Farthington's Voicemail: Dad Mesa center

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 4:36 PM 3 months ago (910-541-3466)

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The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.

All Things New

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Also, I was trying to figure out in the last show why Arthur still cares about Carlton Farthington or Iceland.  I was content with the idea that we don't really know the nature of Arthur's mission right now, that it is inscrutable and that hearing the beauty of his music and seeing him come back into his powers would make more sense than some logical explanation for his behavior.

But in light of "Behold, I make all things new," maybe the idea is that Arthur is part of God's plan in transforming everything Farthington set in motion, everything the lodestone set in motion. In this regard, this intuition I've had that Arthur becomes the new lodestone makes sense. It also fits the Arthurian notion, that Arthur isn't so much a heroic protagonist as the figure around whom things happen. Maybe recreating the Iceland concert heralds "all things new" when the original concert heralded "turbulent reversals."

As far as the morality play goes, here is the closest thing I see to an allegorical structure.  Of course, we don't have simple allegory and shouldn't, but whatever...I'll just say what's on my mind.

• Arthur:  the herald of "all things new"
• Stan, Will:  the rise and fall of the American Dream
• Farthington:  science, psychology, and media ecology as false religions
• Steffi:  digital existence and postmodern nihilism
• The Benefactor/Victoria Woolf/Leif Erikson's sister/the lodestone: the hold and resurgence of myth and paganism

Back to Arthur--some priest friends of mine have explored the idea privately (they are worried this might not be theologically accurate, but it seems pretty valid) that Christ seems to say over and over again that he prefers repentant sinners to people who have never fallen in the face of sin. It would probably make sense that if Arthur is the herald of All Things New, that he himself must walk a path of being made new, that his youth should be full of promise and blessing, and that all that promise and blessing must be smashed through his own failures and the sins of his people and culture. Then he should be brought to glory through Christ, not through some modern notion of "getting back on track" or "being his best self."

A transformation in Arthur, then, would not so much be about getting his act together, but in getting a glimpse behind the curtain that God has ordained his life to be a witness. In this regard, we end up with the existentialist issue with the absurd, which is why we must engage the French (and Kierkegaard and the Russians and Nietzsche of course).  We also engage Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory: the notion that evil is so evil that good seems to be a lie, and good is so good that evil seems to be a mistake, and the notion that even a dark, fizzling out world can be the shadow of a glorious divine plan beyond our comprehension.

This is a completely messed up thought, but we might be on the verge of making the What's Going On of our age!  How crazy that this is the path that may lead us there.  It absolutely fits.

The Perils of Supernatural Evil

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

Pan Twardowski and the Devil by Michał Elwiro Andriolli

Thanks, Art! That solves a lot for me. A few things come to mind. One is that the story is much darker than I thought. I've focused on Arthur's torment in the face of a mankind who has eradicated any context for appreciating a mystic from contemporary life, and I've ignored the perils of supernatural evil, other than to think about Stan in hell and several characters slouching toward it through bad choices.

Secondly, in thinking of Farthington as a scientist, I've imagined him more and more as an eccentric figure from Victorian or Edwardian science fiction, but I suppose he should be more like a Frankenstein, Faustus, or Von Doom--someone who couples his scientific pursuits with an interest in the arcane and occult--he's an alchemist as much as a scientist.

Finally, I don't think we've imagined an Arthur whose soul has become more wholly spiritual well enough yet. We know patients and staff at the hospital turn to him. We know he gets up on pillars. If Will's ex-girlfriend Linda is still in the story, we know she is a nun because of Arthur. We know Will will eventually repent the American Dream and become a monk or something because of Arthur. We know the restaged concert for Iceland has something to do with Arthur's transformation. We know Arthur has a vision of an apocalypse that requires Farthington, a submarine, and a hippie maiden throwing a guitar into a volcano in Iceland. And I think on some level, we know the story doesn't end, but it's also important to our quest to make Catholic art that the beauty and glory of God working through Arthur is cohesive enough to evangelize the audience.

My Mind Detaches From My Ass and Floats Away (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of a 7 December 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.


