This Irradiation of Identities

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 1 December 2015.

Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis by Henry Fuseli

Liza,

This is the most beautiful thing that has ever emerged from the primordial swamp of the project.

Quick take on one solitary question from your minor masterpiece: Yes, I do believe that Steffi, Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's and Leif Erickson's Sister are "the same person." Possibly incorporating aspects of you and/or Allison (no offense: Will and I became a Nietzschean dichotomy).

I put "the same person" in quotes because what Steffi has done is achieve indefinitude, the end goal of Knology and the process catalyzed by the Lodestone.

And no, I have never considered the Benefactor part of this irradiation of identities, although the fact that Will seems to think so makes me wonder. What Steffi achieves is the ability to engulf, usurp, subsume, sublate other identities into her all-comprehending framework. Eventually, even Farthington disappears in this way.

In that sense, she is Charybdis. In another sense, she is Scylla, in that she is endowed with these multiple heads or identities.

I always thought the the Benefactor was some kind of evil avuncular character.

Okay, I need about 5 weeks to process this. Wow.

The Global Village is Too Large

The following is an excerpt of an 10 November 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

Art:

McLuhan considered cultures with non-alphabetic languages, like the Chinese, to still be tribal. Alphabetic characters are, by the their very nature, devoid of meaning. Emojis show a return to non-alphabetic literacies. Memes are a similar development. The ascendancy of the Chinese and other cultures less removed from their tribal roots is another sign of the times. We shouldn't misinterpret the seeming uptick in oppression of these groups as a counterargument. It's a sign of a weakening, a waning. 

But I think it's more helpful to imagine this as the formation of one conflict-ridden tribe rather than the proliferation of many warring ones. That latter phenomenon I chalk up to the last gasps of the print paradigm. 

Then again, Ghengis Khan and Mao killed about 14 million a piece.

Will:

It makes sense that Steffi would see the possibility of the Internet making the whole world one tribe/cult. I think the reason the one tribe idea limps, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm taking this from McLuhan, is that the global village is too large for people to feel the intimacy of the global village. We can't have a multibillion-person village that works like a 300-person village. I can find my network of 300 like-minded people, though. 

You are right that he saw the electronic age as easternizing the west and westernizing the east. A thing that makes McLuhan misleading is that he tried to remove his feelings about technological advancement from his inventories. He wanted to say how things worked, not whether they were good or bad. In general, though, he preferred print culture to electronic culture. That didn't keep him from examining the dangers and benefits of both. In general, he said he was against all change, and that he wasn't an optimist or a pessimist but an apocalist—his hope was in the end of the world.

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.

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!!!

Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.

The Saline Avenger (Part 2 of 3)

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



So I've been wondering: who is the figure that will wreak vengeance on all of us? It can't be Carlton—he's too evil. Maybe suffering the fallout of colonialism would qualify him to play this role, but he's just not innocent enough. I don't think Steffi can do it either.

Then it occurred to me: I want to pattern our vengeful angel on Gianna Jessen. Watch this recent clip of her testifying before Congress.

Burned alive in the womb at 7 months, she survived and now is one of the most terrifying people I have ever heard speak. Regardless of your viewpoints on the topic of abortion, no one can say anything to Gianna Jessen. She has a carte blanche for her entire life. Truth be told, she impresses me as an extremely loving and forgiving person. But who would be more justified in killing everyone than an innocent who was burned alive for 18 hours and survived?

So who would this person be in the narrative? I think I have an idea.

It's Steffi's unborn child who Farthington, as part of his regimen of emptying his novices of all traces of identity, attempts to abort and discard in the tunnels. I'm not sure whose child it is: maybe Will's, maybe Farthington's, maybe someone else's. As we know, Will has gone down into the tunnels to kill Farthington at this point. In the chaos of that encounter, is the baby born alive and left in the tunnels? Who saves the child? I'd like to think it's Steffi, who with her now jawless, speechless mouth, raises the child in darkness.

Now, again, these ideas are all within the puerile Puritan tradition that, like the Socratic Euripides, requires a deus ex machina to resolve the entanglements of the plot. And as I've mentioned before, this kind of approach belies a latent atheism, a disbelief in the omnipotence of God. Thus, we need to help God. Like at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we have to help a rotting, moribund Grandpa kill Sally with a sledgehammer.

