Let’s Begin Again
A Poem and A Story behind the Storied Pie
There’s a partial Reset that seems more important than the big Reset that’s been talked about lately. Aesthetics like Cottage Core, Dark Academia, Light Academia, Permaculture, are related, but it’s not quite the same as those. In a way it’s more conserving and conservative, but not in the political sense necessarily.
(I’ve recorded an audio version of this at Bug Stu and The Pie at Spotify. The Medium robot you get to at the top of this page is not good for this. At all.)
The story that Bug Stu is conveying to us, and to the rest of the galaxy really, sort of wrote itself, as they say, Stu says. I’m mostly just here to tell Stu’s story, because even imaginary beetles are unable to use keyboards and things, as I’ve mentioned before.
But just like how Rhettie’s interpretation of her dreams, the ones featuring Bug Stu, aren’t exactly what Stu intended to inject into her thoughts, I probably have some of my own potential misinterpretations of his intent. I’m going to trust that this is part of how “the story is writing itself” and that it’s okay.
(I’ll get back to Rhettie and Wally in the top picture along with the poem, shortly, but this next music part is related.)
So…
The band R.E.M. came onto the alternative scene in the early eighties. Lately I had been listening mostly to British bands up until then, like Genesis, Pink Floyd, and Supertramp (also Talking Heads and The B-52s and a few others from The States). Stu says he tended to listen to the same British bands, partly because they generally lamented the destruction of a way of life in England as well as the industrial exacerbation of nefarious elements in human nature. (You might recall that Stu grew up in the marshlands of East Sussex)
Stu and I hadn’t met yet, but when R.E.M. came on the scene with “Radio Free Europe” with that American jangly guitar sound, it really got his attention. Like me, he didn’t exactly love the obscure and sometimes incoherent lyrics, especially compared to the tighter lyrical composition in the British bands he (we) liked.
On the other hand, it seemed like R.E.M. was touching on something like those British bands had been with their “Prog Rock.” Like me, he waited intently for each new R.E.M album. For brevity here, I’ll just skip to the 1986 album to explain the title above, even though it really started with the 1984 album, Reckoning, consistent with the fireflies’ assertion that “84 is the portal” on a more cosmic level, according to Stu, as I mentioned in an earlier installment.
The title “Begin the Begin” is a play on “Begin the Beguine” written by Cole Porter…from Indiana, which is where Rhettie and Wally are from, specifically Ade Country and The Star City, respectively. Anyway, “Begin the Beguine” a hit from the 1930’s, was one those “almost love songs” with very clever lyrics and a sweet story. “Begin the Begin” was different, but the similarity in the titles is compelling and creates a bridge in big meanings.
According to Stu, the lyrics in R.E.M.’s “Begin the Begin” and the refrain “Let’s begin again” have multiple meanings to the Galaxy (the thought world of us humans), spanning from a personal relationship, i.e., “Let’s begin again,” to whole societies with their philosophies and economic development ideas, among other things. Okay, we’ll get more into that sometime, but now we can return to Rhettie and Wally.
There are All Kinds of Breakups and Makeups
You could say, like Bug Stu does, that humans kind of broke up with Earth in the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t entirely unjustified, as Mother Nature can be a bitch, even according to Stu (and even according to his friend, Allie Space-Owl). And the British were the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, so it kind of makes sense that they’d be the first ones to generate the Prog Rock lamentations about the break up. (Wally and Stu also stumbled onto this fact while going through Wally’s dad’s albums and notes.)
But this is about another break up, or at least an unfriendly fissure. Among their other differences, Wally had not been near the Earth-steward that Rhettie had been, nor had he been hesitant to trick people with his expertise in persuasion. But he’s been changing. This episode today actually happened a little before last week’s here at Motivate the Mind, as will be clear probably.
In an earlier meeting, the year or so long relationship around “bringing Bug Stu to life for everyone” seemed to be ending. The issue was that Wally could not shake his cynical embrace of persuasion, manipulation, and profiteering. That is, he was clearly trying to change his attitude, but he’d revert back to his sort of wolf-self too often, and Rhettie had had enough, so she thought she needed to find someone else.
