Deadwood, diluvium, Conclusions, Circles

So the Deadwood: The Complete Series boxed set arrived yesterday. The physical set is put together really nicely and only cost $75 when I ordered it.

I pop in the final DVD and listen to David Milch talking about how the series ended. He is visibly and audibly disappointed at how things went down.

SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE WORKS AHEAD

He talks at length about endings, how when we wrap up narratives we're all agreeing upon a lie - that a story does in fact end. Ironically, that's actually something I loved about the way the series currently ends. It's abrupt. It's not pretty. Everything is left hanging and therefore just about anything is possible. It avoids the huge problem, the inevitable letdown, that is the wrapup for most massive and otherwise impressive projects.

Dante's Divine Comedy suffers from this problem. When Dante the pilgrim emerges from Hell and sees the stars, they're far away, possibilities. But the closer he gets to Heaven, the more boring things become. Heaven becomes stasis. Alice Notley's brilliant and moving The Descent of Alette nicely improves upon Dante by offering up a world free from the Tyrant but not trying to replace it as the author. Monty Python realized that the hilarity of a sketch would not be undermined if they just stopped it instead of trying to find a final punchline.

A quick note before I tie this to diluvium - try to find Notley's sequence in its original publication, The Scarlet Cabinet.

Milch's comments got me thinking about diluvium and how it ends. I've long thought of the end as a lie of sorts, but my conception of time works cyclically. My dissertation is not just another book project, but an integral part of a worldview I'm expressing over the course of many books and other works. Things begin, so to speak, with El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent. All the incidental poems I write, particularly the sequences, occur in the world as it exists after the conquest in OcSerp. The Icarus Sketches stretches itself through that world. The Angel of Music, a musical I have yet to write, occurs to either side of that world (heaven and hell are to the sides, not above and below, in this concept). After, a graphic novel, fleshes out hell a bit more. And there's a series of stories I haven't written yet that lead up to the world being flooded. Which brings us to diluvium. Noah and his wife, floating out there, figuring out themselves and each other. And I'd planned to have things come full circle, which is somewhat depressing. Despite all they learn, they are one of the ships (you didn't think it would just be two people saved, did you?) that appears on the horizon and lands at the beginning of OcSerp, and everything starts again. Although that's not totally depressing, as even OcSerp presents the existence of dissenting voices (insisting the whole time that these are marginalized by the history-makers).

Or at least that's my view if I look at it as an ouevre. But after listening to Milch and thinking about some of the works I've really enjoyed, I wonder if I should leave off an ending to diluvium. And if I do, how much should I leave up to chance? I picture myself printing off and hanging all the poems (I'm writing them as 11" by 17" pages in an image-editing program), then setting fire to the latter half and telling someone outside the room to put it out. It takes some of the power away from me. That's appealing.