At some point, we should transition into the mature Catholic view, namely, that we don't need a deus ex machina when we have a Deum de Deo, one who gratuitously takes the punishment we deserve. And it is only when we refuse this grace that we implode in on ourselves and suffer the results of our sin: the collapsed reality of hell in which we become next to nothing.

We Go Medieval on the Seventies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.

Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.

Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.

We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."

Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.

At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.

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.

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.

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).

The Once and Future Child

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group 28 May 2015.

Dan Gilbert

Returning back to Arthur as representation of the children of the world for a moment, I see Arthur as the perfect foil for Farthington. As is perhaps the point.

On one hand, we have Farthington who is a sum of humanity, in a sense. However, he seems to represent the waste of abundance. Having no content of his own, his identity is constructed externally through his reposting, retweeting, and recycling. He's turning other people's intellectual commodities into garbage disguised as a commodity. While he's done no work of his own, he gets all of the worldly gain. Sounds like a lot of people I know.

On the other hand, we have Arthur. Similar to Farthington, Arthur too is merely a sum of all that is around him.  However, he seems to represent the abundance of waste.  Perhaps, as with all children, Arthur is even more moldable and bendable than Farthington. The difference between the two men is that Farthington externalizes the world around him with closed eyes while Arthur internalizes this world with the wide-eyes of a child.

I guess this makes him Arthur White: The Once and Future Child.

Just as Gilbert and other anti-democratic bullies want to exploit the children, Gilbert has plans to exploit Arthur whom he views as small, unimportant, and vulnerable. To Gilbert, Arthur has a purity that must be taken advantage of; he has a trust of fellow man that must be manipulated. So, of course, it only makes sense that the savage sisters, with their fierce motherly instincts, take Arthur in and protect him as though their own child. Seeing no threat in such a small and gentle being, Gilbert's doubt in Arthur is the catalyst for the crumbling of his empire.

Too bad for him. So it goes, Don Gilbert.

Or perhaps in exiting the inner-world and immersing himself once again into the outer-world, Arthur chalks his vision up to a hallucinatory side-effect of some pills some doctor makes him take to make him less crazy. Or, better yet, in telling his vision to his brother and Farthington, they force him to undergo more ECT. Though he sometimes has dreamlike flashbacks of his visit to this inner-world, the majority of his time there is shocked from his brain.

So it goes, Arthur White.

Frolicsome Fawn-Like Movements

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 28 May 2015.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

On the relationship between the savage sisters and Arthur White:

I agree--it seems an effective plot point for the sisters to take Arthur under their pixie sprite wings. Perhaps they interpret his ignorance of Farthington’s evil scheming as an innocence and purity seldom seen in man. To them, this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.

To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game.

Picture, if you will: the savage siren sisters lure Arthur in with their song. As with all invasive species to their natural habitat, the sisters’ intent is to destroy him before he, like his fellow outer-world inhabitants, desecrates the sanctity of their enchanted inner-world. Little do they know at this point, Arthur is not like his fellow man. Yet still, the sisters gleefully watch him disappear into the murky depths of their river.

While all who fell before him had ferociously struggled against the river’s current, however, Arthur neither flails nor flops. Instead, he placidly sinks to the bottom of the water, as though inanimate. There is no fight at all. Bewildered, one of the sister instinctively dives into the river to rescue this enigmatic creature from nature’s grasp. Perhaps, in this moment, she sees Arthur’s innate ability to remain calm amidst the struggle as a trait worthy of protecting from the looming dangers beneath the river’s surface. Or perhaps she sees Arthur’s lack of basic survival instincts as childlike and innocent. Though she herself is not immune to these dangers, like any mother would, she places the safety of this man-child over the safety of herself.

