Dorie’s Degrees in Life and Libraries
or A Poem for Margaret: For Whenever You’re Ready
The setting is summer of 2019, pre-Covid, in The Middle of Nowhere, Ade Country, Indiana. Rhettie (or Margaret), now 28 years old, is reading a letter from her grandma, Dorie, which she just found again after twenty years, and which she’d first read long before she could really understand it, in 1999, when she was eight.
These are the days in 2019 just before Rhettie had started to “make Bug Stu real” for people, as will become clear in this piece. It was before she’d met Wally, before Allie Space-Owl, and before she joined the co-working space. But this helps bring things together, and this is a fine place to start if you’re new. Dorie’s thoughts kick this off, but it expands by way of Rhettie, and even me, and maybe you.
Like Bug Stu, Grandma Dorie (or Dorothy) meanders a bit through different areas of societal thought on her way to what she wants to say. Or maybe that meandering is exactly what she wants to say, or how she figures it out, because it contains the dimensions she thinks we need for rethinking.
She thinks we need to think-about-thinking a lot — especially after we started hanging around the preening postmoderns, as she puts it. She has always been a good natured skeptic, out of caring, and for avoiding unnecessary sadness, especially for others. She is a serious explorer though, like Rhettie.
And she doesn’t think the men that started Postmodernism were being serious enough about their roles as public explorers. She calls them Sophists — like what Socrates and Athens had to contend with, then suffer and die.
Dorie’s letter is about three minutes long. I didn’t put any links in for her miscellaneous specialized allusions, not that you couldn’t look them up. So it’s kind of like how Rhettie would have experienced her grandma’s letters. Rhettie learned to ask a lot of questions, which was part of her grandma’s goal.
In the first stanzas, you’ll sense that Dorie is reacting to something that hurt her, and the source of that pain will come out a ways into the poem.
This whole thing is a kind of poem today, the rhyming kind, so I hope that’s okay. It covers a lot of ground, so we’ll be back over time to fill in the roots and branches.
Here’s Dorie’s letter.
Dear Rhettie,
I know a lot of this will be hard for you to understand now, but keep reading. And keeeep reading. More importantly, keep learning. More than facts. Questions the maps. Maybe we’ll be done with postmodernism before you need to understand what it is. We’ll talk soon : ).
A rhyming letter for making things better: )
They camouflaged their sophistry
in esoteric charm,
then sewed a thread through History,
“‘No truth’ so what’s the harm?”
The thread was spread with earthy paste,
a diatomaceous kind,
Traitorous tailors trained in haste,
and didn’t see what would unwind.
The “No truth” thread abrades away
and cuts through every thought.
What’s left is Pleasure, Pain, and Fray,
but Purpose can’t be fixed or bought.
The earth, our home, like everything,
is not without its toxins, sting,
and thus Apollo, Artemis,
beat Dionysian artifice.
But markets…targeting our Want
with things and thoughts and ways,
for dollars, ideologues, the hunt,
the thread is taunt, it stretches, frays.
And maybe truth starts with that Fray,
so we might look around,
and look inside, and come away,
with mindfulness — it might redound
to modern wisdom’s treasure — found.
Another turn, an Axial Age,
we look inside,
page after page,
our Wants abide,
a faithful search,
not greed, not pride,
a higher perch.
An owl of some kind, claws are clenched,
not on a throat, but fixed, intent,
upon that branch, where she can see,
the tocks and ticks that make thought be.
And sometimes she might need a friend,
a little bug, she’d send him in
for details on which she’d depend.
They’d write new books, they’d re-begin.
A middle ground, a middle way,
but not a compromise.
A little brave, a little grey.
Her vision, hearing — his compound eyes.
The mindfulness of Artemis,
assigned to fly above.
Apollo’s vision, loftiness,
grounded, caring…
a curious, hopeful, kind of love.
A middle ground, a middle way,
the shores are not enough.
The coasts won’t show what lets the Fray,
evade repair, and huff and puff,
and blow the Star Eyes to the sea,
where Neptune snuffs them out,
their brightness, sight, complexity,
go dead, and that’s what Death’s about.
Instead, if we could make repairs,
and understand the ploys,
and shore up complex loves and cares,
return the Stars for girls and boys.
The future ladies, gentlemen,
a mindful growing crowd,
that all start in the River,
vying to make some mentors proud.
Some mentors…though some call it free,
for humans it can never be,
our brains are big enough to see,
life’s always more than Now and Me…
Some mentors…hint of what’s okay,
a splintered view will still hold sway,
as others try to find their way,
some mentors only know the Fray.
Some mentors…start to fit right in
the zeitgeist of the times and then
they step away, and think again,
of how they think — and re-begin.
An interstitial mindful way,
between the seams we know.
