How A Song From Headley Grange in Hampshire Saves Us All
According to Bug Stu
The connections between the Middle-of-nowhere county of Newton in Indiana and the southest corner of the UK, and Purdue University, space programs, freshwater aliens, and 1970’s Prog Rock music, are not intuitive to people. It took the mind of a beetle, and not a Beatle, to put things together.
That beetle happens to live in a tree by my house in Kentland, Indiana (which I’ve come to refer to as the Land of Kent, for reasons which will make more sense to you Brits than to the Yanks initially).
The beetle, Stuard, was originally from the Sussex area but had moved to similarly marshy ground way over in northwest Indiana by 1816. He was not the only important Sussex transplant to take root here, near the former Beaver Lake, but we can’t get into that part of the story yet.
Naturally, Stu sees things a little differently than we do. Perspectives come from assimilations we make of how we see, hear, or otherwise experience the information from life with other living things. And like the Brits, Stu experienced over-maximization from the Industrial Revolution a little earlier than did his cousins in the US. That made him a little skeptical about simplistic ideas about “progress”. (I think Brits put the period on the outside of quotation marks, unlike Yanks. I’ll be inconsistent so as to, maybe, give equal time to each convention.)
Stu had left Sussex for a few reasons, but he maintained his fondness, its emotional bundling implied by his sadness, for his motherland, which he assumed would head for Industrial disaster in the name of progress. “Disaster” is a strong word, but he really really really didn’t like what he saw coming. Unfortunately the same thing was coming to his pristine marsh in Indiana.
Once Stu realized what was going to happen in northwest Indiana, such as with the attempts at draining Beaver Lake for farm ground, he started thinking evem more about his home area in southeast England. He’d fly into libraries and find school kids and college kids doing research, then look over their shoulder, or preferably from under a folded collar or long hair so he couldn’t be seen, to look at maps.
One time he had flown down to a Purdue University library, and he thought he was looking at a map of a country that showed the counties or states, but it was actually a diagram of a hog with the different cuts of meat outlined. After he’d done this and had even realized the mistake, he couldn’t stop seeing Wales as the head of a wild boar, maybe with a little hat, and with his home area in southeastern England as the lower rump and legs as the boar lay on its side.
Stu is very metaphorical, so the cuts-of-meat confusion got him thinking of how some humies (humans) see a land for its “usefulness” as something else, something rather narrow in terms of utility, for some narrow form of production. He saw that happening in Indiana and was distraught. Maybe even more troubling — its not just land that’s often seen for narrow utility. But then something appeared from the UK that gave him hope.
It was music, and Stu called it pastoral-progressive. Most called it Progressive Rock. He didn’t like the Rock n’ Roll connection much, because to him that was another form of industrialization, just of emotions. So while the music business labeled it all Progressive Rock or Prog Rock, he thought pastoral-progressive, implying a progressive form of pastoral music instead of a progressive form of Rock n’ Roll, whatever that could mean, was more fitting.
The over-maximization of industrialization had affected the US, of course, just as it had the UK. But the music scene in the US was reacting to it a little differently, a little more aggressively, what Stu called “bitching and bawling,” whereas certain British bands were much more circumspect, cerebral, sensible, and wholistic. (Stu is a lover of humie music, in fact it’s one of his main reasons for thinking we’ll make things okay.)
He was also still thinking of the boar and the meat cuts and how his home area, and really from Essex to Hampshire and back to Sussex and Kent, could almost be seen as throw-away portions from that particular perspective. He felt like there was a metaphor in there somewhere.
Anyway, he also knew that Thomas Bayes, of Bayesian reasoning, had done most of his important work in Kent, and that The Canterbury Tales also came from Kent, and both represented a compelling questioning of our thinking processes, the status quo, and conventional understandings. These weren’t throwaway thoughts nor specific to just one area of life, but not everyone realized it.
Bayes’ work was particularly important because Stu knew, or had imagined, two people in Indiana, from around Purdue and from Newton County, that were digging into how humies figure things out, or “what makes what’s so so, and what makes what is be”, at least in humie minds. Baysean reasoning is what it comes down to, and Stu had a lot of hope for what those two, Rhettie and Wally, were doing in this and other areas.
They had also come across the potential games-changing book Being You, which was written by Anil Seth of…Sussex University. You’ll recall that Stu is from Sussex originally. So was John Ade, one of the founders of Newton County in Indiana, where Rhettie and Wally do much of their work. John provides the eventual connection to Purdue, Kentland/Land of Kent, space programs, and the freshwater aliens, called Stralfs. Here’s where this all comes back to Headley Grange in Hampshire.
Headley Grange is/was a country manor, once a workhouse for people wthout a family or means to thrive, for whatever reason. It’s just into Hampshire from Sussex. Hampshire (also a famous breed of hog), is the kneecap of the British boar I’ve referred to here. It’s not a very “useful” part of the animal, in terms of meat. But Headley Grange represented something we’ve overlooked in our over-maximization, which is what Stu refers to as the 7th Pie in a modern economy, and it’s for all of us, not just the particularly disadvantaged. This is all part of a much longer story, so please bear with it, but let’s get to the song.
In 1974 the band Genesis, led in this endeavor by Peter Gabriel, wrote, composed, and performed music for their concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway at Headley Grange. (This won’t be about butchering a lamb.) Among all those beautiful and important songs, as Stu will lead us in understanding, “Carpet Crawlers” is the most densely packed in terms of Earth-saving meaning.
Earth-saving is a little misleading, and that leads us to another later Genesis song for clarification. According to Stu, another Genesis favorite, but from after Peter Gabriel left the band, “Squonk”, is really about an instance of mistaken identity — mistaking what was actually a Stralf, from Planet Stralf, as a rare/mythical Pennsylvanian woodland creature that cried a lot.
The Stralfs aren’t actually here to destroy the earth but to convince us to swap planets with them. They’ve been here since 1819, first just as a few scouts (which is what was seen in the Pennsylvanian woods), then by the thousands.
How they influence us is for a later installment (or go down the rabbit trail that starts here), but their strategy has been to put the planet in peril, put us all against each other, then eventually offer us, through known humie space magnates, a better life for ourselves and our heirs on their very very similar planet — according to Stu.
Rhettie and Wally, only abstractly depicted above, are likely to have found another a solution. It involves ideas from different times and different countries from all over the world, not that they’re One-worlders, which is ominous in its own way, at least to me. (I’m not sure how Stu feels about that.)
How the southeast part of the UK ended up being such a key part of this story is hard to say. And how Indiana got connected in all this seems even more unexplainable. I don’t know yet — sometimes things just happen.
If you want to learn more about this, here’s how the story is unfolding over here in Indiana, as I explained things a couple days ago at The Pie. Since Julie is putting out Motivate the Mind from Sussex, it seemed potentially important that I made contact with her and her readers.
At that link you’ll see in the Table of Contents that #6 (a 12 minute read) is where you need to go, unless you want to read about my thoughts on literal and figurative kintsugi, Thanksgiving, architectural restoration, etc.
You might end up joining The Resistance, but we’re not worried about that yet.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
