My Formula for Human Greatness

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 27 February 2016.

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Leonello Spada

Something has been consolidating or coalescing in my brain recently that I wanted to throw out there for your consideration. Today's reading about the prodigal son helped me put several things into partial perspective.

It hit me with this passage where the prodigal son returns:

…his father ordered his servants,
‘Quickly, bring the finest robe and put it on him;
put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
Take the fattened calf and slaughter it.
Then let us celebrate with a feast,
because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again;
he was lost, and has been found.’
Then the celebration began.
Now the older son had been out in the field
and, on his way back, as he neared the house,
he heard the sound of music and dancing.

I'm putting this all together with several different things, some of which we've discussed before. I'm just going to list them off here:

1. Nietzsche's amor fati/eternal recurrence/lake that dammed itself up
2. Camus's Sisyphus
3. Hamlet's inaction
4. The wisdom of Silenus
5. Arthur White's motif of long delays and our distrust of the Benefactor

And if you can believe it, I'm formulating a Christian version of all these things, one that finds a formula for human greatness and heroism.

What the prodigal son did in this reading is ask for his inheritance early. What he really asked for was a horizon beyond his father's house, beyond his life—a kind of Camusian suicide. Upon receiving his inheritance ahead of time, he “collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Like Nietzsche's lake, he flows off to a distant horizon and, in so doing, drains and dissipates himself.

This is no formula for human greatness, no matter how resplendent the horizon, no matter how grand the enterprise. As Horatio puts it, we follow ghosts “to the dreadful summit of the cliff.” Similarly, what Christ is saying in this reading is that the horizon of action, of accomplishment, of ambition is the primary occasion for our perdition. It is how we become next to nothing, so that all that is left is to hire ourselves out to tend swine.

Chances are, we've already done this countless times in life. But we can always dam ourselves up and become a healthy sized lake, whatever altitude we're at. Smaller streams draining off to this or that enterprise seem to be an appropriate part of a lake's ongoing health, but not the eager gushing of our whole selves off to some counterfeit consummation. Herein lies the difference between “dying to self” and Camusian suicide. The former not the latter is the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” as Hamlet only later realizes. When the prodigal son returns to the father's house, he again experiences its riches—the finest robe, the ring on his finger, the sandals on his feet, the sound of music and dancing, etc. But he has died to the idea of a horizon. Which is scary because most of our lives are hell bent on the horizon.

I can't help but read Camus atheistic text from this Christian perspective:

Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory.

It is in the father's house that the present moment subsists. Only in choosing to live in the father's house can we hear “the myriad wondering little voices.” In my case, those “wondering little voices” are often actual children. When the roaring torrent of my own ambition isn't deafening me, I can hear those little voices, smell their hair—in short, exist. But that is only after the idols have been silenced.

And this isn't a prosperity gospel I'm talking about, but in the father's house, we are rich. At the same time—like Hamlet, like the prodigal son, like Camus's Sisyphus, like Nietzsche's lake—the hero of the story strains against and even overleaps its bounds, usually to his own detriment. Thus Jacob wrestles with God. Thus Jesus says of the skeptical Nathaniel, “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.” Thus, the older son is not the hero of the story.

But outside the father's house—traveling off toward some horizon, following those ghosts—we don't own anything, and we end up slaves or at the bottom of some cliff. When Hamlet returns from his voyage out over the waters, the ghost is gone. Only then does the story tilt quickly to its denouement. I have a feeling a similar criterion has emerged in The Return of Arthur White.

So with some edits, I agree with Nietzsche that “this is my formula for human greatness.” Not love of fate or fortune, but of God's will, “which shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will.” Not saying our project will ever partake of that greatness, but I want to set that up as its criterion.

The Vernor's Dude

The following is an excerpt of a 3 December 2015 email exchange between Will, Art, and the group.

Woody the Gnome

Will:

I'm also up for the traveling notebook and the zine. 

Also, I think the Savage Sisters of Shakespeare should be our project's version of two other Detroit staples: GLOW (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) and Juggalos. By our version, I mean probably not much like those things at all. But Faygo should be involved. 

Also, somehow I thought the Benefactor morphed into Leif Erickson's sister....that the Benefactor was the Lodestone keeper. For Art, he's the person who ruins the project by funding it, either in real life or in the story. For me, he or she ruined America by funding it with the lodestone's power. 

