolutely necessary. The ethical realm is characterized by a willingness to die rather than to sin. I think ethical is rightly considered the realm from which one is "catapulted" into the religious sphere.

So where are Jimi and Arthur and prostitutes and Carlton Farthington located? It might be difficult to locate. But modern artists and would-be mystics might consider the ethical sphere impossible to stomach without the more complete revelation of the religious. They are different than the aesthetic types who just want to burn their eyes out on Netflix every weekend and buy a cottage someday.

For this reason, I also think Arthur would have picked up on the unnaturalness in Lena's charitable activities. The Sweet World is way bigger than that. It wouldn't feel as natural as breathing to him, but it might have been a womb-like place where he found some nourishment.

Mimesis Not Diegesis Effecting Catharsis!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 July 2014.

Apollo and Socrates (at the Academy of Athens)

I am also interested in bringing up a new topic, that of mimesis vs. diegesis. I began thinking along these lines when you brought up Drunk History, which is a pretty unalloyed modern example of diegesis, although the actors, of course, engage in (deliberately pitiful) mimesis. It must be first admitted that the writers of Drunk History would--without the slightest doubt--be forcibly and immediately expelled from the Republic, because their narration does absolutely nothing to promote values and virtues of youth.

That said, the only poets who would be allowed to remain in the Republic were the diegetical ones; mimesis is considered unacceptable because, among other things, "human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one part only" (The Republic, Book III). I don't have a fully formed idea here, but there seems to be an intersection between this and the idea of multiple identities that occur after the turbulent reversals. Actually, it seems to intersect in a lot of ways, but I haven't figured them all out.

Socrates would reject what we are doing in imitating our characters. And it doesn't help matters that most of the characters we imitate in this drama are not ones of a praiseworthy sort. Also, some of our characters do the same thing as we do, usurping the identity of others. Finally, we have the more overarching sense in which we all--to a greater or lesser extent--fashion multiple identities for ourselves in this age of avatars.

This same Book III talks about the importance of engendering courage in youth. And the blame is placed on even the poet Socrates revered--Homer--for perpetuating ideas of the afterlife that were contrary to nurturing this all-important virture. The main issue is making it look like everyone--with the exception of maybe Teiresias--has a shitty afterlife, and thus that death is to be avoided at all costs. They've got a point about that one passage in The Odyssey in which the fearless demigod Achilles says he would rather be alive as the basest slave than king of the dead. It's almost as if he regrets the valor that put him constantly in harm's way.

This aspect seems to have a connection to our focus on the underworld and Hell. In some ways, Farthington is doing what Socrates would have him do, that is, make that realm more desireable or palatable, and make life as we know it a thing of lesser value and passing worth, thus engendering courage in his followers. But the followers of Farthington are well on their way to becoming shades, to entering into the anonymous and ignominious part of Hell. More and more, they live the life of a disembodied shade, seeking only to drink blood on the rare occasion it becomes available. Perhaps Farthington thinks that, by leading them into the underworld willingly and while still alive, he is making them kings of that world, himself being the high king.

There is also the issue of exile, the fate which all mimetic poets would suffer in Plato's Republic. Is Arthur and Farthington's trip to Iceland an experience of exile? It sure bears a distinct resemblance to St. John's exile on the island of Patmos and capitalizes on that visionary tradition. I think it is an exile in the sense that neither of them have any place in modern civilization. They have been expelled by Nietzsche's hated Socratic man, who sees rationality, science, and mechanistic thinking as perfectly capable of fathoming the depths of reality.

Apollo and Marsyas

Arthur and Farthington turn this all its head by enacting their modern mythmaking, co-opting the symbols and concepts of empiricism/positivism (think dinosaurs), and allowing the Dionysian to regain superiority.

Arthur is likely from the upstart musical tradition of Marsyas, not Apollo, and is, in some sense flayed alive (or is just among those musicians and poets expelled in The Republic).

