A Higher Order of Creation (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014.

I like the Scylla/Circe idea...but why not Charybdis? That's an even more blatant cunnic/yonic symbol (okay, can I get my head out of the gutter?).

In some ways, Mary exhibits not only woman par excellence, but mankind par excellence.  And what does she exhibit? Well, something that is germane to our recent topic: becoming nothing in a good or bad way.

We can safely and securely look to Mary as the model for the good, nay, preeminent way of becoming nothing. In one way, she is merely a paragon of humility, the vessel in which God becomes incarnate. Yet she is given to utter the Magnificat. Aside from that, her only message--echoed down through the centuries--is "do whatever he tells you" (Jn. 2:5). She "ponders all these things in her heart" (Lk. 2:19). Like Carlton Farthington, she has no content of her own; she echoes, contemplates, or makes manifest the content of others. But in her case, the only one held within her frame--within the ribs of her proscenium, so to speak--is the Almighty, the ground of all being.

Carlton Farthington exhibits the bad version of becoming nothing.

Cut off from the ground of his being, he seeks to appropriate the being of others. He seeks to be the outer frame, the last arch in the proscenium, the maelstrom that draws in and envelops the existence of others. This, as I've pointed out before, leads to the near nothingness of Hell. Losing all inner integrity, he eventually implodes. Like a collapsed sun at the center of a black hole, he becomes hyper-massive, infinitesimal, concentrated and trapped within himself along with all the other damned ones who have drifted across his "event horizon." Nothing, not even the remaining light within him, can muster the velocity to escape the gravitational field that results.

Could this role be played like a woman? She would basically be a Charybdis at that point. Smacks a little of adolescent, Kerouacian misogyny. I think your second email suggests that maybe he should remain a man and that Mary is the heroine of the entire story. She manages to do what we all were made to do. Everyone else does it in distorted ways. Some of those ways can be rerouted or redeemed.

Others lead direct to damnation.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

Circe Invidiosa by Waterhouse

I see your point.  I like the Steffi idea, especially since it's a twist and TV needs twist, but archetypically, she could easily default to a Scylla/Circe figure.  Not that I mind that.

I see a lot of promise in Agnieczka as a character...we just haven't talked about her much because of her loose connection to an ex of yours and partially because of the awkwardness that happens if you play Arthur White and have to have a relationship with an actress. The problem goes away if we pursue the TV show option and don't play the parts ourselves.

Linda is a heroic figure, but she's kind of saved by Arthur, which lends her to a few stereotypes...the redeemed fallen woman Mary Magdalene type, which again, is not a huge problem for me since the men are fairly archetypical, too.  I'm not on a quest to eliminate archetype...I don't think any of us are.  I think we just want to sharpen the archetypes.  Archetypes are really useful for helping people process truth...they just fail when they are presented in a hackneyed manner, unless the point is farce.

Arthur's parents are interesting contrasts. There's probably that problem of the Victorian thing where the wife is the moral head of the household and the dad is the economic head, but I do like the idea in which Arthur's mother's ambitions toward heaven rival and even outstrip his father's economic ambitions.

The big female character you left out is the Virgin Mary. In my eyes, the whole story is about Arthur's relationship with Mary...she's the central figure of his mystical connection to heaven.

In so many ways, Arthur lives in a feminine world, and there's a little bit of a feminist undertone I see in the way that Will and Farthington's aggressive masculinity screws so much up, and if the world could accept Arthur on his own terms instead of trying to butch him up and measure his music in terms of money, it would be a much better place. It's not that Arthur is effeminate...it's that the world can only recognize his gifts--creativity, intuition, love, a profound appreciation of beauty, a life-giving disposition--in feminine terms. Really, though, they are divine.

The idea of Steffi adds an interesting spin on maleness.

One other crazy idea: Joe Lazarus, Jr.  could be Josie Lazarus. Sorry, Joe! But really, there's your female on a heroic quest if we just change his gender.

3-D White Guys

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014. 

"native and indued unto that element"

You know, as I'm looking at our pictures, I'm realizing that we don't have many well-developed women written into this story.  There's The Woman in the Sweet World; Lena, Will and Arthur's mom; Agnieszka, Arthur's wife; Linda, Will's girlfriend in the later years...

This concern comes out of my AP English class where I noticed that most of our tragedies consist of a 3-D white guy suffering against the 2-D backdrop of non-white and non-male characters. I wonder if it would make sense to develop a convincing Virginia Wolff- or Simone de Beauvoir-type character, who, maybe just by her presence, satirizes the seriousness of what is going on with these self-important men. I'm having a real hard time imagining who it could be, but I think that shows just shows my narrow-mindedness.

The same narrow-mindedness that had the original (female) teacher of the class choose all books that are by white men, about white men.

The "stage" is already crowded with men angling to be the tragic hero. One thought is that current-day Carlton is Oberlin student/cult member Steffi Humboldt. In that case, Carlton Farthington did die and only appears in public dressed as the mascot. Steffi is the one who has taken over all of his material, including the material that he appropriated from Arthur White and Will. Maybe Steffi has some connection to Arthur that she would want to appropriate him, taking him into herself as it were, and bringing forth new life (okay that's problematic, but I'm trying here!).

But it does make sense to me that she or some other woman could be the sea devil. It might be interesting if we were able to write an entire story for her, where our story becomes just one small part of her universe. Unfortunately, my mind can only envision her having an Ophelia/Edna Pontellier/Virginia Wolff-type demise: she walks back into that element to which she is "native and indued." I suck.

Have a great day!