Between what seems so whole and real,
we see how winds and wolves can blow.
The she-wolf with her wiles and ways,
the he-wolf with his guile and gaze,
the wolves may howl and blow, and graze
for meat, but solid shelter stays.
Neptune doesn’t want your soul,
or Star Eyes that make humans whole,
and go back to the sky to say
to others, “Here’s what makes the Fray.”
The rivers’ rich riparian shores
are meant to pull you in,
to find your earth, your purpose, mirth,
a place to land and plan, dig in.
Repairia’s for riparian shores,
of fabric, truth, whole thought.
It’s more than just the soil, and Pan,
no matter what the Sophists brought.
The thread sewn in has sown a din
of disconnected howls,
and now extracting it and wolves
will take some special owls,
a kind of owl that likes the Y’s
of trees close to the ground,
close enough to hear the cries,
but not be too earth-bound.
They’ll need some helpers,
some beetle bugs, brave and special too.
And they can see the needle’s path
so they’ll know what to do.
Then they might extract the thread
…or maybe decide to…
like Neptune, just dissolve the thing,
and heal what’s left, what’s true.
Love forever,
Gma D.
Then Rhettie took her grandma’s note,
and held it to her chest.
She felt her heart beat, felt the chills,
and wondered what was next.
“Is this my path? Is this, at last,
the meaning of my dreams?
Did I read this…years ago?
Cuz that’s the way it seems.
“And grandma’s almost eighty-four,
I want to make this real.
I want to show her that I know,
the point of what she’s made me feel.
“I want her…to know I know
about the Soil, and what we sow,
and how my tears can make things grow,
and heal; that’s what she needs to know.”
Rhettie found a purple pen
and a flowered sticky note,
her tears had smeared some letters,
and she smiled and cried at what she wrote.
Grandma,
I will make those stories real.
And they will show what’s not revealed
in normal expositions, sealed
for mystically fraught times but healed,
by a reimagined stream and field.
I will make those stories real.Love forever,
Rhettie
She put her grandma’s poem
back in the envelope, so old.
They both forgot the letter,
since there were many, truth be told.
But on this day, the stars were right,
with Rhettie, ready, she more than might
go find some Helpers, to think and write,
a crew, to make what’s faded bright.
Then out the window, she could see
her Grandma Dorie, busily,
picking daisies she’d bring in,
for Rhettie’s birthday, once again.
She put them in the same old vase,
a “D” imprinted near its base,
Rhettie saw her smiling, then
she walked on in and they’d begin:
“D’s for Dorie!” Rhettie said,
“D’s for daisy!” Grandma said instead.
They’d played this game for thirty years,
the memories brought her mom to tears.
She’d just joined them, and unannounced.
Surprised, the vase, knocked over, bounced
first on the chair, then to the floor,
in several pieces, really more.
The three of them, stood hand to mouth,
they’d watched it in slow motion.
All those years, all those birthdays,
all Dories’ life…and then, commotion.
“I’ve always wanted this repaired!
It’s leaked a bit for fifty years!
It’s had a crack but stayed intact.
It’s broke, so that allays my fears!
“I’ve got a nice kintsugi kit,
but never had the chance,
to try it out, make use of it,
but here’s the perfect circumstance.”
“Indeed, it is a circumstance,”
Rhettie loved her words.
Her mom gave her a sideways glance;
Dorie laughed, quite unperturbed.
Their tears all quickly dried
as Grandma showed them on her phone
kintsugi fixes, all supplied
by others, learning on their own.
“Repairia! Like I used to say
when Rhettie was just small.
In fact I might have seen this then.
Look at the roots and all!”
“Mom, I don’t think those are roots…”
“Oh…yes they are, I see!”
Said Rhettie as she let her looking
see things differently.
“And now this vase will have some roots,
and gold ones, gold on green.
I like that look, yes gold on green.
It’s royal and…”
“Serene! Yes, gold and green,
and more serene, without that crack,
that fissure, cleaned
of faults about to break apart,
Grandma, that would break my heart.
And just imagine, if you weren’t here,
that crack, the cleaving, always near…
But you, you had that…fracture hack
— we could put Humpty Dumpty back!”
They laughed and picked the pieces up,
and brought out Rhettie’s pie.
She preferred this pie to cake,
and made a rhyme to remind them why.
“Bumble…berry Pie, not cakes,
I like the shell and goo.
I like the breaking, through the crust,
and what’s inside it, too.
I like that those three berries there,
the red and green and blue,
can make up any other hue
…if they were lights…
And since they’re not then that’s not really true.
And I’m a geek, thanks Grandma,
…and that’s why I love you.”
They laughed again and hugged,
then Rhettie paused and told them, “Wait.
I don’t need any gifts today, I know,
I’m way too late.
