Historicity Destroys Legend

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 10 April 2016.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones

I love aphorisms. Nietzsche is particularly good to read as a collection of isolated aphorisms, most especially at The Nietzsche Family Circus. I also took some inspiration from Liza's cut-outs from The Believer article on the writing style of Roland Barthes. (Wow, that had a lot of subordinate phrases, but that's the reality—frames within frames!)

I've begun to think that it might be fun to do a bunch of aphorisms that are ostensibly taken from a full-fledged text that doesn't exist, such as The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas, or the seemingly more pamphlet-like “What is Knology?” I am especially proud of “Joseph Lazarus is not only the most complete guitarist of his generation, but also the most complete human being,” which is a rip off of Sartre's comments on Che Guevara. How would that have ever come up in the pamphlet (or treatise or interview or feature article) on Knology?

I would love some of the more philosophically trained among you (Allison? Joe?) to start trying to “connect the dots” as to what this philosophy actually is, kind of like what some have tried to do with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which is to try to systematize aspects of their philosophies after the fact due to the often oblique and evasive styles of writing.

Will, your “tons of likes” statement brings me back to an original strategy for the project. We've talked extensively about the significance and importance of likes, favorites, retweets, reposts, embeds, but, as we well know, we get nearly none of those things. And I understand the reason for that, namely, that the posts are too confusing to inspire anyone to mouse over and give us a thumbs up on anything. Not to say that what all of you have contributed hasn't been incredible—it has—it's just the way we frame it makes it hard to contextualize. Plus, we have so little actual existence in the “real” world.

Still, in accepting any of this as an excuse, we've lost sight of the critical aspect of the project, its fundamental and essential donnée.

The project is supposed to show how in our current age, the frame is more important than its contents, the proscenium is more important than the scenium, the smoke is more important than the fire, the echo is more important than the utterance. In fact, the project attempts to take this to the degree where those former things—the antecedents or referents—no longer exist. So many reasons for this that have been discussed ad nauseam and I don't want to get into it all over again.

Will, in addition to a central contributor to the project, you've been pretty much its only groupie. My main point in this email is that we may need more people willing to be groupies, to be frames, to be echo chambers. And I'm going to argue that this groupie-hood should not be based on any quality inherent in the content. It should be groupie-hood for the sake of groupie-hood. Call it groupidity. This is a central precept of Knology. Gotta get that on an inspirational meme soon.

I'm not saying that this should be any of you by the way. Honestly, I appreciate any likes you can give, but I don't want you to give them unless it makes any kind of sense to you. Perhaps, you have some better ideas of how we can cause this to flourish without attempting to endow any further reality to the original, which should remain shrouded in doubt.

Once this dynamic is established, I believe we begin to harness the power of infinite regress, the infinite series of receding images produced by two facing mirrors. I understand the argument that we should strive to make the primary as meaningful, sincere, relevant, interesting, entertaining, engaging, helpful, good, true, or beautiful as possible. But I also argue that's just what they'll be expecting us to do. More importantly, that's missing the whole point—the whole dynamism of the Female King, the Symbolism of Ophelia, the Wisdom of Silenus, the Tunnels within Tunnels, the Restaurant within a Restaurant, and so many others.

It goes back to the idea hinted at throughout Tennyson's Idylls of the King: that of Arthur and Camelot's nonexistence. It is this absence of historicity that makes Arthur—not Richard the Lionhearted—England's enduring image of king.

In other words, anyone looking for an underlying principle in any of this will be disappointed. There is no principle; there's only what comes after. That's why we're always dodging, refusing to go on record, why every narrator is untrustworthy, etc. We're hinting at an absence, a lack. We're trying to get people to stumble across the event horizon of a black hole.

This isn't to say that I don't love all the ideas. I love Liza's zine idea. (I wish we could somehow mass produce “Cartography of the Mind”!) I love Will's podcast idea. I love Nick's journalistic idea. I love the recording idea. I'd love to do as many of those things as possible. That said, I also love Joe's documentary-footage-on-a-dead-computer idea.

Because historicity destroys legend!

Myth of Sizzliphus

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.

New Pathways

The following is an email sent from Joe to Will and Art on 31 March 2016.

Will: Though I always knew it would be true, I must say I'm relieved you don't see my loss of Catholicism as creating a chasm too wide for us to bridge. I know what you mean by not having a reference point that would help you understand my situation, and me yours. It bothers me, but that's one of the reasons why I want to keep talking with you and Art. I'm trying to be methodical and accurate in my description of this "loss of faith"—even that phrase isn't right. Your description of Sartre likely approximates the truth. And you're right, it isn't a mystical atheism. Nothing in Greene gets at this—trust me, I checked. Negation is the right method here: I know what the loss of faith is not. And it is decidedly not John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. There's no embrace for which I yearn.

I've changed so significantly in the past two years—in many more ways than one—I feel a strong urge, as a necessity, to go "home," to square one, to where I started before everything changed. Your friendship and mentorship has meant more to me than you can know, and in many ways is my mental home. You gave me many of the terms by which I think and write. 

It's funny, because you did teach me to think, and because you provided me with certain habits of mind that burned new pathways in my neural framework—that got me through college, that got me the job I have, that got me into grad schools—I must infer and really do feel that my thinking about God was influenced by you, as well as my thinking about the very atheism that has taken the place of my former belief. Your mentorship laid the foundation for a lot that goes on in my mental world—the stuff you surely would have intended, and the stuff you maybe wouldn't have, or at least the stuff that might have given you pause. Anyway, I'm excited and anxious to see you soon.

