Thought Pioneers on The Porch
How These Two Thought Through “Ought To”
[Here it is on Spotify! If you know anything about Bug Stu, you know he sees music as an even bigger deal than we do, and using Spotify lets us connect this to whatever music seems best for understanding his story. For now, it’s pretty minimal here, just a (super symbolic) R.E.M. song at the end: “Begin the Begin.”]
Postmodernism has been showing some cracks since the early 2000’s. Maybe the whole postmodernism thing, the cracks, and whatever emerges, are part of a growth process. I think so. Growth is often painful. Postmodernism seems to have been at least as painful as it was emancipating, which seems to have been the goal, at least some of the time.
Maybe some of the time it was just novelty and self-serving “access to impulse” — dressed up as honest philosophy and searching. Maybe we gave up “access to purpose” in that, from misconceptions about how happiness works. Sometimes little goals get in the way of bigger goals. Or sometimes strategies get in the way of goals — but this isn’t a business blog about distinguishing terms like that.
As we’ve come to understand our minds way better over the last twenty years, our distinctions, partitions, and compartmentalizing —we know more than ever how those resulting trees can obfuscate a forest, let alone the mycorrhizal networks in the forest floor, in their shared root environment, so to speak. The analogies about networks of thoughts and things are endless, but let me jump to our story with all that in mind.
Rhettie and Wally, like a lot of other people, are from Indiana. Maybe that’s at least partly why they’ve come up with IndSteadavision as the name for their stories, which they’re just now starting to develop. Rhettie is from one of those Middle of Nowhere places, a little over an hour south of Chicago near the state line. Wally is from Lafayette, home, sort of, of Purdue (actually in West Lafayette).
And I’m not making this up, Bug Stu is. Stu, and his friend Allie, think we humans need a different story if we’re gonna move past postmodernism. It’s related to the forest metaphor I mentioned. The complexity and interactions of reality, especially when elements with true agency are involved, like us, are so complicated that we have to create narratives to feel like we understand things.
One of the things postmodernism did for us was to make us more aware of this, even if it was (is) painful along the way. Then neuropsychology came along and started to untangle some of the knots, or massage some of the knots, that postmodernism pointed out, and sometimes created.
Somehow, I swear, all that leads to this next episode about Rhettie and Wally, their IndSteadavision, and something Stu and I call The 7th Pie. It’s a pretty long story, but there are a lot of nice things along the way. There’s also some semi-geeky stuff, a little, so I hope that’s okay.
In the previous episode, Rhettie and Wally appear to have made commitments to each other, to stick together, in this thing that Bug Stu refers to as a Frodomance, which is a form of a platonic relationship, although I’m not sure entangling it with platonic anything is necessarily accurate yet.
(Note: it’s harder than ever to come up with a term that no one else has “made up” for their own purposes. The meaning of Frodomance in this story has to do with there being two people committed to a relatively altruistic mission — altruistic other than giving into the personal compulsion to complete the mission. Altruistic — not in the way of O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, but in completing a more broadly beneficial quest, such as with Tolkien’s Sam and Frodo and the elegantly evil ring.)
Rhettie and Wally, as Bug Stu will mention in his poem for us below, are playing out their quest to “turn back the foes of flourishing” by creating a Different Story, which is an idea Stu nudged into Rhettie’s mind through her dreams, in which he shows up often.
As some of you know, there’s a bit of a mobius strip (or a mobius trip?) in this, because eventually Rhettie starts including Stu in the story(ies) she and Wally are writing. I’ve mentioned this development on the podcast of all this (not sure it’s really a podcast but here it is), and it gets tricky, or sticky, because Rhettie is not interpreting and conveying Stu exactly how he’d like, or how he sees himself.
That’s showbiz, at least, and life maybe. And as in showbiz, and life, that little feature doesn’t always figure into things very much, on the everyday level of things, for better or worse, and the same is true here. It’s fine to just keep it in the back of our minds most of the time.
Okay, here’s another part of the story from Stu, about one of the first meetings Rhettie and Wally had on the “back porch” of the Purdue Memorial Union, when the medieval theme first emerged in a serious way.