But I just found a poem today,
and I just don’t know what to say,
but Grandma wrote this years ago,
and I’ve been wondering, but now I know.
I know what I should do from here,
on out I mean, this made it clear.
Here grandma, read this, this first, here.”
So grandma started reading,
what Rhettie wrote that afternoon,
She started out, but her voice soon broke,
and Rhettie wondered…why so soon.
But Dorie had remembered well,
the poem from years ago,
the one she’d sent to Rhettie,
when she’d felt her lowest low.
The year was 1999,
with Rhettie only eight,
her brother had started school,
but said he’d never graduate.
Dorie knew his reasons,
but his parents didn’t know,
and they blamed her,
and she let them believe that it was so.
It was in his darkest times,
and sometimes she would hear him cry
to Counting Crows, This Desert Life,
he’d lost a girl, his friend, his love,
his long-time presumed wife.
Elizabeth had left his world,
his heart abandoned,
his mind then hurled
him off the edges everywhere,
he groped for meaning,
he couldn’t care
for anyone or anything,
just those songs, and softly sing.
And Dorie’s heart had never felt
so weak and so inflamed,
she’d never trusted
Sophists, as she called them, those she blamed.
“They’ll never look to see the whole!”
she’d say, with unseemly rage.
Unseemly, that is, for Dorie,
in her sanguine middle age.
A woman of composure, peace,
of learning that had never ceased,
who’d always “find a way.”
But now her grandson, crushed, abandoned,
brought her mind back to…the Fray.
That’s the name she’d given it
from her reading long ago.
A twist on T.S. Eliot’s
Little Gidding, she had come to know.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest
between the wars.
The pain, the strain, the lack of gain,
detested and abhorred.
“The sun will rise, but that’s not great.
It’s Eliot who has grasped our fate,
the Place, the first time, see it…wait…”
And that’s how this had started out,
the phrase, the place, some turnabout.
“And know the place for the first time.
And know the plays for the first time.
And know the phrase for the first time.
And know the frays for the first time.”
Dorie wondered, line by line,
repeating them, and on the third time,
“Know the plays, and know the phrase,
and know the frays, all three, they rhyme.”
Dorie never ceased exploring,
and as she’s neared her end,
The Fray is what she’d focus on,
to break the path and re-begin.
But in that fall of ’99,
“the end of the world,
and I don’t feel fine”
they joked together
and Dorie resigned
to their circumstance,
and then line by line
she wrote the letter,
the poem, part screed,
to heal and make herself feel better,
and vent a bit, to see to it,
to plant a thought,
against the Fray that had beset her.
And here they were, twenty years on,
and Rhettie, held it again.
Dorie’s dream, a stream of thoughts,
on how…to re-begin.
Her little screech owl and beetle bug,
and the screed she’d have left under a rug,
but maybe it has a role to play,
she wondered as Rhettie looked her way.
Rhettie, now at twenty-eight,
with eyes of stars, for distant stars,
she’d had a path, but she had to wait.
Like Dorie, she was shaken by the flood of tears and scars.
Rhettie wondered, like Francie did,
the girl with the tree in Brooklyn,
how Reasons crept to life and hid,
with no windows to open…or to look in.
Grandma remembered Rhettie back then,
at eight and a budding sage.
A budding tree, growing and thin,
to bear fruit in the future Axial Age.
That’s what Grandma had often said,
a turning, as happens every now and again,
centuries apart as we uncover Indstead,
reinterpret our dreams, and again, re-begin.
Those stories that Dorie had set aside,
once too, a girl with a mission,
once too, a little girl, and still inside,
and they wondered about Rhetties’ decision.
She held the note from Rhettie now,
she’d started reading but paused.
Her voice had left, the tears had come,
and Rhettie hoped she knew the cause.
She pushed her hand out, fingers spread,
and locked with Dorie’s hand.
They’d made a story long ago while lying on the bed,
and in this story, trolls had come to take away our land.
Stralfs they called them, unaware some humans knew their plan,
the Hand Hug was the sign we’d use to show we’d take a stand.
The sign said “We both know that there’s been something going on,
to make us sad and mad — and glad to leave, to launch, be gone.”
But these were happy tears that flowed
from Dories’ bright green eyes.
Rhettie’s were the same and both
had visions shared inside.
Rhettie took the note and sat beside her grandma now.
Now hard to read, but she would need to steel herself somehow.
She read the note, out loud, as she’d intended, a brief sweet vow.
Dear Grandma,
I will make those stories real.
And they will show what’s not revealed
in normal expositions, sealed
for mystically fraught times but healed,
by a reimagined stream and field.I will make those stories real.
Love forever,
Rhettie
That moment everything sort of changed. They locked fingers again, then turned their clasped hands around like they used to so they could kiss the back of the other’s hand, and they sneakily whispered, “Onward.”
