A Post-Paliative Publication for Us Postmoderns
It’s Not A Long Post. It’s a Short Compilation
What I mean by the title is that postmodernism always struck me as creative, rich, and reactionary even while I was immersed in it. Reactionary postures often seem bent on pre-conceived prognoses and prescriptions, while the incompleteness, the short-circuiting of mental explorations in the name of A Cause, can leave us treating the resulting unintended consequences for, like, ever.
“Post-paliative” refers to the need to revisit fifty-year-old paradigms, maybe just set them on the shelf rather than assuming they’re correct, and see if we can do better than continually treating the symptoms of a chronic condition that might have been exacerbated by premature conclusions way-back-when. (And without making anyone too angry. It’s not like anything is going to be for everyone, everywhere, all the time.)
A movement? I don’t guess so.
Well not one with a manifesto,
because we’ve seen the rest,
and we think some jest might be best,
that is, we want to seem serious
but not pious –or imperious.
Contents
1. Reflections, Introspection, and Projections for This Project (3 minutes)
2. More Sweet Convergences During Late Fall Reflections (4 minutes)
3. Window Restoration, Kintsugi, and Bigger Connections (<2 minutes)
4. Come Back, Copernicus, continued (or Poking Some Truly Admirable and Attractive People With A Stick) (3 minutes)
5. A Thanksgiving Day Night to Remember (4 minutes)
6. Rhettie and Wally Venture Into a Redemptive Rabbit Hole (12 minutes)
1. Reflections, Introspection, and Projections for This Project (3 minutes)
Stu and I both feel like timely convergences are still keeping the overall story of This Project going, which is a totally true story on one level, but it also includes different levels of enhanced historical nonfiction, as we like to call it here at headquarters in the Middle of Nowhere and Everywhere.
The Stralfs appear on all levels of this kind of “nonfiction”, as does Bug Stu. I hope you’re wondering how that could be true for nonfiction. (If you’re not wondering, or if this sounds like it’s headed toward your least favorite part of The 7th Pie and C.r.e.w. here, skip down to the next section, which is more personal and fitting for Thanksgiving.)
Of course, “creative nonfiction” is what metaphors are often for, and as Stu often reminds me, he’s quite metaphorical : ). It’s just not in the ways you might think, and the same is true for the Stralfs. I realize that one problem with long-running metaphors like these in our age of The Bifurcated Polar Bears, Stu’s term, is that the If-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us emotional mode tends to kick in. And the “you’re-against-us” part of that has tentacles which invade both our tribal natures and our personal friend/foe detectors, and our mental sentries, with their variously triggered modes of defense or even the perceived necessity of restitutionary offense.
(Bifurcated: think of a population that’s best represented by two main humps, say the Purdue and IU fans in Indiana. In the Purdue hump are people that are bullish on Purdue and bearish on IU, and vice versa. The same could be said for Left/Right, with only a small overlap at the base, and members of each distribution think the other “hump” is very wrong, doomed, and/or dooming. (I am not equating the principal-based division with fun collegiate affiliations.)
In either case, there tends to be a split population, polarized, with genuinely bad feelings about the other side. Please forgive Stu for this “Bifurcated Polar Bears” business. It comes from one of his favorite poem creations, he tells me. I have not seen the poem, but I’m looking forward to it.
These ubiquitous and reflexive triggers are one reason I’ve resisted referring to this, or to Rhettie and Wally’s project, as a movement (in addition to the hubris). I’ve observed too much motivated reasoning when people are in movement mode. That’s one reason Stu and I refer this as the 7th Pie, to avoid implying how the American Cultural and Economic Pie should be made.
Thinking of that issue of movement mentality takes me back to one of my first meetings at MatchBOX when I was asked by a marketing consultant if I was wanting to start a movement. Eventually I decided I wasn’t, and that I preferred to look at this as catalyzing a trend that was already emerging. You might remember that little poem up at the top, which I wrote a few years ago.
I still remember the small Break Out Room where I was asked that question and where that poem started, which was actually in the same meeting. First it was “A movement? I guess so…but not one with a manifesto…” Then I changed it to “A movement: I DON’T guess so…”
It’s back to that liminal or interstitial thing, two very fitting if somewhat fancy words for these emerging in-between political spaces I hope we see more of. That space doesn’t do political pop-dichotomies, so it’s natural to hover indecisively over yes/no questions about the nature of This Project, or of anything similar. Know what I mean? Sometimes hard thinking doesn’t lead to hard yes/no questions, instead it leads to less need for a simple answer.
