The Proverbial Pebble

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 19 December 2015.

Slender Man

I had a few statements and questions in these few moments watching the boulder roll down the hill.

Nick:

I just wanted to formally welcome you to the fold or family or friendship or whatever it is. Will shared your idea with me and I think it's a great one. I only hope we can give you enough raw material for you to move forward with. At any rate, please share any links to your alt-monthly column. And feel free to chime in as little or as much as you want. I'm wondering if I can use any of your past and future communications for the blog as well, inserting you into the collapsed feedback loop of the project as it were. I like your idea for a character—another character attempting to reframe or rationalize or represent the project. A New Journalism-style journalist might have more tools with which to do that. I'm thinking The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test might be the best model in that some subjective disorientation will be critical to the accuracy of your reports. I'd love to see what that looks like, but I assume you might be waiting on an actual recording. As you probably already know, though, one of the main motifs of the project are the empty frames within frames, that is, the idea of talking about something that may or may not even exist. I'd love for something to exist, but I'm no longer counting on that happening. Another interesting possibility is how talking about something actually brings it into existence, as in Slender Man. Regardless, it's not a great idea to wait for the proverbial pebble to drop.

Will:

I've been thinking that it might be nice for us to actually get together at some point prior to going to recording. I know we've accepted the swaddled/crucified existence of the distance between us, but could we start planning a "working weekend" of some kind? This may sound overbold, but I'm just going to put it out there: it'd be great to come up for 2-3 days and pound things out in your basement. You could even be gone if you have some kind of job in the summer, but I could work on stuff and we could run through it together at some point during the day or night, hammering out exactly what we're going to play. Some of these songs I'd like to workshop with you somewhat more, not just go back and forth like we have been. Ideally, I'd just like to hang out, work on stuff for the recording, and maybe do a few fun things at night. We could make it double duty and try to have a show during that same time. The problem with that is that it will probably take away from the recording work, which I consider to be the most important, most neglected aspect of our project (and I understand there are many neglected aspects of our project). We could alter things such that I camp out or sleep on a park bench at night. I'd like to come away from that trip with a solid spine of each song. Everyone would walk into the studio ready to play their exact part. Long story short, we could save a lot of money down the line with the coordination the aforementioned workdays would provide.

Farthington's Voicemail: through April 1st processed

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.

 11/20/15 4:44 PM 3 months ago (910-541-3466)

Hey, so we say that this is one step beyond love lily it's variance. You know maybe the the the Madman the the person is Insane was the prophet of this coming arrow where we are the image of the symbol or the sign would become more real than reality It's Ralph and that the reality which day. So that's the world and let's show Lazarus junior fine since so and then it's it's I mean potentially. Even more just tripping when something. Get out that really shouldn't exist. Cakes for and I'm reminded of the whole creepypasta Slenderman Phenomenon where by you know someone kind of makes this off makes it up, and then I'll just you know it and then kind of through April 1st processed. That that Artist becomes reality and maybe even maybe even a greater kind of reality Tell you know and and I think this is I'm feeling ideal this place and I think a lot of people feel this bye. Just driving around right now and being a flag at half past seems like every single day flag fan, and you we get into wondering. What is the flag at half-mast? And ever since 9:05. I think thank you x x I have finance class started flying at half past all the time or you know fairly often where you don't even know what it is that we just point help of points does flag buying it have passed actually drive whatever the cast your teams and so the black find a half mast and knows why it was. You know lowered. But you know it creates if you pastor free. And so I think that one of the things is dramatize Bye Joe Lazarus junior Confronting his clone Joseph flat surface the 3rd.

Old Habits Die Hard

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 7 September 2015.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, 10 May 1813

Here are the words to "Old Habits."

As always, feel free to change them. The only thing essential to the song is the idea that the song is cyclical--it needs to end where it begins. I can't remember if I told you, but it seems especially fitting now--the lyrics are based on a chain email that went around a lot during the Bush years. I'm not sure why it's less popular under Obama, but I'm sure it's his fault. Thanks, Obama.

Anyway, it's based on a cool theory that has been misattributed since the days of print. I've attached a Snopes article on it; they seem to have cut their research into the history of the piece's publication beyond the last few decades. It seems fitting in the context of the album and the project that the song features the wisdom of a made-up person that has been passed down for at least two hundred years without ever properly citing any sources. Ostensibly, it gets passed down because people remember that one newspaper article they read, which turns into that one radio story they heard, which becomes that one magazine article they can't find, etc. Maybe Slender Man wrote it originally.

Here's another exposé with more of the older history.

Old Habits Die Hard

Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray
Found the strength
To break free
Forged a path
Of liberty
Grew our home
Our way of life
Forgot the days
Of pain and strife
When others fell
We let them be
They didn’t work
As hard as we

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

And then the bills
Kept rolling in
We’d lost our sense
Of discipline
We looked for help
At any price
Easily
Absorbed advice

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

For anything
We’d get for free
Relinquished our
Autonomy
Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray

Old habits die hard. x 4

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?

The Happy Heart is True

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 20 May 2015.