Art: I'd have no problem posting these wherever, and certainly have no problem with anyone in the group reading them. I'm honored (and a little surprised!) that you'd like to keep reading, and that you think others would as well.

I've been trying to write about this for the past two years.The big shift in me, the loss of faith, happened or at least was catalyzed when I went to India two years ago. A lot happened there, both on the streets of New Delhi and in the desert mountains of Leh, a city in the Himalayas, and I've been trying to capture it. The sights and sounds and smells of India are inextricably bound up with the contours of my own spiritual story. But I've never trusted anything I've put on paper about it. Now, for some reason, I feel like I can finally write about India and everything that happened after. I'm hoping our emails can provide some of the foundation for that. And, along the way, I'm hoping you and Will can read what I write and respond. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Polishing the Turd of Nihilism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.

Camus in Stockholm

One thing I have been wondering about the project is why the French matter so much to it.

In my mind, they matter because the project needs to take on the philosophies of our age and expose their limits. Graham Greene nailed this approach in The Power and the Glory: a very weak, broken, and ineffective priest fizzles out and a noble, hard-working atheist lieutenant triumphs, and yet the triumph is empty and everything the priest stood for lives on or is resurrected in others.

I've come to see Arthur as this triumph of the Church, a type of lodestone of the Church. In and of himself we see both beauty and failure. His perfection doesn't lead anybody anywhere; his brokenness does, because the brokenness is completed by Christ. On the other hand, Farthington and Steffi are obsessed with perfect systems--the ultimate manipulations or the fruition of grand ideologies.

Somewhere in between are the French, who I think are about polishing the turd of nihilism. Camus and Sartre try to give us some sort of way to be Christian without Christ. Baudrillard and Derrida delight in exposing the limits of language. There's a poetry and a beauty to what they write, but with the former, I see misplaced faith in the lack of God, and in the latter, I realize I'm not chasing shadows of truth, just shadows of shadows of shadows. Of course, I'm not well-read enough in any of them, but out of all of them, Camus is the only one who holds my attention for long. I worry about things that spark my intellect without engaging my soul; I prefer the combination of the two.

And really, I worry that our project gets mired down in confronting these philosophies and that we don't direct enough energy toward its core, which in my eyes is evangelization. We have written far more criticism about the project than we have created the project itself, or rather, somehow the criticism has become the project itself!

We have a lot about exposing the limits of the world, but not enough drawing people toward the beauty of God. Perhaps I'm blaming French philosophy for this effect because it is the effect French philosophy has on me.

Yah Mo Be There

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



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

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

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

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

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

Have we unconsciously reincarnated this wandering mongrel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surging Up in the World

The following is an excerpt of a 20 July 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Jean-Paul Sartre in Venice

Will:

So you mean Arthur White the project, the world Arthur White inhabits--postmodernism, basically--not Arthur White the character? 

Your ideas about cloning in place of fertility remind me of one of my favorite archetypes: Frankenstein (played by Will Witkowski, Farthington, and Steffi Humboldt).

Art:

I do in fact mean Arthur White the character (and the other characters for that matter), who proceeds through something like Baudrillard's sign-order system toward eventual disintegration, a perversion of the Christian/Plotinian process, which instead radiates out from center to final and definitive fulfillment. 

I've just been contemplating the way in which this perverse radiation of identity becomes progressively more false with each iteration. And yes, it's very Frankenstein's monster. 

• First, there's just me at the center of this circle of identity, a confluence of a lot of crazy, improbable stuff 

• Then, I'm named. A lot of allusions and appropriations in that name. Overall, pretty good considering how much identity needed to be straddled; it's appropriately cacophonous, schizophrenic, unpronounceable. 

• Then, there's the Sartrean surging up in the world and defining myself: inclinations, affinities, traits. Some aspects get promoted and amplified such as spirituality, music, Italianness; others are downplayed or hidden. Also at this stage, there's the conscious appropriation/incorporation of aspects of other people's identities. 

• Then, there's these songs that I wrote, a further promotion and amplification of aspects of my personality at the expense of others. More incorporation of others' identity here as well. 

• Then, there's the whole story of Arthur White, which in some cases interpenetrates and/or precedes the previous step, the main idea being that Arthur is a spiritual and musical prodigy. More incorporation of others' identities here as well. 

• Then, there's all the radiations that occur thereafter: performances, posting, reposting, retweeting, etc. Also any interpretive meanings added by others (first by you all and then anyone else thereafter). Hell is other people, Allison?

I'm saying that there's something in this radiation of identity--going from original to faithful reflection to masking to pure simulation--that everyone experiences. I don't think the radiation itself is what is maleficent. But if God is not part of this process, then the process tends toward total disintegration: becoming a bloated, empty red giant that inevitably collapses in on itself. I guess that collapsing can be seen as a kind of reintegration, but not the kind you want. 

If, however, God is at the beginning, middle, and end of this process, then my radiation occurs in a fundamentally different way. I radiate out toward fulfillment without denaturing myself in the process. I radiate because it's in my nature to radiate, like God radiates without compromising His oneness. Luckily for me, God can break in at any point in this process. 

Incidentally, this radiation could also be seen from a more benign McLuhanesque perspective, in which we merely "caress" and make art of the mundane materials of a previous stage (the 70's, but also progressing from one bullet point to the next).