Your idea about podcasting also brings up the whole diegesis/mimesis idea. As long as it's just us talking about the characters and the story, we might last longer in a republic ruled by the Socratic man. Of course, I guess that's sort of what we've been doing with the blog as well.

Now with all this hating on Socrates in our story, it's interesting that, in some ways, he also gives voice to its happy ending:

our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession--the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind? 

This seems to be an apt ending for any divine comedy, if we replace "freedom" with "virtue" and "State" with "Church."

A major criticism of our approach is that we delve so deeply into baseness--to an extent that can our work even be considered Christian? Did anyone who attended "An Evening with Arthur White" feel strengthened in their faith? Did anyone feel "encouraged" or "equipped"? And if so, what is the mechanism that allows someone to profit from this? Obviously, Socrates sees no benefit in this approach; I think a whole lot of Christians see no benefit in this approach either--they too have roundly expelled these kinds of poets (just keep that dial locked on Family Life Radio!).

Or is it, as Aristotle says, "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions"?

In other words, mimesis not diegesis effecting catharsis!

Sit Back and Watch the Felix Culpa

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 30 June 2014.

"...like a Kierkegaardian Abraham"

I love Aristotle and I think it's remarkable that Poetics holds up so well after the whole rise and fall of Western Culture.

His method in all things, though, was to study every example of the subject that interested him and seek the patterns. I love this method: pattern recognition. McLuhan says it's the key to our ability to fabricate a survival strategy. But Aristotle only got to look at the art of his day, all of which was governed by the absurdities of polytheism. The pagans gave us tragedies of fate and epics of action; Christianity gives us tragedies of action and epics of...well, fate isn't the right word, but humility, maybe alignment with God's will.

I think the spirit of Poetics holds up, but I think the letter would be different if he had had the advantage of looking back from our point in time and space. So, yeah, I take liberties with Poetics because I see Shakespeare, Miller, and all sorts of other artists and philosophers continuing the work of the original text.

The question of Odysseus' virtue is impossible to reconcile since the gods don't have a unified will: none of them stay even personally consistent.

It's the problem of Plato's Euthyphro: polytheism just can't deal well with virtue, which is crazy considering how much the ancient Greeks prized it. I don't see Odysseus as having humility in the Christian sense. He doesn't become more devout, he doesn't say Zeus must increase and I must decrease. He is still a man who strives with gods, to steal from Tennyson. He's humble in the same sense I'm humble when I drive: I'm better at not getting caught when I speed than I used to be, I'm less reckless, and I could probably handle a conversation with the cops better. I even have a sticker in my window that shows I donate to law enforcement. I'm about as humble in the face of speed limits as Odysseus is in the face of "the gods." And if Officer Athena counseled me on how to beat the system, the analogy would be even better, not that it's that good.

The Greek epic hero has to figure out how to assert his humanity to its fullest extent, something approaching "god"liness. The Greek tragic hero in some ways just doesn't have as many resources available to prevail.

I see Oedipus as a supremely screwed character. I read him like a Kierkegaardian Abraham, put in a position in which serving the heavens means doing the opposite of what a moral person would expect of a divine request.

Humility means accepting his lot and killing his dad and marrying his mom, or at least resigning himself to that future. Morality means protecting his family. So he can't be moral and humble. And he doesn't earn his curse, really; it's like he's the living punishment of his parents' transgression. But even then, what makes their attempt to defy fate immoral, if morality comes from the gods and Kronos and Zeus are both child killers, not to mention father killers? Again we hit Euthyphro: morality must come from a source higher than the gods.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I think Zeus was probably Satan.

Anyway, from Marlowe onward, we've got tragic heroes who aren't marked by Olympus to suffer, but who bring about their own suffering, although there are always extenuating circumstances. And we get the Christian approach to comedy and the epic, plus the morality play about finding one's proper place within God's perfect plan. I wonder to what extent Milton set out to mock the pagan epic by having Satan more or less get smashed by the God's providence, and not by a set of death-defying scampers (if you cut out the pre-story of the war in Heaven).

God just spells it all out in Book 3, and we sit back and watch the felix culpa.