The Virgin Mary from the Ghent Altarpiece, 1432 by Jan van Eyck

Brief, bright new thread...

You're going to like this, you've been waiting for this. With all of that compellingly creepy stuff, how can God possibly win out? How can Christ possibly win out? How can the Blessed Virgin Mary possibly win out?

O, so definitively... So definitive is their victory.

Not going to fully flesh any of this out, but this thought has invigorated me.

We've had this conversation before: surely Christian art will never again have relevance, in part because its reliance on the deus ex machina.

First of all, how non-postmodern to say "never"!

Second of all, our this God isn't in a machine. Our God is the CREATOR OF EVERYTHING. Our God is CREATOR.

Aristotle said the poet should always "seek what is necessary or probable"

so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this incident happen after that one. It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance, as in the Medea and in the passage about sailing home in the Iliad. A contrivance must be used for matters outside the drama — either previous events which are beyond human knowledge, or later ones that need to be foretold or announced. For we grant that the gods can see everything. There should be nothing improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy, e.g., that in Sophocles' Oedipus.

And yes, on the human plane that makes sense to a certain degree. But here's the rub: our God is different than the gods of Euripides. And one of the places we see that most clearly is in the gratuitous designation of Mary as Mediatrix.

Check out this section from Lumen Gentium:

III. On the Blessed Virgin and the Church

60. There is but one Mediator as we know from the words of the apostle, "for there is one God and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a redemption for all".(298) The maternal duty of Mary toward men in no wise obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows His power. For all the salvific influence of the Blessed Virgin on men originates, not from some inner necessity, but from the divine pleasure. It flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on His mediation, depends entirely on it and draws all its power from it. In no way does it impede, but rather does it foster the immediate union of the faithful with Christ.

The italicized portion is mainly what I wanted you all to see, but it's all so beautiful and good I can't bring myself to excerpt. God as CREATOR can't be constrained by "what is necessary or probable"! That italicized phrase, if you can momentarily step outside your cradle Catholic mind, is utterly MIND BLOWING. I think we often think of God as operating from necessity: God would necessarily be one, would necessarily be omnipotent, would necessarily be good, etc. But we sometimes don't realize that there is this peerless CREATOR who moves things, who makes things, who speaks things into being. Not some Plotinian god who helplessly radiates, but a Being who possesses a degree of creative agency utterly unimaginable to us.

And so we go beyond the Sabbath to the Lord's Day
And so we go beyond death and Purgatory and Halloween to All Saints' Day

New wine in new wine skins, son!

And you can see why saints like St. Brigid have been inebriated by this riotous superfluity:

I should like a great lake of beer to give to God.
I should like the angels of Heaven to be tippling there for all eternity.
I should like the men of Heaven to live with me, to dance and sing.
If they wanted I’d put at their disposal vats of suffering
White cups of love I’d give them with a heart and a half.
Sweet pitchers of mercy I’d offer to every man.
I’d make heaven a cheerful spot,
Because the happy heart is true.
I’d make men happy for their own sakes.
I should like Jesus to be there too.
I’d like the people of heaven to gather from all the parishes around.
I’d give a special welcome to the women,
the three Marys of great renown.
I’d sit with the men, the women of God,
There by the great lake of beer
We’d be drinking good health forever,
And every drop would be a prayer.

And God can do creepypasta too. Just read about the Three Secrets of Fatima. Let Slender Man wave his octopus arms around the playground.

Because the happy heart is true.

A Permeating Presence (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 20 May 2015.



Relating back to the initiating artist’s presence in the project, I don't think it inhibits its growth.

Contrarily, I think it is this permeation of presence that guarantees its growth. There’s a lot of speculation, which you know if you read the article I sent, that the anonymous Kanye Quest gamer who uploaded the Pastebin was either the game developer or an Ascensionist.

Why? To become part of the story.
Why? To bring awareness to the story.
Why? To only tell part of a story bound to enrapture many with its creepiness, mysteriousness, and incompletion.

(Think Slender Man's blank face, which alone encourages infinite amounts of interpretation. Would the manifestation of the Sea Devil costume ultimately close this channel for open interpretation? Whereas seeing was once believing, in the age of simulacra we only have to believe in something to see it. So, like Slender Man, the more ambiguous Farthington is, the more we believe in his existence. The more we believe in his existence, the more we see him. Simulacrum precedes reality, yes, but it must also remain simulacrum which must remain reality.)

None of the aforementioned speculation comes as a surprise, of course, but what I’m fascinated by is the extension of this speculation from the first Pastebin that was posted "anonymously" to every subsequent article, comment, video, etc. The digital footprint is the same, some claim.  If discovered too early, this can inhibit the story's growth, yes. After a certain point, however, it really doesn’t matter. The story has already become bigger than the storyteller, and is no longer the storyteller’s to tell. It is now ours to do with it what we want, to take it where we want it to go. Eventually it becomes bigger than us even, and goes where it wants to, heedless to our instructions. The initiating artist then not only provided us with road signs leading us to what McLuhan calls the “roads and canals” of modern media ("make happen agents") but our messenger has also become our partial guide through the roads and canals. I think, were the initiating artist to recede too quickly once the others begin to exceed, the others would go wayward and the story’s survivability would be doomed.