Oh, speaking of references…Tyler Durden is mentioned, the “dissociative villain” character from Fight Club. The line itself is a reference to a line from a 1974 prog rock concept album, the best ever in the opinions of a significant many, from the first years of popular postmodernism. You know if you know, or something, as they say. (Stu loved that band.)
AND, there’s mention of Stralfs, of course, which I’m slightly and even then undeservedly proud to say you can google, aka the Foes of Flourishing in this world. They can look like small blobs, which is all you need to know — for the poem below.
Rhettie and Wally on The Porch at Purdue, According to Stu
The coalescing story of two pioneers,
a porch, Purdue, some cheers, some tears…
Those mostly tears of joy, release,
the feeling of a fought-for peace,
in thought, where most fights need to be;
cut through the veils and clearly see.
Two pioneers of Now and Then,
and Here and There, how they’d begin,
with I/Thou firmly in their minds,
from Buber — and Frankl, Wittgenstein,
and others from the pre-postwar,
prepared them as they’d search, explore.
(Search, explore…not quite the same.
Though a rose is a rose by another name,
and beauty finds the open minds,
a search bears fruit of a dubious kind.
Its goal is set as the search begins,
but explorers hope for unknown ends.)
Could peace prevail through their shared songs,
and stories, poems, despite the throngs
of wailing, flailing, sycophants
of Pan and profit? They hear their chants.
And Tyler Durden leads the parade,
with others to further fray and abrade.
“The play’s the thing again this time.
But not like Hamlet. There’s no real crime,”
said Rhettie as she raised her glass.
And Wally paused — the seconds passed.
Then an awkward seven seconds in,
Wally spoke, “Yes, the play, again!”
They clinked their cups and downed their tea,
Fort…ified with poor whiskey.
“A fort? A castle? Just whimsically.”
“You’ve drunk too much?”
“Well, just slightly.”
But Rhettie kept that in her mind,
’cause Camelot was a favorite find.
Through her grandma’s records, the phonograph,
the musicals… “She’ll get about half,”
she’d say to Grandpa. Rhettie danced and sang,
“Right now it’s fluff, just fun meringue.
One day she’ll understand the whole pie,
not just the show — she’s got a bright Star Eye.”
Now her eyes climbed up the Union’s wall,
“A castle, clearly, with walls…so tall!”
Then Wally saw her vision, too.
“And draw the crowd Julie Andrews drew?!”
“Yes, drew, or draws, and draw a bridge,
a drawbridge…yes…and a distant ridge.
And there the Foes, not hurrying,
but scheming, planning, not worrying,
they knew they’d enter undetected,
if all were true and none defected.”
“The Stralfs could clinch the horses’ toes.”
“They’re hooves, but yes, ‘Foes on Their Toes’
might be a song we’d write for this,
a play on words — I can’t resist.
They walk through mud and piles of dung.
Who would notice if there Stralfs hung?”
“Then once inside the castle wall,
they’d drop and hide, wash off, and all…”
“But where’s the water? Where’s that come from?”
“Yeah wait, and they need cover…um…”
“Hey maybe while they’re on the bridge,
the drawbridge, thick with poo porridge…”
“It’s mostly mud, but I think I know
just what you mean: off the edge they’d go.
Yeah, nonchalantly roll to the side,
get in the moat, clean off, then hide…”
“They swim? Or float?”
“Yeah, they take in air,
when they drop from the bridge,
on their way down there.”
So there they were, those pioneers,
reciprocal muses and their enmeshed gears,
with what we call a Different Story,
for the 7th Pie, and for her Grandma Dorie.
They know there’s a way long way to go,
but fearing failure only makes it so.
Well, wait, we don’t need a trite expression,
but it can be true, and it’s my impression.
I mean, if the fear kept the two from trying,
then failure’s sure, clearly no denying.
They will not have failed, I mean,
but nothing will have changed; the scene
continues down that rutted path,
cut by Stralfs, let’s say, their wrath,
against you Farmers of the Earth,
you humies, so, instead of mirth,
and flourishing, the Life, its worth,
turns dark…
But darkness precedes birth.
(To be continued)
Thanks for reading.
Tim
