De Profundis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 October 2015.

Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré

More on the saline abortion avenger.

The two best stories in the world, Exodus and the Gospel, begin with a massacre of babies.

Evil is characterized most by its banality, which means it sets itself up against creativity, procreativity, prolificity, etc. Inarticulate babies sum up that impulse perfectly; that's why Satan has always laid siege to that stronghold.

I'm not sure where our story is heading, but I think it makes sense that this would be a starting point of sorts, albeit of a later episode.

Is the fact that it's twins the reason why Farthington seeks an abortion? Or was that his idea all along? In other words, all of his followers need to be emptied; some of the stronger ones need to be broken. It's clear that Farthington is pissed and that something didn't go as planned, either with Will, Arthur, or Steffi, or any combination of these three. Steffi almost certainly would have needed to be drugged at this point; Farthington doesn't have that kind of control over her. Will may have been on his way down to save her.

The fact that some horror occurred down in the tunnels is probably enough. That's the nature of the dark substratum: irrational, inarticulate, incoherent, unfathomable, yawning, awesome. But that something is born, unleashed upon the world is also important. God knows all about Leviathan: no dual Universe. He chose to use the primeval chaos as the sign of his first sacrament, for Moses, for Jesus, and for us.

So mind blowing and beautiful this strange faith of ours!

Part of what I want to do in creative pursuits is to "reconstitute" (wrong word) chaos. Then let God do what he's always done: bring order out of it. But I can't play the role of junior god; I can only describe the abyss:

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!

Will Will

The following is an excerpt of an October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

In all our messing with nomenclature and in all my years living with my own name, we've never thought of "Will" as a future helping verb.

Art:

How about when Farthington can't control Will he creates a clone of him called Will Will (helping and main verb). Maybe this is what is in Steffi's womb, although I'd always imagined that one being female (perhaps male/female monozygotic twins?). Maybe this is another reason a raging Will follows Farthington into the tunnels. Modernity enthrones the enfeebled will at the center of its moral law. 

Will should only be a helping verb; modernity tries to make it both helping and main verb. 

One of the twins dies. Does the other become the inarticulate monster?

Will:

So, I am conflicted on the saline avenger. 

My pro is that terrible topics are important to cover, especially in a project that seems to be a mock grand unifying theory of postmodernisty. 

My con is that for some reason, I have never lost my faith in the idea that at some point, this story will actually take some conventional narrative form and be told, and at that point, the saline avenger, if we aren't completely past the tipping point of holding an audience already, completely dumps us over. I know I've always said I want to work within the influence of a morality play, but I still like shaded, complex, mimetic characters. I worry that we keep flattening out everybody. 

Who knows. But there's no reason why Will Will can't just be a girl, who I suppose leaves the cryptic message "WILL WILL" in blood on walls.

Art:

Pulled in two opposite directions then... 

You want our narrative to take a more conventional form (a flattening, rationalizing, dehumanizing impulse). Your original, Everyman-inspired allegorical impulses might be classed with this as well. Deus ex machina too. 

But you also want nuanced, mimetic, irreducible characters (a deepening, irrationalizing, humanizing impulse). 

We've defined postmodernism the synthesis of these two. One way we've conceptualized it is clear, straightforward narratives told by unreliable narrators! 

Is that scaffolding robust enough? 

Carrie, the Stephen King movie, is great for this. All the nuance of modernity is finally judged by a pre-modern God, who is PISSED OFF. It's one of the most dialectically satisfying moments in film. Similar to the tension in Antigone between the younger Olympian gods of Creon and the older chthonic gods of Antigone. Hilarity ensues when the older gods wake up from their slumber and get pissed off by all the silly modern antics for which they have no context, understanding, or compassion! 

Although it's a piss-poor movie, the scene in Prometheus where the Weyland wakes up the engineer gives a similar pleasure: old gods waking up and KILLING EVERYONE!!!

The Monster That Now Pursues You

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 October 2015.



I don't think this will go in the blog either because I'm not going to be able to express what I feel about this coherently. You may be able to understand what I mean.

I think the so-called uneducated people of America are just pissed as hell having been essentially ridiculed for the last 8 years by everyone from the POTUS to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I feel some of that anger, even though I am not a Creationist or automatic weapon owner or even someone who has smelled sawdust or animal entrails in the last month. But I feel like this is a reckoning. The vengeful, silenced masses are now sending us their inarticulate messenger. The basic message is:

You have banished us from the table, from the public square, from civic discourse. You have been unwilling to engage with us in dialogue, preferring instead to use your monopoly of major media outlets and the bully pulpit of the presidency to shout us down, to proclaim us unclean, to paint our demands and desires as ridiculous, unconscionable, or worse. We, for our part, have attempted several times to present our arguments coherently according to the terms of engagement. But you have killed our most articulate messengers, replacing them with straw men whom you burn in effigy all the day. You have successfully demonized us, silenced us, and caricatured us. And so we now send you the only messenger you can recognize: the caricature, the demon, the vengeful, inarticulate angel. Its exaggerated, grotesque, almost comic features are a function of the toxic underworld from which this monster emerges. Had you extended the warm embrace of civility and dialogue, you might recognize in it a brother or sister or friend. But it is too late for that now. No, you didn't create this entity, but you are the one who turned it into the monster that now pursues you, wordlessly and inexorably.

In my prophetic imagination, this isn't Trump. This being would actually overtake and kill Trump at some point, Trump being far more articulate than the underlying impulse the entity represents. At best, Trump would be a perverse John the Baptist figure:

I am baptizing you with water...but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. (Matt 3:11)

I am not saying anything about the relative validity of issues such as flying the Confederate Flag, espousing traditional views of marriage, believing in the Genesis account of Creation, etc. I'm just saying that it's been relatively quiet lately. Voices have been summarily and successfully silenced. Hillary Clinton is the odds-on favorite for the presidency, Bill Nye has parlayed his Bachelor of Science degree into a second career, and Barack Obama is taking victory laps.

Drop the mic, right?

But you are a fool if you think those voices that raged so violently are just gone. They fester in the fetid darkness, their individual voices echoing, melding into a cacophony of incoherent rage. To be clear, if this were a horror movie, I would be killed along with everyone else. I'd be that traditional character who thinks he understands the being, who thinks he can reason with it, who is fascinated with it, who tries to explain to others how it became what it became.

The Saline Avenger (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.

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.

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.