I think besides Victoria Woolf's being a Freudian slip on my part, she is in my eyes what Steffi becomes when she absorbs the power of the lodestone and the life force of Leif Erikson's sister, who may or may not be The Benefactor or both. 

Also, I think we've got the postmodern revival of the allegory of the cave going on here, with the return to paganism and the arches within arches. And of course, the actual cave.

Art:

How about the Vernor's dude? Could be a new character. Some kind of archetypal figure from Detroit's version of the Schwarzwald. I see him being some sort of pagan figure who gets dismembered or eats children, but is sanitized and repurposed as Vernor's logo.

Will:

I love it. I think a Rumpelstiltskin-type approach would work. I think that any Icelandic magical creatures who end up in the salt mines with Leif Erikson's sister should be refugees from the patriarchical structure of Germanic myth. That means this gnome has somehow fled to be nestled in the lap of a very powerful and wise gynocracy (which was just autocorrected into "gyro crazy," which means we must be talking about the caves under Greektown). 

So I'm thinking his story has to be a strange permutation of the traditional child eater/mischief maker/imp thing. What sort of gnome would the SSS keep for a lapdog, and how would the story morph into bringing the gift of Vernor's to Detroit? What is an Icelandic Pan who enjoys subservience to women all about? Is he the Mordred of the Arthur White universe? 

Also, how much of this salt mine world does he see? Does he see it in dreams? Can he ever distinguish any of it from mystical visions? And as a fairy tale percolates under the city, how does it shape Childe Arthur?

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.

Cartography of the Mind (Part 9 of 17)

The following are excerpts of an illuminated book sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

addressing darkness & light through inquiry & reflection

I felt that
I had
stepped
through a
door that had
been usu-
ally left open
to discover trem
endous treasures
there these
treasures terrified
me I told myself
that I could turn aro
und and go. And then I
walked on.

I am wondering...

1. Have the Benefactor and Leif Erikson's Sister become one character?
2. If not, what is their relationship to one another? To the Savage Sisters or Shakespeare (= the Icelandic Wyrd Sisters?)? To Victoria Woolf?
3. Are each of the above ultimately a different name for the same thing?
4. If so, is that thing Paganism (aka Christianity's sister religion)?
5. What is the overarching role of (myth+) paganism's resurgence within the context of this project?* (My deductions on #5 to follow my questioning...)

6. I'm a bit confused about the Benefactor's intentions...Is the Benefactor a Redeemer, a Destroyer, or both? Initially, I thought the horror raps had been written to illuminate the world's darkness, so to speak as though by carving the hallowed history into Detroit's original and unchanging rock, (s)he was ultimately giving a voice to the oppression and corruption that plagued the Benefactor's remembered world since conception. So, in the context of the story, I categorized the Benefactor as the Storyteller: (S)he's survived through many lifetimes. Outlasted history and embraced as an ageless androgynous (turn page) elder who's etched our story out into the stone for us, perhaps as a warning. In a sense, I viewed the cave as the axis mundi; as people's tunnel to Christ by way of Pagan myth. Of course a story demands an audience, but it was my assumption that despite the Benefactor's use of the Lodestone to lure people to the underworld to hear of the redemptive horrors, we were complacent in our world; we had no desire to be stirred out of this complacency, no desire to confront harsh truths, no yearning to grow deep like roots. In yet another sense, I viewed the Benefactor as Will views the French: as a protector of America's pieces we'd rather dispose of until the moment we're finally ready to grasp their value. From my current understanding, however, the Benefactor is, in fact, "nefarious"; (s)he is destroying our history through total inaccessibility to it. To revisit Will's message on storytelling, the Benefactor is ultimately rendering his/her survival meaningless—and in turn ours—by forgoing creation a total destructive collapse of all history. Though allowing us access into the cave would "make us what we are," his/her selfish isolation makes us what we were never intended to be: greedy, gluttonous, selfish, alienated, miserable, the most dangerous city in America for the third year in a row, and ultimately doomed. Am I getting warm? If the Benefactor is "nefarious," it would seem that my interpretation of paganism's role in this project is incorrect, or partially at least. My most recent deductions, from piecing together bits and pieces from past e-mails and blog posts are that this project both embraces paganism as a bridge to the "myth become fact" aka Christianity and discredits paganism for leading us to Christianity through a vehicle other than Christ. In the context of the e-mails, the Benefactor = Graham Greene's lieutenant, in that any potential triumphs will be empty failures; any truth the Benefactor arrives at without Christ is not truth at all, but mere shadows of shadows of shadows. Further, the Benefactor is not evangelizing. While (s)he may know better than anyone the limits of our physical world ("The Most Authentic Critiquers"), (s)he does not draw others toward the beauty of God. Instead (s)he, quite literally, repels people from it. AM I GETTING WARMER?