The final version of that A Movement? poem was soon written on a conference room (dry erase) wall, just like almost every idea and sketch I use in all this. I know you don’t care, and shouldn’t care, but I’m indulging myself in key reminiscences, okay? Maybe it does matter!
2. More Sweet Convergences During These Late Fall Reflections (4 minutes)
I was remembering when I worked on the little house right across the street south of MatchBOX Coworking Studio. The work was for ARCH assistance program, and it was to be historically sensitive (which is all I’ve ever done). We ended up restoring two great windows, providing wooden storm windows, restoring the front door -original to the house, and adding a nice unexpected touch.
We had to completely disassemble the front door to tighten things up and to do some inserted repairs in the gouged-out lock area. Where epoxy was used, Shelly Knight did some tinted shellac artistry to mimic the original wood grain. I found a vintage wooden storm door and transom window which we modified and fitted for the house. Prior to that it just had a large white, failing, 1980’s composite storm door.
The new wooden storm windows and door with transom window and framing we added looked very nice, and they still do. That nice little house sitting right next to MatchBOX is a constant reminder of how This Project started, which included working with Indiana Landmarks as well as Purdue Extension’s Local Foods Initiative. It was in the early days of local/organic/diverse/regenerative agriculture.
I took the photo up at the top to catch both the little house on Alabama St. and the beautiful old doors at MatchBOX, which I declined to work on due to my transitioning focus, but which got me involved with MatchBOX before it was MatchBOX. So yeah, it’s a meaningful picture to me, and I’m indulging a little more in that realm, not so much in mood of Thanks-giving, but just in reflection and savoring and maybe noticing something new, which is my usual mode for Thanksgiving season.
The same day I took those pictures I was preparing to paint about 100 screw heads for the window work I’m doing on 6th Street. The first step, after cleaning the screw heads, is to insert them into a piece of Styrofoam for easy handling/painting. The last time I’d done that was maybe 10 years ago with Diana at The Black Sparrow. We drank our beer, talked about the galaxy or something, and inserted a couple hundred screws into Styrofoam as we sat under the Is Train (aka Hobo Ghost Train by its creator, Anna Rae, but she lets me call it the Is Train as I use it in this other part of reality, so to speak, is in the backdrop for Stu and Allie’s stage shown below).
Jeanne, my wife, connected me to Dianna, who connected me to MatchBOX and to The Black Sparrow. The first in-earnest meeting toward The 7th Pie and C.r.e.w. also happened to be held under that same picture — two years ago today, which is Thanksgiving, which I hadn’t realized until looking back on my phone just now for a photo. The photo from then conveys a confidence and joy about This Project finally taking a sustaining and sustainable shape. But we were actually still far from it, with more disappointments, dysfunction, and breakage coming in the pre-prototype efforts, so it’s a sad picture — so it’s not here. But it’s meaningful.
3. The Window and Kintsugi Connection (<2 minutes)
So, this is still about kintsugi really, as I brought up last time (scroll down just under the image of windows) in the context of vintage window restorations, an alternative mental model for many things, even societal and personal relationships.
They all come with their own literal and figurative economics, all weirdly tied to human flourishing in ways we’re only now understanding, that is if we’re willing to take off the costly philosophical/political blinders, improve on our received wisdom and the received (and endlessly reinforced) narratives, by way of insights gained from 2001 on about emotions and cognitive mysteries.
The replacement window phenomenon, particularly from the 1990’s on, is such an appropriate analogy for the themes and theses of This Project and of kintsugi. People weren’t told the complex truth about window systems, longevity, energy savings, life-cycle environmental impact, etc.
Not enough repairmen were available to counter the replacement window industry’s deceptive marketing, which created an appetite, urgency, and new conventional wisdom (guided misconception). The most obvious casualties of the misconception ended up as upcycled-chic décor or landfill fill. The less obvious casualties, and their metaphorical counterparts, will be a subject here someday.
I came into this labor of love to counter, quixotically, the misconception. My mini-rant here wasn’t formed to protect my livelihood. That is, I came into the field because I understood the ruse and despised the various losses –the rant was my reason for getting into it in the first place. But I also felt like it would be a good way to start building experiences and expertise I’d need for the larger focus and explorations.