"Lafayette Park Detroit redevelopment over Black Bottom" by Mike Russell - I (Mike Russell) created this work entirely by myself. Transferred from en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The way I see it, it's not like we haven't addressed the topic of the Witkowski family's treatment of racial issues...maybe just that we haven't addressed them enough. I think these two incredible miscarriages of moral justice (which are made even worse by the fact that, at least in Ferguson, no laws were broken by the policeman: all a policeman has to do is say he felt his life was in danger to justify lethal force and he can kill anyone he wants) are important reminders not to drop the ball on portraying the casual racism of the Witkowskis.

I think what is especially relevant about the Witkowskis is that they are guilty of the same obstacle to a just society that so many contemporary white Americans are. Their problem isn't that they harbor any sort of hatred toward African Americans. Stan and Will see themselves as sympathetic, I'm sure, coming from a disenfranchised background. I was watching a documentary on James Brown that touched on his support of Nixon, and as an immigrant family, they would probably be on board with that: the idea of economic self-determinism. They would probably help people pull themselves up by their bootstraps here and there, and probably be a little impatient with anybody who doesn't fight against the odds. I don't think they'd fall prey to that paternalistic racism of the loving slave master, really.

And Arthur obviously loves black culture and doesn't tend to see reality the way most people do; he'd be largely oblivious to the politics of race. Who knows what he even sees. I imagine he sees angels and demons, he probably sees auras and the ultraviolet spectrum, too.  It's not that he's color blind, it's that he sees very different colors.  He'd probably see people by their proximity to hell and heaven or something like that.

Anyway, I think the problem the Witkowskis reflect about white America is that institutionalized racism doesn't show up on their radar. It's so easy for white Americans to believe that, since they don't bear any racist sentiments, their little corner of the world has moved past racism and all that is left is for the remaining racist hearts of the world to change. This sense that the world has improved blinds them to the fact that most of the economic and political and a significant chunk of the social structures of racism are still intact and functioning very well to benefit white people and disenfranchise black people.

The problem isn't just a matter of hearts.

The problem with Stan and Will is that their eyes are on money. They view earning money as something that helps everybody: their employees, their musicians, the women in their lives who handle the charity, the promotion of black culture through music, the elevation of the disenfranchised, etc. Paving over Detroit makes money for people and protects the family. Stan doesn't see what paving over Black Bottom or cutting neighborhoods in half like the Chrysler Freeway did, or if he does, he only sees the issues on a very superficial level: people will adapt and the economic improvement will more than make up for the inconvenience.

We have similar issues with Will. If everything goes according to plan, he will help turn all of the musicians who work with Arthur into famous millionaires. How could anyone challenge his treatment of black musicians, and how could it be bad for white musicians to help build markets for black musicians? The problem is not his vision, according to Will. It's that Arthur keeps on screwing everything up, which means the tours are never supported by new records, the recording costs are never recouped, the corporation is always broke, and the band rarely gets paid and ends up being severely exploited.

Cultural Autism

The following is an excerpt a 4 September 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust

Art:

A lot of stuff coming together in those last few emails. Some paired motifs like pillars and the Tower of Babel. 

I like the head on a stake image. If I can go pagan a little here, the head on the pike also conjures up Pentheus. When you look at the more proximate cause of why Detroit went down, it was people trying impose order--literally in the form of concrete--over the chaotic, creative substratum embodied most fully by Black Bottom. 

Can we put Stan at the center of the collective punishment Detroit and its suburbs suffer? 

Do Arthur and Will have a chance to make it right? Does Arthur, cursed by many things, now have the power to convey divine benefits such that--in an Oedipus at Colonus-like reversal--everyone loves him and wants to claim him? 

Seems like Detroit can also be seen as a particularly Yeatsian apocalypse with its ever "widening gyre" and "the center cannot hold." And what's the eschatological ending there? Well, either heat death, big rip, or big crunch. 

I like all the anti- stuff as well. Seems to suggest that worldly collapse is necessary before spiritual rebirth and growth can occur. That seems to work with Detroit as well. 

I've got to go! You're doing this conversation much more justice!

Will:

We don't need a literal pillar, although I wouldn't rule one out. 