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.

Those Who Sow in Tears

The following is an excerpt of a 31 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

St. Paul in Prison by Rembrandt

Will:

The podcast my friends Russ and Fred run has a structure that could work for us.  Basically, Russ tells the story of the inspiration behind one of his songs and then plays the song.  We could run a similar structure: Legends of Arthur White, in which we tell a story about Arthur that May or may not be true and end with a song from the era we address.  The whole, "correct" story could be told in another medium, and a podcast could go in multiple contradictory directions without any issues.

Art:

I noticed that; that's a really good idea.  

I feel too hampered, hobbled, hindered to accomplish that (or anything beyond emails and practicing songs with Francis). I'm not enjoying my small sharing in the swaddled/crucified existence right now. Half wishing the Benefactor could make all of this go away. But I'm sure Paul and John the Baptist and so many other heroes of the faith felt the same when they were imprisoned, their lives and voice snuffed out. But as Paul writes us from his prison cell: "Nothing can separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus." 

I'm having a hard time believing this, both with teaching and with this project (Psalm 126:5-6): 

Those who sow in tears
shall reap with cries of joy 

Those who go forth weeping,
carrying sacks of seed,
Will return with cries of joy,
carrying their bundled sheaves.
will reap with cries of joy.  

I feel like I'm sowing in tears; I just don't believe the second part. Help my unbelief! 

I'm not sure what you were imagining with the podcast, but if you were able to create and host the show (along with the theme music, bumpers, etc.), you could actually just run the whole thing. 

What about having guests on who would learn the songs, possibly bringing their own interpretive flair, and play them up in T.C.? Then, you could call me on the phone (there are ways to set this up for podcasts) and see what I thought. When appropriate, you and I could provide some background about the song and it's meaning. I could just be myself or I could get into the Arthur White role. I could also play the song from my home, either instead of or in addition to the other person performing it. 

Alternatively, we could discuss some of the story lines. But I still like the idea of me being only a relatively small part of the show.

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.

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!

Introducing Liza!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 17 April 2015.

Hello Allison, Arthur, Carlton, Will, Will, and any of the others hiding amongst us,

What a full room we have here!

Here I am, at long last. Here I have been all along.

As you will soon see, my presence in this project will be much like that of a fly on the wall. Even in the long intervals that are likely to pass by without any buzzing on my end, know that I am watching, reading, interpreting, and reflecting on your messages. Once I've digested them as best I can, I will swoop in, impose my character(s)' rationality on what Art has called the “primordial wildness of [your collective] scribbles," and fly off once more. Never mistake my silence for disinterest. On the contrary, understand that it is only through the emptiness of the silence that I discover the joy of the noise. Though Allison is light-years ahead of me on her journey through The Sweet World, I’d like to think the degrees of our excitement are equally matched.

While on the subject of Allison – hello! Though we’ve never been in direct communication with one another, I already feel, in some sense, like I know you. Instead of filing my taxes last night, I spent my evening bouncing back and forth between Civilization and its Discontents, Leaves of Grass, and your thesis. I’m yet to make a significant dent in it, but I can already tell that every atom belonging to me as “legend” also belongs to you.

To all of you, really. What great company I’ve stumbled my way into.

I’m tempted to call you members of what Vonnegut’s Books of Bokonon would describe as my karass, but I won’t. Whereas Bokonists derive their life's meaning from foma - shameless untruths - I attribute the entanglement of our lives to our mutual interest in deriving life's meaning from transcendent Truth. A force exists in our communication that is far beyond us; there is a deeper meaning in it than any of us can perhaps currently fathom.

I dig this idea of understanding the meaning through the medium. As we discuss our potential roles in this project, I've been thinking a great deal about how the indefinite process of contextualizing the essence of these roles in turn enlightens our existence both inside and outside the Sweet World. Through this lens, it’s interesting to consider the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian - this sense that we clarify our confusion in the journey through the interplay of these oppositional forces.

In response to a message I sent to Will last night regarding my own bewildering journey to restore order to the chaos that saturates our public education system, he sent me a passage from Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday that further highlights this unifying duality. What I’ve ultimately deduced from all of it is that the meaning of each of our respective roles in this project and beyond has been distorted by what Chesterton calls “an engine of torture."