Such a scene reminds me of that moment in Grahame Greene's The Quiet American when Fowler says of Pyle, "That was my first instinct--to protect him. It never occurred to me to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

Arthur, though, is far from dumb. Though deemed insane in the outer-world, this reflects more on the type of society that interprets his childlike wonder as craziness than it does on Arthur. Far from dumb themselves, the sisters are able to interpret this wonder of Arthur's as brilliance and therefore worthy of redemption. They see the woundedness in his wide, blank stare and are dazzled by it. Maybe they even see parts of themselves in Arthur, whose every action in this strange land radiates with the saintly glow of his mother. Maybe in the sisters' gaze Arthur sees parts of his mother reflected back at him (and therefore parts of himself).

Upon pulling a calm Arthur from the torrential waters, the sisters soon discover that, much like themselves, Arthur has no fear of the depths. Instead, his (and the sisters') deepest fear is of shallow living.

Or perhaps after pulling Arthur out of the river, the sisters also discover that he was not lured by their song after all. A song that until this moment no man has been immune to. Like Farthington's evil deeds, Arthur was oblivious to their seduction. In this scenario, maybe he instead fell into the water while bending down to bask in the marvelous fragrance of the flowers growing along the shore. Maybe the flowers are the same flowers from that Hamtramck garden, the flowers that he once tended to with great care alongside his mother. Or perhaps they remind him of the flowers he used to pick to adorn the Virgin Mary statue outside of his childhood church. Whatever the case, Arthur feels like he's made his way back home, to the world he inhabited as a child. Though this childlike awe is the source of much of Arthur’s woes in the outer-world, in this inner-world it is this exact wonder that protects him from all potential dangers.

Another possible scenario is that Arthur doesn’t fall into the water at all. Maybe, instead, the sisters draw back their bows because of his reverence toward their world, his delicate demeanor, his frolicsome fawn-like movements. Perhaps, while standing alongside the riverside admiring the beauty, a band of misfit animals gather around him mistaking Arthur as one of their own. Catching a reflection of their world’s natural beauty through Arthur’s eyes, the sisters become certain that his intent is pure and his heart is full.

It is in this moment, perhaps, when the sisters realize that Arthur is the living arrow they've been searching for. He is the ultimate ammunition in their war versus man, in their ongoing battle with Gilbert. If this be so, then the sisters themselves are the weapons--they are the bows. (Take that, societal objectification of women's bodies for pleasure and enjoyment!) If Arthur as the arrow is the sisters' greatest hope for humanity, the sisters then are not only the bow that holds him but also the shield that guards him. They are his protection against humanity.

To borrow from Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children,"

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. 

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. 

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

This could eventually tie into Steffi shooting Farthington in the tunnels. Is Steffi a direct descendant of the sisters? Are they the ones who taught her to shoot?  In her angsty teen years did she rebel against their savagery with a savagery all her own? Is she the fallen angel who forms her own kingdom? Or, maybe, Steffi is still one of the sisters. In becoming a follower of Farthington's (and seducing him along the way) she is able to learn all of his secrets and ultimately destroy him. Perhaps this was the initial plan, but maybe somewhere along the way she began believing the lies. She falls under Carlton's spell, seeking his garbage to fill the emptiness symptomatic of life's cruelty outside of the enchanted forest. In doing so, she betrays her sisters by falling victim to mortal temptation.

Or does she? Maybe Arthur is not the ultimate Christ figure in this story.

Maybe Steffi is.

The Savage Sisters (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email from Art to the group sent 22 May 2015.

Wow!

Where to start...! You've laid out some pretty compelling options.

I like all of it, but I think I like the packaged trash idea the most.

And then, once we've got them hooked, take it to the next level: packaged nothingness (I like that my phone knows when I type "packaged" that the next word is "nothingness.")

I think some of the other options are too difficult and distract from the "empty frames" motif that is central to the project.

We could even give the whole thing a bogus charitable pretense too, like so many cults and large-group awareness trainings promote to distract attention away from their brainwashing and/or profiteering activities. Maybe pictures of the place the trash was picked up? Maybe suggesting that you have in some sense "adopted" that spot? Maybe that you can keep buying trash from this one spot in Detroit in order to keep transporting it out of town--with the hilarious aspect being that we create more packaging to do this! Then again, maybe that's too much content. I think the point is to have context without text...or tent without content?