I'm also wondering if we can treat the "ruins" in a way that runs counter to the popular images of ruins. There's plenty of bland, boring stuff in the fallen areas of Detroit. And even though the symbol of vegetation is cliché, it doesn't seem to be that common of a visual trope in ruin porn. It would be strange to see Witkowski and Sons Cement evoking the Shire. 

Along a related thread, I've been thinking about a recent development in postmodern analysis: cultural autism.  Don DeLillo's Point Omega deals with this issue in several ways; it also deals with the issue of the American wasteland--postmodernism becoming a desert and people devolving into stones. People may read Arthur as autistic rather than as a mystic, but there is a bit of cultural autism at work in many of our characters: a type of preoccupation with personal agendas that are out of joint with a healthy social fabric. The notion of cultural autism is that the godly amounts of power technology provides is turning us all into little gods in uninhabited universes. We are desolate because we sculpt worlds for ourselves that aren't inhabited by others. The characters in Point Omega can be near each other and try to simulate vague ancestral memories of familial and romantic relationships, but there is no heart in any of it; things like divorce roll in like the the tide, barely worthy of notice. 

Another thing worthy of notice is another DeLilloish thing: postmodern time. He has been really preoccupied with the shift in our perceptions of time at least since Cosmopolis. Basically, satellite and digital culture have uprooted us from any traditional human sense of time in ways that dwarf the impact of the clock on human existence.

I love looking at the literal construction of Detroit in symbolic ways. My feeling is that Detroit is basically Rome and that its problem is not that other cities learned how to be flexible and Detroit biffed it; it's that Detroit collapsed first, and the seeds of its collapse are germinating in all cities. To also go pagan, maybe the country offers up Detroit to an angry destroyer god to spare New York, Chicago, and LA.

Epitome of the American Dream

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 5 July 2014.

I wonder if Stan could have been accused of murder in the cement burial of a worker (or someone else--Jimmy Hoffa?).

A line of grates cover the outflow of Savoyard Creek

And the Witkowski name--previously an irreproachable pillar of the community, an epitome of the American Dream--was suffering. This is all during the time of the riots, so it could be suffering for multiple reasons (and I think you've already mentioned that is was, even among the members of the Polish community).

Will always thought his father had achieved definitive success, that his father had paid all the appropriate dues and that his legacy was therefore assured inside the American "covenant."

Maybe Stan was killed before a verdict was pronounced.

But this would definitely set Will in motion, attempting to achieve the decisive ascendency owed his family by the American Dream--leveraging everything, sacrificing everything, risking everything. He is kind of like "Happy" at the end of Death of a Salesman speaking of his father: "He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have--to come out the number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I'm gonna win it for him."

Depending on the circumstances surrounding the murder and the victim, I like Stan ending up in the Savoyard Creek, which was buried as a sewer in 1836, became Black Bottom, and then was partially paved over by I-375. I'm sure there is still a canal in Detroit's sewer system that follows its flow. These primordial rivers persist despite the concrete.

Here's the video about the woman who gives tours of Detroit's buried rivers. Also, check out these pictures of other rivers that have been forced underground due to the dominant concrete.



Pretty spooky!

Plenty of Room for Mafia Ties

The following is an excerpt of a 5 July 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Why does Will want to "assert the family name"?  

Is it a situation like The Wild Duck in which Hjalmar's dad was convicted of a crime that brought shame to the family name (whereas Old Werle, that perv, goes free)? Plus, Will changes the family name! 

from Ingmar Bergman's 1972 production of The Wild Duck

Names and renaming are important in this story, but I don't see the sufficient motive for Will Witkowski other than the usual desire to be famous idea. This might be an area to shore up somewhat. In The Wild Duck, Hjalmar was going to reveal his great invention (or his "life lie" as Relling puts it) and bring honor back to his family name--he wasn't just desiring fame for the usual reason. 

I really think this story has some connections to The Wild Duck, by the way. I'm afraid to say I identify far too much with Hjalmar--such a simultaneously pitiful and unlikeable character!

Will:

I just see asserting the family name as being tied to the American Dream.   

Polish people aren't known for wanting much more than a decent factory job out of America, but Stan is one of those guys who has to evangelize the gospel of the self-made man.  Supposedly my family in the old world were an unimpressive lot: a few prostitutes here and there even, but mostly guys who didn't want to be cannon fodder in the Russian Army.   