The purpose of the Sweet World - from my own understanding at least - is to provide us a space in which to translate this meaning not despite this distortion but through this distortion. If the lodestone that Art mentioned confuses our identities, then it is really the most clarifying force there is in our route to understanding our identities.

When I wrote last night's message to Will, I had not yet read through the entirety of this e-mail thread. Now that I have, the line between my purpose in life and my purpose in this project has been reduced to a dash. It is through my daily struggles to contextualize my transcendent purpose amongst grave misfortune that I’ve discovered an inherently meaningful connection to the contextualization of my role in this project.

After writing said message, it dawned on me that I didn’t so much write it as I did sit down at my typewriter and bleed it into being. Though most writers seem to disagree on the attribution of this paraphrased quote, they (maybe) unanimously agree on its merits.To write in such a way, we must abandon our mortal vulnerability  by ripping open our wounds. To look upon these wounds with rapture instead of lamentation is to have paved a clearer channel between the earthly and the divine. It is to, as Coleridge says, "build that dome in air."

I often think Detroit could be one of our earthly channels into the divine. Whenever I hear someone refer to it as a "blank canvas," I want to shake my fist at the sky in horror that they don't see it for what it really is: the Sistine Chapel of the Midwest.

Though Nietzsche uses this blood-writing metaphor to promote earthly elevation of the Übermensch over the Untermensch, I’ve decontextualized parts of it below in order to support the above idea:

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood and thou wilt find that blood is spirit."

"He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.”

My decontextualization of this is that our willingness to suffer into Truth is not for worldly pleasure - that of the head - but rather to satiate our yearning for the divinely transcendent - that of the heart.

The text concludes: “Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.”

So, in a sense, this is how we define ourselves in opposition with ourselves: we can either give into the temptations of man, exalting ourselves to übermensch, or we can remain steadfast in our rejection of these temptations, isolating ourselves as the untermensch.

As the fly on the wall, it seems apparent that Art and Will are not writing The Sweet World into existence, but rather bleeding it into existence. In my decontextualization of Nietzsche, this is indicative that God is dancing through you.

With this dance as my aim, I prioritize the process over the purpose. Through a certain lens, this process is our purpose. The difficulty then lies not in understanding, but in discovering the courage through our confusion to present our woundedness to the world as Jesus did. Though this will inevitably yield more wounds in the short term, the moment we fixate our gaze on the gore despite our worldly instinct to avert our eyes is the moment we will see Beauty and know Truth. As Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters [us].”

In keeping our veins open, we will come to see the light that will guide us into the caves. It is this light that will not only illuminate The Benefactor's horror-raps etched on the crumbling walls, but that will keep our eyes steady on them despite all impulse to look away. Though this is all lofty idealism at best, I have trouble envisioning a better alternative than this in combusting “the engine of torture."

On that note, it appears as though I’ve rambled my way to the edge once more. Perhaps the edge of the cliffs is where the Sweet World exists. After all, if you're an outlier of the world, you're an inhabitant of the Sweet World.

As my favorite secular-humanist once said,

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Until my next swoop,

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!!! 

The Hyacinth Girl (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of a Facebook message sent from Liza to Will on 25 February 2015.



How I long to step my feet
Upon these waters that have lured
Me down a certain half-deserted street,
but my vision is obscured...

How then shall I begin?
In a minute is there time
For my answer deep within
To manifest in rhyme?

To the entrance of the cave she comes and goes
Whether she’ll go in, she does not yet know.

So, be my guide - unmask
my eyes from iced obstruction -
So, I may gauge the task
Of Icelandic poetry construction.

(But first I must digress
From this route to understanding,
For I’ll burst if I repress
the fallacy of TB’s poetic branding:

While,
Yes, the cool all dwell in graves,
And Fishbones has fallen from its hill;
Yes, I too prefer the caves,
And killing dinosaurs for the thrill.
Still,
I simply can’t digest
With every single salty grain,
That rhyming ain’t the best
Despite TB’s strong disdain.

For rhyming is a fine device
That knocks down walls once girdled round;
It lures us deep into those caves of ice,
Making us tenants again on holy ground.

Excluding no ages, rhyming accepts all men;
Protruding the pages marked up in pen
Floats beauty disguised in an appealing casing,
(which is why my tone)
denotes snooty surprise upon such rhyme-debasing.)