Here are some posts that might provide some insight as to why the empty/trash-filled box makes a LOT of sense:

• Another Arch in the Proscenium - May 21, 2014
• Cataclysmic Changes (Part 2 of 3) - May 31, 2014

Actually, a lot of stuff in the April - May 2014 range deals with nothingness in a box, in a frame, on stage.

Other fun tidbits:

• Can we get people to buy nothingness from Detroit? Like having a little black hole in your living room radiating street cred. Better than a "Detroit vs. Everybody" shirt. Of course, don't get too close to the event horizon of the box. Kind of like tanning.

• I guess I can see the relevance of transporting bat shit and ghosts out of Detroit too. All these things--trash, nothingness, black holes, bat shit, ghosts--seem to fit into the same category.

• Like Henry Ford before him, Dan Gilbert is definitely basking daily in the dark light of the lodestone, listening to The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever speed rap in Old Icelandic.

• Who is making these products? Followers of Farthington? Of Steffi? Of Victoria Woolf or Shakespeare's Sister? It feels like some of the latter-day, post-Farthington people. I like them being members of some kind of female-only version of Yahowa's Savage Sons. The Savage Daughters of Shakespeare's Sister? Sworn enemies of Dan Gilbert, buying up vacant lots in Detroit and fighting his henchmen on the banks of the river beneath a river. I'm not sure if they are friendly, hostile, or indifferent to Arthur White and company. And they live in harmony with the land. So it makes sense that they might sell Poop Paper, Guano Tea, Moisturizers, Dung Masks, Sea Salt Scrubs. Maybe it doesn't make sense that they create more packaging.

Unfriended

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



One more thought: What if we had a Kickstarter that we were doing everything in our power to stop? Because we realized (too late) that it would allow this ancient (or brand new) menace to manifest?

Okay, the Kickstarter idea wouldn't quite work as is. My point with that was that we wanted to fund the Farthington mascot costume but then got some premonition that it might be a bad idea (for the reasons I mentioned a couple posts ago). But then it got 100% funded and we had to go through with it.

But I think that isn't quite right. In order to express the true viral horror by which myths become reality, it would need to be out of our hands the minute funding hit 100%. In other words, we'd need a rogue group member who still wanted to go through with it, who took that money and started working, no longer responding to the group's attempts to communicate. And then, of course, the mascot starts showing up and grisly murders start happening.

I guess the big question would be whether the first murder would be the rogue group member, who didn't realize what he/she created. I don't like that route. I think it would be better to at least imply that the rogue group member is the one who has donned the mascot suit and is committing the murders. But then, it seems obvious that at some point, that rogue group member is found murdered but the murders continue. So, then the question is who is inside the mascot suit. At some point, there are no natural explanations left.

I like the creepypasta genre because multiple story lines can be pursued simultaneously without investing any one of them with truth.

A totally different plot line could explore the dynamic of online groups like ours, which also have some terrifying possibilities. One is that an anonymous participant (or someone who was supposed to be dead, like Unfriended) suddenly joins the group and starts saying creepy things. Or alternatively, one group member's identity seems to have become suddenly possessed, evidenced by a sudden shift in tone, a subtle change in avatar, etc. In the avatar example, I could start slowly blacking out my mascot suit's eyes until no white is left. This new movie seems incredibly trashy, but it's a good representation of the trend.

As if this couldn't get any scarier, these characters would not be Carlton Farthington or Steffi Humboldt or Victoria Woolf, but us, the writers of this story. I don't know, I'm kind of scaring myself. Let me know if I should stop.

Honestly, if the Sea Devil costume is ever made, I will feel a slight twinge of horror for the rest of my life.

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!

Creepypasta

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

Let the children... by Victor-Surge on DeviantArt

Incidentally, our story has a lot of potentially creepypasta fare embedded in it. The whole summer pilot program venturing down into the steam tunnels, reading drafts of Yeats's "Second Coming," catching glimpses the terrible beast Farthington had warned about,

sometimes swaggering in the distance up ahead of us in the dim intermittent rays of our flashlights, sometimes turning around suddenly to face us, its human physiognomy smiling to reveal a terrifying array of lion's teeth.

See the original post here.

Also, the idea of Carlton/Steffi inside the Sea Devil suit. Jawless or not?