I'm not trying to compare the plight of Polish immigrants to the plight of African Americans, but I think of the black doctor in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter who is constantly infuriated that the black people dream what he believes are such feeble dreams. That's Stan. Will totally shares his dad's worldview and feels compelled to do better than the previous generation..a key part of the dream. And he wants to be self-made as well, which means making it in the music business instead of cement, even though he's good at cement. 

The other part of the dream is branding. Everything is about branding. Of course, Art is pretty representative of the majority of Poles, who in my experience tend not to be particularly materialistic or power hungry. I don't think we necessarily need some Old World ghost in the closet: the emptiness of the closet would be both a source of shame and the freedom of a tabula rasa for Stan. And a landscape of cabbage, hard work, forced military service for the Russians, and poverty accepted with happy songs, dances, and ritual prayers would make him hungry for modern affluence in the New World. 

Of course, if you are okay with it, there's plenty of room for him to build mafia ties.

A False Vision of God

The following is excerpted from the June 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Art:

Saint Augustine in his Study by Botticelli

I like that last part about the "blade of grass." 

That's C.S. Lewis artistically rendering the Augustinian doctrine of evil not having being in the usual sense. Elsewhere, Lewis describes the damned soul as being "nearly nothing." Heaven is literally experiencing the Source of Being in the fullest possible way. So it would be a superabundant, unexcelled experience of being. Hell, since it is the experience of being cut off from the Source of Being, must be as close to nonexistence as is possible for created beings with immortal souls.

The fact that Lena made Will pledge to make Arthur famous on her deathbed makes it a no-brainer that she's going to Purgatory at best. 

Saints don't say those sorts of things!

Will:

True. 

I think what makes Lena seem saintly to a modern audience is that she's always doing good things. But, then again, she's an old-world Catholic. She might have more fear of God than an all-consuming love of Him. 

She might think that she's protecting the family from its wealth through her acts of charity. That fear would be consistent with a false vision of God as a scale measurer, a pretty common misconception. Still, I think she genuinely loves the poor and sees Christ in them, although not perfectly or mystically. Perhaps she does it because of her own childhood poverty. So this loving the person of Christ in the poor keeps her from going to Hell, while her bargaining and manipulating is what needs to be burnt off on Purgatory. 

Although the family doesn't really need Arthur to become a star for financial reasons, maybe she also wants to protect Arthur from the bullies or wants him to show the world. 

Or maybe she has been partially converted to the gospel of the American Dream as preached by Stan.

That Ocean of Flames

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

I guess I'm more cynical than you are (and impressed by the book I mentioned).

Last Judgment (detail) by Hans Memling

I would continue to consider the idea, though, from the artistic perspective. As I said, it has already figured prominently as a motif. One possibility would be that Arthur had a vision of his father and/or mother. One of the more disturbing visions that occurs again and again in Fr. Schouppe's book is when a friend or family member is seen in Hell's torment. Hell seems to be an all too common destination for people.

If this is true, many of us are in serious danger of experiencing something way, way, way more agonizing than anything on this earth and--oh yeah--for all eternity. Here's one from the book, which is highly readable due to it being more or less a catalogue of shocking accounts:

St. Peter Damian speaks of a worldling who lived only for amusement and pleasure. To no purpose was he advised to think of his soul; to no purpose was he warned that, by following the life of the wicked rich man, he should reach the same end; he continued his guilty life unto death. He had scarcely ceased to live when an anchorite (hermit) knew of his damnation. He saw him in the midst of a fiery pool; it was an immense pool like a sea, in which a great number of people, howling with despair, were plunged. They were striving to gain the shore, but it was guarded by pitiless dragons and demons, who prevented them from coming near it, and hurled them far back into that ocean of flames.

Could Stan Witkowski be in Hell? Perhaps Will has a vision of that down in the tunnels as he tries to retrace his steps and figure out who he killed. That could have some interesting resonances. We could create a Lazarus and the rich man type story, with the buried worker going to Heaven (not "Abraham's bosom" as in the original) and Stan Witkowski going to Hell. Could Stan be in Hell and Lena be in Purgatory, with Lena returning to warn Arthur about her deathbed pact with Will because, from her now-eternal perpective, she sees where it leads. I like at least one character to go Hell, and not just for being an out-and-out villain, like Farthington or perhaps Steffi. Perhaps Stan followed the American Dream straight to Hell.