With feet hovering like the Fool,
I consider the plunge
Yet I’m afraid that grad school
My free time’s expunged -
I oughtn’t take on new tasks,
When I’ve hardly time to inhale,
Which is why I now ask,
What will my duties entail?

To the water she comes and goes
Coming closer and closer to dipping her toes.

Let’s speak hypothetically:
“I’M DOWN,” in all caps
“to broadcast, poetically,
These scrawled horror-raps.
For still the time it sometimes comes
In which I’m free to write,
And I’d give a tithe of all their sums
To the Sweet World of Arthur White.

So tell me more, I’m nearly baited,
Will it be worth it, after all?
Answer me this: Am I the one fated
To read the writings on the wall?

The Hyacinth Girl (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of a Facebook message sent from Liza to Will on 22 February 2015.



My reply, at last.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my apologies for the lag in response time. “Busy, busy, busy,” is what we Bokonists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

This has been my mantra lately as I adjust to life as both a full-time graduate student and a full-time inner-city school teacher. The remainder of my mental and physical energies are exerted (should read: exhausted) in my daily efforts to dismantle the current public school system. I’ve been working closely with the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which has at least alleviated some of the loneliness in the struggle.

What little free time I’m left with is lost in the haze of daydreams; daydreams of an America in which there is free healthcare for all, one where inner-city schools are more than just breeding grounds for prisoners. How are my students to see anything but the shadows on the cave’s wall if they are never allowed to move their heads? I find it meaningful that you have unknowingly asked me to free The Benefactor’s horror-raps from the cave walls at a time in my life devoted to guiding my own beloved cave-dwellers out of the cave, toward the sunlight, and into the Truth.

Having been blessed with the understanding that these are the days that must happen to us, though, I am able to get through most moments with the Kerouacian acceptance that while the flesh may be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty damn glorious.

With life’s current chaos explained, I’m not quite sure I’ll be a valuable asset to your project. Though I’m more than intrigued by the possible journeys of The Benefactor, I’d hate to commit to something knowing that most of my mental powers and daily sources of creativity will be blown by the point in the day I’d finally get around to working on the translations.

This being said, I scrawled down my own cave-ramblings in response to your message while sitting in the back corner of class. Some things never change.

Message me back with answers to the question(s), and then we’ll get to talking on possible future developments.

They called me,
The Hyacinth Girl

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 5 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.


"ESO-L. Calçada - Pluto (by)" by ESO/L. Calçada - Pluto (Artist’s Impression). Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe the most authentic Detroiter ever is a super-ancient Icelandic guy!

He probably could be played by Eminem.

He speed raps horrorcore in Old Icelandic. Perhaps he was thawed during an early precursor of the turbulent reversals, which carried him and the lodestone in a flood of ice water down to Detroit. Perhaps Henry Ford had a hatch leading down into the tunnels where he would meet with this guy and listen to his Old Icelandic horrorcore raps while basking in the dark light of the lodestone.

This is so much scarier than global warming!

Carlton Farthington comes to Ann Arbor after reading an ancient manuscript about some underground caverns (now campus steam tunnels) that lead to a network of covered rivers, brooks, and streams. These in turn lead to an underground waterway to Iceland, which in turn leads to a volcano, which in turn leads to the center of the earth.

Somewhere along this path is the fabled lodestone, but what he discovers is that it has traveled to Detroit, where it was responsible for Detroit's meteoric rise and subsequent demise. He also discovers that it has A Guardian.

The Benefactor, aka The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever.

Oh, and while we're at it, I'd like to set the record straight about a few things: (1) dinosaurs had fur not feathers and (2) Vikings had helmets with horns and (3) Pluto is a planet, straying to the far reaches of our solar system before it slingshots back to destroy us all!

We need a bunch of meddlesome scientists who will be shocked by these revelations, people who have spent the last decade or so gratuitously revising everything I hold true.

Farthington is also a scientist, but a visionary one, like Eilert Lövborg in Hedda Gabler. Not one of these meddlers who want to spoil everyone's fun.

Dwarf planet, my ass!

Maybe Leif Ericsson discovered Detroit.

The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 2 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of a 27 January 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

The Descent of Aeneas into Hell

Art:

I'm imagining someone born on the banks of the Savoyard River-turned-sewer beneath the ruins of Black Bottom, now beneath the surface facade of the Chrysler Freeway.  