As with creepypasta in general, I'd love for our story to eventually encourage the type of underground fan fiction, fanart, and cosplay that tend to proliferate around these threadbare stories. I don't know how all that starts, but it's almost like too much involvement by the initiating artist can actually inhibit its growth. This, of course, is the open source paradigm in a nutshell. Also that of King Arthur, whose legend grows as his reality recedes from view.

I just remembered and looked up the Slender Man meme, which was started as a thread on the Something Awful Internet forum, namely, a contest to doctor everyday photos to look terrifying. It relies on the exact same dynamism as our project.

As the author of the linked article states,

Slenderman highlights the strength and weaknesses of the Internet simultaneously...Of course when Victor Surge first created him, he was just a creepy picture with minimal back story. Now he is a cultural phenomenon and terrorises the dreams and thoughts of many.  What makes Slenderman a fascinating study is that he is the the personification of how modern myths work. At the core of Slenderman, most of us know he is created. You can trace back his history to specific posts and websites. The Internet ruins the myth but at the same time, the Internet gives it an authenticity and connectivity that continually builds upon it. 

The strength of this meme comes from its ambiguity, which has been part of the reason why I have been so reluctant to go on record with a lot of specific details we sketch out on the blog. At times, this kind of clarifying impulse seems to trespass on the minds of would-be co-creators. Interestingly, I've always seen our performances as running a similar risk, especially when characters lose their indefinitude. I don't think it needs to be that way; our attempts to justify our invariably less than ideal configurations (e.g. like Friday, making an inexplicably young J.J. Lazarus into Joseph Lazarus III) allows us to avoid painting ourselves into an ontological corner.

Everything Now is Measured by After

The following is an excerpt of an 11 May 2015 email exchange between Art, Liza, and the group.

Go Sea Devils!

Art:

Hey Liza! 

I was thinking about your excellent drawing from a couple days ago and it got me thinking of how that could be a great post. 

Although your style isn't like this at all, I love this photos and text way of talking through a piece of art for a few reasons, the biggest being that it conforms to that meta, diegetical, frames-within-frames, proscenium-arches-radiating-out-from-the-stage style of our "narrative." Unlike the linked page, however, your drawings would actually benefit from not being a finished draft! I told Will a long time back that one of my favorite things about growing up in the late 80s/early 90s was how many "box sets" of bands came out, and invariably, they would have such wonderful artifacts--photos, ticket stubs, lyrics scribbled on napkins or hotel stationary--such that these large liner note booklets became almost more interesting than the music itself. Now, it gets a little complicated that some of these things predated what happened on stage (scribbled lyrics = postscenium?), but still, there's a preferencing of what surrounds the thing--its radiations as it were--over the thing itself. 

In other words, talking about the thing--preferably the unfinished thing--is better than the thing itself. Perhaps because Plato-like we stay closer to the ideal that we have glimpsed than if this were ever fully actualized. 

One area that I wanted to ask you about was Farthington's (or Steffi's?) sea devil mascot suit. I want something inspired by but not plagiarizing this, something that could be plausibly used in an actual sports arena capacity, but would strike everyone as just the slightest bit off, somewhat more so than in this photo. 

Art

Liza:

Greetings, 

Count me on board with all of this (good thing, too, for I'd hate to be overboard with the lurking CD-evils!).  In particular, the interplay of photo and text, of visual and aural, of medium and message.    

I've been thinking a great deal lately about a related interplay of sorts: the interplay of the Benefactor's scribbled horror-raps (think: text - aural - Realm of the Ear) and the cave walls (think: "photo" - visual - Kingdom of the Eye).  

For a variety of reasons, I believe a proximal encounter with such a spectacle carries the overwhelming potential for transcendence and this "turbulent reversal" of which you frequentlynspeak. Even for a polyfocal digital audience. Better yet, especially for a polyfocal digital audience.  

Throw in nature's ambient instrumentation as the soundtrack, and we're suddenly standing before the altar of what Walter Benjamin calls "the hierarchical pinnacle of aesthetic experiences." 

I've plenty more I want to write, but, for now, all I've time and energy left to scribble is: I'll get to scribbling StefFiarthington's sea devil tomorrow.  