4. Come Back, Copernicus, continued (or Poking Some Truly Admirable and Attractive People With A Stick) (3 minutes)
I would say that the Copernican Revolution, having to do with the adoption of a Sun-centered solar system model and helping to kick off the Enlightenment, is NOT like kintsugi I’ve been going on about, but it creates a nice illustration for us. You could say the Enlightenment let people get out of the mental cages of the day.
But, because of our overly decisive natures when it comes to mental frameworks of the physical, social, and metaphysical, we tend to end up in other cages quickly, albeit more suited to our individual tastes (which are not generated from quarks nor from Schrodinger’s Cat, despite irresponsible and abundant creative licensing with quantum physics, which I would submit is our current pseudo-intellectual cage, if you happen to be taking submissions). We now know enough about emotions, motivated reasoning, guided reasoning, etc., to explain individual tastes, preferences, and even political/philosophical preferences and proselytizing.
That’s not to say we can control or even precisely predict it reliably, thank goodness, but we understand patterns, probabilities, obscuring complexities, anatomical function, neurotransmitter roles, and so on. And it’s not to say there is no Little Fairy-like thing in there somewhere, or Big God out there, but we probably don’t want to overburden them with responsibilities and rationalizations that can be attributed to other factors, functions, and phenomena.
I can imagine either of them imploring us, in Gen X fashion, to “Get a freaking grip” and stop using them to justify our plans and ploys in whatever quest we’re on, especially the covertly selfish ones (which surely have them bored out of their minds by now) and the ones we’ve picked up from self-fulfillment gurus in whatever guise, with all the originality and profundity of an emperor’s or empress’s innovative designer/stylist/publicist. It’s all been done before, and reframing it only seems to work for a while. There are other equally cozy, equally expansive, ways of looking at ourselves and our enjoyments.
It’s so unfortunate, but not too surprising, that neuro-psychology is being (ab)used to bolster and pad the uber-Me Generation mythologies popularized in the 1970’s. Our wants, impulses, compulsions, etc., are not from anyone’s Inner Fairy of the Heart or of the Mind or of the Gut Biome, and we are stubbornly negligent of our collective heirs if we’re promoting these personal and politicized Tales of Fairies in 2021, because they’re just tricks. And there is no Golden Snitch for our truth despite the internet’s glut of lemonade stands of affirmation/confirmation. We need to think harder and more deeply -–for the children. Yes, I’ll say it.
Fairies are actually fine for metaphors though. I’m serious. They’re even useful. The value comes in being able to reference them BUT ALSO maintain the awareness of their unreality, which means there’s another cause, and there’s lots of flexibility in the “truth” we assign to what the fairies tell us. How is it even possible that I’m writing this in 2021? Actually, I think I do know how it’s possible, but I won’t get into that today. There’s much cozier convergence stuff to write about today.
I need to finish the kintsugi relevance for those last few paragraphs. With the right repairs, maybe using something more flexible than the traditional lacquer of literal kintsugi, things can gain much more resilience. The breaks themselves, the emergent dysfunctions maybe, bring emergent and tentative understanding, with the tentativity evoking a sense of care-fully increasing understanding as opposed to axiomatic and crystalized knowledge, in many important cases.
For me, the metaphorical sense of kintsugi, as I’m using it here, is not actually about preserving old ideas by gluing them all back together. It’s about building some slack, some flexibility, mystery at times, into our conventional and emerging actual understandings. I emphasized actual there because some so-called understandings are from disingenuous searching.
That is, they’re from searching for rationale for a preconceived remedy, a paliative usually, for ourselves or others in whatever area of life and living. Can we admit that we get the insurance company in front of the ambulance at times, so to speak, even in our own lives? And then maybe we should try not doing that and definitely stop encouraging others in that practice? And that remedy metaphor doesn’t just apply to the revenue side of life.
Cognitive science and complexity science seem to be good sources of “flexible glue” in putting our empirical and theoretical personal/social understandings together now, without the use of an uber-anything or anyone. That’s really the main reason I bring kintsugi into this, that we seem to have pretty good, flexible, slack-providing glue through modern cognitive science.
I’m going to continue exploring the kintsugi metaphor next time. I started this with last Saturday’s issue from my conversations with Amelie (real) the Wee Window Apprentice (sort of real), if you’re interested (scroll down to just under the image of windows).