In the book, the damned are able to do actual damage to the living. For example, one licentious man came back to a rich woman he had been flirting with and grabbed her wrist, burning it all the way down to the bone, such that she had to wear a wide bracelet the rest of her days. These damned are not trying to save anyone usually, they're just pissed as Hell (literally!).

As Miller puts it, "the possibility of victory must be present in tragedy." I think the inverse of that statement is also true: "the possibility of defeat must be present in comedy." As you've mentioned before, you want this to be a comedy, but we need some darker shadows to ground and provide relief for the redemptive elements.

Another Candidate for the Subterranean Beast?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 23 May 2014.

Construction of Chrysler Freeway through Black Bottom

I never answered your question about the symbolism of cement combining liquid and solid to become very solid. It definitely works. That's the point for me that it starts to become a loose symbol, where the resonances become too many to enumerate.

I don't know if this ever happens in real life, but I still like the idea of someone being buried in the cement--maybe someone insignificant to the story like a worker (black? white?). But maybe someone significant, like Stan Witkowski himself.

I feel this could be a can of worms worth opening.

If it were a worker, that could have some interesting implications. If it were a black worker, is that somehow emblematic of Detroit in general, or at least of race relations leading up to and after the race riot in 1967?

Concrete is so richly symbolic with its connection to the auto industry, to Henry Ford's vision of a car for everyone, to white flight, to the economic and cultural desertification of Detroit, to the Nietzschean ramifications of a water-based material that becomes sculptural (kind of like an Apollonian power grab).

Other thoughts:

• Detroit's sprawl has created something like a red giant that may someday collapse into a black hole (cf. description of Carlton Farthington in "A Higher Order of Creation (Part 3 of 3)")
• Could this buried character be a yet another candidate for the subterranean beast Farthington encounters? (cf. "What Happens After Iceland?")
• I love this tidbit from the wikipedia entry on Black Bottom: "Historically, this area was the source of the River Savoyard, which was buried as a sewer in 1836" 
• Check out this video about Detroit's "ghost rivers," including the River Savoyard

Ill-Advised Arrangement of Cement

The following is excerpted from a 15 May 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

What do you make of the Witkowski cement dynasty in this symbolism of land and water? We've got a substance that begins a liquid, becomes very solid, and washes all through Detroit, destroying neighborhoods and hastening Detroit's decline.

Art

I-75 and Ford Freeway Interchange in 1970, Detroit

Well, if they were involved in building the Chrysler Freeway (I-75 and I-375 through Detroit), they may have been the ones who paved over Black Bottom, originally named for its dark, fertile soil and for being the epicenter of black culture and music in the city of Detroit. 

This works out nearly perfectly for the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, by the way. Black Bottom is totally chthonic/ Dionysian and the impulse to destroy and pave it over in the 1960s was totally olympian/Apollonian. 

It's a complicated issue, but this act really went a long way toward hobbling black culture (and culture in general) in the city of Detroit. From what I've heard, Detroit's particular way of complying with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 more or less ensured that Detroit would never give its inhabitants an experience of true, vibrant urban living. That divided, piecemeal, culturally lifeless experience still persists to this day. And it's quite literally the ill-advised arrangement of cement that guarantees it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

This issue of race is an important one to bring up if our setting is Detroit. 

Isn't it interesting that Arthur White sings black music? Wouldn't it be interesting if his dad's company was the one who paved over Black Bottom? This all feeds into our motif of echoing or appropriating other people's content. Arthur White is not the real deal! Like all these other white wannabes--from Glenn Miller to the British Invasion to Michael McDonald to Rick Astley to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Eminem--no matter how good or bad they were, you have to feel more or less uncomfortable as you consider their success at parlaying another culture's riches into their own enrichment.

This is the exact subject I wanted to talk about next. We spent some time talking about the domination of men in our story--I think we need to continue with that, developing our female characters in the process. 

But no story about Detroit can be complete without a discussion of race.