But Rhettie didn’t want to feel this way. She wanted to keep going with Wally. She even knew, or knew she wanted to think, that Wally was giving up on his conniving wolf mode of marketing. “How can I trust you if they can’t trust you? And they don’t know they shouldn’t trust you! So should I?”
Here’s Wally’s conundrum. His role as a marketing consultant meant his claim to “be able to talk anyone into anything” was useful for most clients, but not all. Not Rhettie. He had made that claim to her at the beginning just like he did most clients, and she never forgot her distaste, though they’d still worked well together for a year or so. He’d seem to move away from it, then revert back, and Rhettie was never sure where he really stood.
But he wasn’t sure he should really change. On the other hand, his work with Rhettie wasn’t like anything he’d done before, and he was sort of pulled to giving everything else up in order to “bring Bug Stu to life” or “make Bug Stu real” or one of the other phrases they teased each other with (because it’s easy to make Bug Stu/stew jokes, and because it all seemed a little absurd, and they both knew it).
However, Wally wanted to be “philosophically consistent,” as he put it. He didn’t want to be both, the jaded marketing consultant who “could talk anyone into anything” and the one working as an honest and whole person with Rhettie on a project like this. He might have been a bit of a wolf, but he needed to be consistent, internally, in his wolfness — or give it up.
They Had a Bit of a Fight
Yes, they did. There hadn’t been a lot of words, but they both left one work session saying they needed to do some thinking, and they both knew what that meant. Rhettie did do some thinking, a lot, but she never could make up her mind about what to do with Wally and his part in her project.
Wally did a lot of thinking, too. And he listened to a lot of music. Then he put the music away because he knew how music worked on his mind and made him too emotional in his decisions. Then he made up his mind. Then he put some music back on and wrote something for Rhettie that (sort of) explained his decision.
They set up another work session, and they both knew it might be their last, which was sad to them, even if it was the best thing to do. When they met, Rhettie noticed some atypical mannerisms in Wally. And he wasn’t joking around at all, which was weird. He said he had written something for her, and that he just wanted to give it to her to read while he went and had some coffee outside their meeting room.
You might remember that Wally, by way of his passion and profession, really has a way with words. He intentionally writes in simple terms and short sentences. He’s often teased Rhettie for writing like her Grandma Dorie, with long sentences that “hardly anyone will trudge through or know why they did if they do,” as he put it, intentionally making a rhyme.
Rhettie didn’t know what to expect as she took the letter, and she wasn’t sure what to make of Wally leaving the room. You can see from the picture above that Rhettie is on the verge of tearing up. Not quite tears, but a little melty, as Stu calls it.
She could tell it was written in stanzas from seeing through the back side of the paper. Her first thought was that he’d composed a nice goodbye poem, so she was somewhat resigned to the breakup and was already thinking of what she should say in response.
She turned the paper over and started reading, sort of looking forward to some bittersweet recollections of their time working together before he said goodbye. But that’s not what he had composed. Here’s what he wrote:
(She finally deciphered what he’d scribbled at the top: Merely My Humble and Modest Proposal.)
(And Rhettie laughed at herself a little for liking the word proposal and how it made her briefly forget about the goodbye poem she still expected to read.)
Here’s the poem he handed to Rhettie:
The Bright Spot
Let’s go build a Bright Spot
and a school along the way,
with five components, like a star,
a place to work and play,
a place to think and change the pace,
a place to wink and leave the race
for Cheese and build a better place
for those to come, a smiling face.
Let’s light the way to Nowhere
in its middle near a marsh,
a flattened land where fireflies roam
where Progress has been harsh.
Not a place that Time forgot
but maybe others did,
or maybe they forgot the future
and treasures Progress hid.
Let’s sharpen up some simple tools,
and see what’s hidden there,
what’s hidden in Repairia,
warm shelved shelter and fine fare.
Let’s ponder Plato’s Ship of Fools,
and maybe clear the air,
and open up Agraria,
skipping over the trolls’ snare.
Let’s fit The Shop with all the things,
to fix and build a thing that brings
a smile or pause to people’s days,
and pleases, draws, a steward’s gaze.