Is this your "true" Detroiter? Do we need to invent a character who has this kind of claim to authenticity? Whose existence is equivalent with Detroit's primordial essence? Someone who lived in this dark world, who haunted all the bombed-out ruins of Detroit, traveling through its underground network of rivers, creeks, and brooks, used first as open sewers then covered over by the French? 

Is this The Benefactor? Is he the one, emerging from the depths as a modern Berry Gordy of sorts, who engenders a renaissance in Detroit music?

Will:

The cult of authenticity is a very postmodern thing, and I love the idea of making The Benefactor the most authentic Detroiter ever. He should be a descendent of Cadillac, have some Native American roots, and be hundreds of years old. Also, we should use him to mercilessly satirize what Spike Lee called the Magical Negro stereotype. 

Actually, maybe he is beyond race...maybe he wears many faces. I see a hooded cloak. 

Also, he should turn out to be an Autobot.

A Few Scattered Thoughts

A few scattered thoughts:

• I love your ideas for the show.

• I get the low budget thing, and I'm seeing low budget as well. A slight clue that the show is happening in Arthur's present-day mind would be the low-budget presentation. A ballet, if it happens, could be done with video, but I'm fine with it not happening.

• I taught some kids whose mom owned a costume shop in Lansing. They might have something mascoty for us. Did you ever see the Viking mascot on Freaks and Geeks?  

• It occurs to me that Farthington, Steffi, and Rusty all ascend in this story as the Joe Lazarus figure descends. They are the strange fruits that have overtaken the garden in the absence of a gardener figure.

• I like The Benefactor figure.

• I read Kubla Khan as the greatest of all Romantic poems about the beauty that can result from the unattainability of the unattainable. That is one reason I like thinking of this performance in light of Coleridge. Really, we've got a metanarrative--glimpses of what we'd really like to share with the world. It's the story of our impossible attempt to give the world Arthur White as much as it is about Arthur White's struggles to save Iceland, whatever Iceland represents to him.

• My love of morality plays reemerges as well, although in a postmodern way. All of the formal features of the Iceland struggle have some sort of symbolic significance to Arthur that he attempts to solve by assembling versions of the concert in his mind, but we can't quite call any of the figures allegorical because who knows what they mean. In my mind, I feel an intuitive connection between 70's cults and contemporary digital culture and it informs my understanding if Farthington v. Humboldt, but I can't spell it out enough to cry allegory. Still, even just something that teases an audience toward allegorical thought carried in a frame of amateur public performance satisfies the part of me that wants to carry the torch of Catholic performance art by nodding toward morality plays.

The Benefactor

The following is an excerpt of a 27 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.

Grotto with Statue of Pan, Villa Corsi-Salviati, Sesto Fiorentino

I am interested in taking this issue head on as I finish work on the remaining songs. I have identified an upper limit of 3 more songs (although your "Hey Rome" threw me off--it is also an Iceland song). I also need to record the acoustic, finger picking version of "Tokyo Nights."

I want to introduce an anonymous "Benefactor" figure to the story. I'm totally unsure who this is or what role he or she would play, but inside the diegetical approach, we will merely start talking about the Benefactor until he or she materializes. Instead of asking for money, I want to create an opening in the narrative for the Benefactor (or should I say, The Benefactor) to step into. Here's the reason: we can't concern ourselves with these matters too much...and the extent to which we would need to concern ourselves in order to be effective in the traditional way IS too much. Eventually, we could add an element to the blog at the top: Are you The Benefactor? with a link to a contact us form. Some shadowy figure who, like dark matter, has provided Arthur White and his universe an endless influence of energy such that we are not only expanding at a constant velocity outward, we are accelerating.

"Who is The Benefactor?" we wonder aloud to ourselves.

Of course, we have already been talking about The Benefactor all along. It is the "moss-covered fountain of Pan," through which water from the wilderness is brought in to irrigate the well trimmed rows and patterns of the garden." Actually it is the water that flows through Pan...and we know very little about whence that water originates or what lies outside the walled-in universe of this garden. Is The Benefactor an individual person or Person? Is The Benefactor a body of persons? And what is his or her motive in supporting us so completely? What does he or she want? What does he or she expect in return? In other words, what's the story there? Is this a nefarious or benevolent entity? Can this entity be connected in any way to characters or elements that have already been introduced, like Steffi Humboldt or the lodestone?

These are pressing questions...any ideas? Bottom line, I refuse to engage in any un-artistic discussions.

I want to summon The Benefactor.