And, 

I'll write what I want to write right now after Thursday. In the days after Thursday.  

Those will be the days after. Everything now is measured by after. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man) 

Later, 

Liza  

So-Called Feminine Approaches to Dominance

The following are excerpts of emails sent from Will and Art to Liza and Allison on 12 April 2015.

Circe Invidiosa by John William Waterhouse

Will:

Feel free to take on more than one character, or one, or none. I generally take the lead on Will and Art generally takes the lead on Arthur and Farthington, but we both kind of write all the other characters (or at least have debates about them) while assuming someone else will play them at some point. Art has written Will stuff and I've written Arthur stuff. Also, whether people are antagonists or protagonists keeps changing. At one point, Joe Lazarus, Jr., was the focal point of the story in my eyes, and Will was the antagonist. Then Farthington outdid Will. Then Steffi outdid Farthington. Then we added the Benefactor, who is still smaller than the beasts from air, sea, and land. And really, God is at the center of the story.  

Anyway, Liza, I get what Art is saying with you and Allison both playing sides of Steffi, but I see you as also being The Benefactor and yourself as the discoverer of The Benefactor, as you confront both Detroit and the silliness of Detroit authenticity issues on a daily basis. 

One last thing...I at least don't trust myself to write female characters and neither does Art, I'm guessing, but we're both U of M grads, so we wouldn't be satisfied with the story if the female characters didn't kick butt. Personally, I believe in the superiority of women to men, and I think that idea is playing out more and more in the story. Of course, I worry about sexism. On the one hand, Leif Erikson's sister The Benefactor is way more of a badass than Leif ever was. On the one hand, Leif Erikson's sister The Benefactor is way more of a badass than Leif ever was. On the other hand, I can't tell if Steffi's overthrowing the masculine approach of Farthington's mind...um...penetrations by becoming the digital environment through which she...um...engulfs all of humanity is really feminist or sexist.  At any rate, I think Art and I would both benefit by letting go of our hold on Steffi and The Benefactor for a while and seeing what you do with them.

Thanks for playing along!

Art:

Right. The one thing I would change is that Farthington's is a "feminine" approach, in that, as we've said, he "has no content of his own" but instead seeks to control the context. That's stereotypically feminine, yes, but what other than a stereotypical approach would Farthington choose? It's all about appropriation, whether that be blue-eyed soul or so-called feminine approaches to dominance. It's just that he eventually gets outdone in this regard. 

This is the counterintuition of John the Baptist, Mary, and Jesus--the idea of being humbled as the sure path to exaltation (not that they thought of it in those terms!). This same counterintuition is seen in distorted form in Farthington and Humboldt. 

As you said, it turns out engulfing is more powerful than penetrating (a là rock, paper, maybe even scissors).  

Farthington figured this out, forming a cult with no doctrine, merely creating a clearing in which he exists as "next to nothing." And then coopts, echoes, embeds, reposts, retweets, reframes, repeats, resounds, and otherwise lives parasitically off others' content. 

I realize this has to sound a little weird coming from Farthington's email! Okay, we'll shut up!!! 

Hello Liza and Allison!

The following is an email sent from Art to Liza and Allison on 12 April 2015.

Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice by Nicolas Poussin

I have been going back and forth for a long time trying to figure out how to approach this first email. I do feel some need to formally welcome you to the project. No pressure as far as your involvement, but I have to say that I'm kind of overly excited about the prospect of your respective contributions and it's bringing up all sorts of past experiences of rejection, when my heart was all a-flutter and things didn't work out, in large part due to my unabashed enthusiasm. So I learned the lesson of Orpheus, by which, in the words of John Updike, "we achieve our desire by turning our back on it." Be that as it may, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm psyched. And of course you have full permission to leave at any point (but I guess by analogy that means that you fall back into the underworld). One paragraph and I've already made things weird!

I understand that you are both up to big things, but I wanted to summarize what I understand about your potential roles thus far, expressing some of my own thoughts and providing links to past posts that may or may not be helpful to you.