Let’s build The Port and join the web
and plan for both the flow and ebb
of trends and wise technology,
for trade and travel, as on the sea.
The Village is already there,
but needs some love and needs repair.
Repairians have a lot to do,
the little things and shelter, too.
The Landing, too, is mostly there.
It’s mostly land, and where we dare
to train and strain and make complete,
a family para-agrarian retreat.
The Pie, the fifth point, at the top,
ensures the stories never stop,
with stories of what makes Is be,
inures the Nowheres and city.
“What makes Is be?” How this began.
Star City, Ade, and Nowhere land,
and questions for our biggest test,
What makes us whole? Why this unrest?
That’s where Allie and Stu come in.
An owl and beetle, where we begin
again to question why we’re fraught
with fights and plights of warring Oughts,
and why Bright Spots don’t light the land,
and how our Fits and Fray began.
They’ve theorized a 7th Pie,
an atom suit, a bright Star Eye.
They know we need a different tale
about why peace just won’t prevail.
They’ve found the foes of flourishing,
which are quite small and not Earthlings.
So here begins…beneath a star-filled sky,
The Making of The 7th Pie.
Not that anyone was around to see Rhettie read the poem, but we can imagine seeing her. It’s funny how when someone reads, you can’t tell what they’re thinking. You might see a smile; there might be a laugh, but there might not be. Either way, so many little wheels of different shapes and sizes and colors are turning. And the wheels and cogs in the little factory roll out questions and tentative conclusions and too-fanciful scrap for recycling later and all kinds of things. It’s kind of sweet to know that’s going on.
And sometimes the little factory rolls out tears along with everything else, like this time with Rhettie. Wally had somehow put almost everything she’d ever mentioned in his proposal poem. It wasn’t at all a goodbye poem, but she couldn’t know that for sure until the last two lines, because he’s good with twists, as she’d seen. There was no twist. It was more like one of his proposals for a marketing approach. That’s exactly what it was, she first thought.
But then she realized that it might still be a goodbye poem, sort of as a gift for her as she continued alone. He’d left the room, and maybe that was why. And maybe he had left the building even.
Then Wally showed up at the window of the conference room, and Rhettie stood up and tilted her head “about 14 degrees” as a way to sort of express her love of the poem and her question of just what he meant by giving it to her.
He opened the door and said, “To be honest, I really liked writing that poem. I kinda want to read it to you. Would that be weird?”
She didn’t want to ask what he had meant by it yet, because she’d convinced herself it was a goodbye poem again. “Here, yes. Yes it’s weird. But I want you to. I mean, I think I get it, and I liked it…but go ahead. Please.”
So Wally took the poem, still standing up, with Rhettie still standing up right in front of him, a little awkwardly, too close, but it’s a small room and chairs were in the way.
He began,
“Let’s go build a Bright Spot
and a school along the way,
with five components, like a star,
a place to work and play…”
Rhettie interrupted, “Let’s? Us? Do you mean us?”
Wally nodded his head and motioned back and forth with his hand to mean “Yes, you and me” as he kept reading.
“…a place to think and change the pace,
a place to wink and leave the race
for Cheese and build a better place
for those to come, a smiling face…”
And Rhettie went from having melty eyes to full tears and pretty much crying as she also laughed a little as Wally kept on reading. Hearing Wally read it was so much different. That and knowing for sure what he meant was too much for even Rhettie to hold in. And she didn’t completely stop her crying and sort of laughing all the way through the poem. And she saw Wally had melty eyes now.
She couldn’t say anything and didn’t want to yet. Neither could Wally, but he put out his right hand and did the thing where he points toward her left shoulder like they’d often done. And she was supposed to lift her left arm and just touch the tip of her finger to his like always.
But this time she said, “No.” Then she hugged him and squeezed out a few more tears.
They had never hugged. The quirky index finger tip connection is what they’d chosen to do instead of hugging. Normies might have just been doing business hugs the whole time — but that seemed weird for them.
Today, this hug apparently had to happen, and Wally apparently needed to have tear marks and a little makeup on his shirt, and the sheet of paper with the poem needed to get pretty wrinkled up as he hugged Rhettie back.
Pretty. According to Stu.
(To be continued)