This reminds me, have any of you seen The Institute? How about Faults?

I think both personify this notion.

A Permeating Presence (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 20 May 2015.



What an interesting phenomenon that Slender Man is.

Over the past couple of years, many of my students have been inhabitants of the Slenderverse. It was interesting to witness some of their involvement in this world dwindle into nothingness following the Wisconsin tragedy. It was equally as interesting, albeit more horrifying, to witness some of their involvements deepen post-pronouncement.

(Does this validate the Tulpa Theory? Can we kill Slender Man simply by killing our thoughts of him? Or does he operate on some sort of quantum level? Is he still there even when we can't see him? Has the story become bigger than the storyteller(s)?)

It is perhaps more interesting to me now as I sit here and relate all of these stored memories to everything we’ve been talking about.

Art, I'm with you. There’s something very Baudrillardian about Slender Man’s proxies acting out their hyperrealities in "reality," of their human experience not becoming simulated but rather being a simulation of reality. I fear we're treading dangerously close to Baudrillard's fourth stage of the sign-order system. Some would even argue that we’re already living in it. Do you think these girls were just plain maladjusted and therefore were predisposed for "possession," or do you think they were unable to foresee the repercussions that would arise in the transference of their digital fantasies in the realm of reality because their sign "has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is its own pure simulacrum"? Have any of you seen the film Heavenly Creatures? Perhaps the Slenderverse was their Fourth World.

In response to your first message, I partially agree that the knowable presence of a project’s initiating artists can suffocate the project’s aura (and subsequently its survivability). However, I also believe the initiating artist is frequently the one who helps catalyze the progression of the story from the constructed identity of an anonymous observer. Someone relatable, someone detached, someone with similar levels of separation from the project as the rest of us.

So, the initiating artist is there with a permeating presence, (s/)he just chooses (wisely) to stay concealed behind the curtain until the final scene. Sometimes (s/)he never emerges at all. Sometimes we assume the process was organic. Sometimes it was really just an unlabeled Genetically Modified Organism, creating a schism between what we think we are consuming and what we are actually consuming.  

Art, this goes back to the e-mail I sent you in regards to DeLillo and the postmodern propensity toward anti-reality, toward the blind acceptance of artifice as reality. Unless we diligently peel off the layers upon layers of gleaming, plastic packaging we’ll never know what they’re hiding at their core. However, what are we to do when there is no core, only endless layers of more synthetic packaging? Do we bemoan the lack of objectivity or do we embrace the abundance of subjectivity? Is all of this fruitless to even wonder about since there is no fruit, just a representation of the fruit?

The Pure Simulation of Farthington

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 19 May 2015.

Jean Baudrillard lecturing at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Is it at all plausible that this is the kind of existence Carlton Farthington has? I mean, surely someone would have to have met him face to face right? Someone would have verified at least the slightest shred of his existence? Or is this what Steffi discovers?

Now, that doesn't mean that Farthington wouldn't have an effect on his environment, just as Slender Man supposedly led two teen girls to stab their classmate 19 times. This is very Baudrillard, in which simulcra now precedes the reality. So, it's not that Farthington doesn't exist, it's just that he has come to exist through this postmodern mechanism. Perhaps there was the slightest of originals on which Farthington was based. Perhaps this was some actual person who someone met at some point. That person could have died or just disappeared into a normal life somewhere in the world. Or never existed. Or was cobbled together from multiple people. It really doesn't matter.

Regardless, it is the pure simulation of Farthington that now predominates, that grows ever stronger, and that impacts the lives of his followers. Maybe one or more people actually occupy this meme for a time. Maybe an actual demon is summoned by the clearing that is created. It's not implausible that this is what happened in the Slender Man case.

I have been thinking about how much fodder for creepypasta we have!

Doesn't it strike you as the slightest bit strange that on November 1, 2014, I began communicating solely from my carltonfarthington account? And that our first show since then was at All Saints Church?

Don't want to scare anyone, but with 4 people, we do technically have enough for a horror story.

What would be terrifying, Liza, is if you actually went all the way through with creating the Farthington outfit. At that point, someone or something could occupy that space.

That is why The Benefactor is so nefarious. Yes, we'd love to have things funded to the maximum, but what happens when an idea like this starts to exist in space and time? Seems like #1 on a created thing's list is to seek out its creator. To what extent is creating a costume an act of invocation? Do we create that being or just give it a place to manifest? Alternatively, is that being planting this idea in our heads, trying to get us to give it a place to manifest itself? At that point, we will have served our purpose and will likely be summarily dispatched. Or possessed. Or who knows, maybe it will just leave us alone. Or nothing will happen at all.

Another similar move would be to find out where the nearest buried stream is. Is there one that flows through your neighborhood, under your school, under your house? What's the nearest one? Is there a point of access to that underground network somewhere in your basement?

Whatever the case may be don't give out any addresses, don't ever give out your address over email!