Allison, I understand your role as one of exegesis/analysis. In some ways, this puts you on Will's Apollonian, rationalistic end of the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. I gathered from lurking somewhat on your Facebook page that you're pretty familiar with Nietzsche having written a dissertation that synthesized his and other people's work and that you ultimately hope to help people to live their lives better...my point being, I assume you get the reference! I think "The Eternal Loop of One's Own Rationalism" would be a good place to start in terms of conceptualizing what you're doing (you would be Actaeon, by the way). You become a Nietzschean protagonist of sorts who tries to rationalize the formless horror. Eventually--spoiler alert--the Dionysian shows its superiority. Your own Apollonian endeavors are not for naught; they are paradoxically "energized and raised aloft" through glimpsing the formless horror. So, yes, you get eaten alive by your own hounds so to speak, but something cool comes out of it. I mean how many people get turned into a stag? That's pretty cool in and of itself.

I should back up and say that I know you're not intending to be one of the characters, but, like a lot of people who have had some involvement, you may end up fitting into one or more roles. I visualize you as an early Steffi Humboldt, whose "Forward" is used for The Principles of Theory. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that she didn't just "go back to Oberlin." The post, "Eve vs. the New Eve" may also be a good place to find out what may have happened to her.

At any rate, whether you identify with Steffi at all, I like the idea of you trying to come up with a thesis as to what the project is. Everything can and should be tentative, probably indefinitely. We use the word "maybe" a lot. That's unlikely to change. Any even preliminary ideas, drafts, intuitions would be welcome--whatever aspects of the project do you find philosophically interesting. Interestingly, when I start posting some of that material, your thesis will have to accommodate it: the eternal loop of one's own rationalism! Thank you in advance for any contribution you can make!

Okay, moving on to Liza. Liza, I posted your first post today and it's generating some excellent traffic (by the way, shares, reposts, retweets, etc. are all appreciated and, in fact are part and parcel of the cult)! You seem to be more on the Dionysian side of the spectrum with me and Arthur and Carlton Farthington (those are all me, by the way). That means that you can pretty much write whatever you want. I think you've already intuited that we grant ourselves wide latitude when it comes to unintelligibly in this project (or as we like to call it, indefinitude): text-to-voice, voice-to-text, to English-to-Icelandic transcription, and just good old fashioned not making ourselves understood, we have pretty much free rein to say whatever we want! Being on this side of the spectrum means that your life--like mine--has been touched by the lodestone. Thus, our identities become increasingly confused, fused, diffuse, etc. Definitely should read "Epic Finale" - Part 1 and Part 2.

And yes, I'm thinking of you as a latter-day Steffi, who now goes by other aliases like Victoria Woolf, Shakespeare's Sister, The Überfrau, etc. Of course, you could also be Leif Ericsson and/or The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever. Here's something I wrote to Will a couple days ago:

Maybe indefinitude is the ultimate goal of Knology. Maybe it's what Farthington promised his followers. And yes that has a meaning in terms of time, but it also has a meaning in terms of identity. Maybe that explains why all our characters blur outside their boundaries, or at least the ones that have been touched by the lodestone, The Benefactor, Knology, etc. Ones like Will seem to lack that transcendence, but have clear facticity. There's a trade off.

And--I'm not even sure if the two of you know each other--so I apologize, but even your two names introduce an interesting conflation and confusion of identities. Again, from a recent email to Will:

I also like that we have a Liza and Allison coming on board. Having a field day with those two names, their meanings, and the potential relationship of those meanings to one another. No etymology on hand now but just the "a-" meaning not and the "-son," which is so odd for a girl's name. Liza is the one that is apparently free from those affixes, accretions. Perhaps further along the path toward indefinitude...

Of course, Will and I are not immune from this same treatment. At a most basic level, our names are nothing more than Nietzschean concepts.

Okay, enough of me. I've probably scared you off. So reply to our emails, feel free to get involved to whatever extent and in whatever capacity you'd like, maybe even call Carlton Farthington at his home on Topsail Island, North Carolina (910-541-3455). We believe that, inside the swaddled/crucified existence, whatever utterance you're currently capable of making is the best utterance. Don't wait until come down off the cross--you'll be dead then!

Will, anything to add?

Art