5. A Thanksgiving Day Night to Remember (4 minutes)
I took an early walk Thanksgiving Day morning. My enjoyment in seeing the kids’ cars in the driveway clearly needed to be shared with everyone, which got me thinking of other shots of appreciation and symbolism I’d probably run across on my walk here in The Land of Kent (there’s so much in that name now, first used in jest for this). So, I put them on Instagram (Regroup.farm) along with this little rhyme:
(Note for rhyme: Here anyway, a Bolshie is a new Bolshevik-ish semi-advocate, a FiDdL-er is a card-carrying member of The Fellowship of the Dimly Lit (me -at least), and an ish-Middler is rather uncommitted politically and prefers the depth of the middle to the tides and rocks of the shorelines, so to speak (ish- means -ish). The Cause is whatever cause could get in the way of something good and cozy and expansive.)
Amidst wine and song and all along
the New Bolshie and FiDdL-er
mixed with mostly ish-Middlers,
as The Cause went on pause
for the Season (and Santa Claus).
We spent most of the day at my parents’ farm having another of the dozens of wonderful Thanksgivings there. It’s nice and fitting that our gatherings have included Lafayettians for many years now. (It makes my otherwise split life seem more coherent.) I’m going to resist letting my appreciation for my parents and the family and the place derail today’s writing agenda. It could. I’ll just leave it at that.
Among other recent nice convergences, the documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, came out on my birthday, November 19, which was also the day of the lunar eclipse — my prompt for writing about the Scientific revolution last time. (And I failed to include my observation that we’re still experiencing retrograde motion on the part of the Left and Right, in terms of handling genuine understandings of science/information, in case you’re up for a little Ptolemaic humor!)
Our plans to watch it failed until Thanksgiving Day night, fortunately, and the kids were up for watching it, and they enjoyed it, and regretted not knowing more about KVJ sooner. My own appreciation for Kurt Vonnegut’s humor and his stories is probably a little unusual. I’m not an iconoclast nor a rebel or even irreverent, and I don’t really appreciate it in others unless it’s truly necessary and not just an aspirational aesthetic (most common, imo).
However, Kurt’s logical (yes) absurdities and absurd but apt expressions remind me so much of the older farmers I knew growing up. I also sense a much more complex sensibility than the iconic KVJ asterisks and sarcasm can convey, just like was the case with the old farmers. I don’t know what that is exactly, but I like it.
So there we were, joined by Ronnie Rat and my new Kurt Vonnegut finger puppet, finally watching Unstuck in Time. I’m pretty sure there will be some new Vonnegut readers in the family. Our local George Ade might have been seen in a way similar to Kurt Vonnegut, just with a more period-appropriate restraint. Both writers have been part of This Project, and if that isn’t nice...
Anyway, the whole ceremony, complete with the Kurt Vonnegut talisman, let’s say, apparently conjured up the convergences that actual-MFA-writer Jenn needed, because a couple of hours later she received a hoped-for contract offer on her book. Thanks Kurt. Way to go, Jenn : ). So it goes sometimes!
It’s been a wonderful and wonder-ful week of convergences. Oh, and a fun one I almost forgot is that I got a call from a utility lineman supervisor that I hadn’t spoken to for many years. What started This Project was my moving a couple of 100+ year old houses to the countryside in Morocco, Indiana to create retreats, and that powerline supervisor was instrumental in both moves, with about as much to handle as the house-moving crew.
I’ve had those projects on hold due to the scale and time required for each, and it’s kind of painful. Stu and I are waiting for some confirming convergences with this latest phone call, and that would be effing awesome, as kids used to say.
These past two weeks have been especially reflective, as the season of late fall tends to be. It started when I got to thinking more about the practice and metaphors around kintsugi, as I talked about up above and last weekend. I had actually been thinking about Rhettie’s and Wally’s story, and how they normally meet at a co-working space in Lafayette called Matches, and how Rhettie’s brother does architectural restoration in Lafayette.
That’s what got me thinking about working on the little house south of MatchBOX, then the other downtown window jobs I’ve done over the years, the audiobooks I get to listen to while working, and how I really wish I could grow that alternative for people, and how this is all part of something I’ve called IndSteadavision (TM), and how The 7th Pie and C.r.e.w. Monthly is really meant to be all about that, in various forms.
With an emphasis on repair in kintsugi, it can seem like it’s all about saving the old things and ideas, but that misses something big. The new part, the IndSteadavision part, comes from exploring to find out enough about the systems, about how-things-work, about new insights that weren’t available to previous generations, to do something differently and without prescribing what everybody, everywhere, needs to do, all the time.
There are network effects that can take care of many things, if we’ll let them, if certain pieces are in place, even without an uber-anything. And that’s what Rhettie and Wally are getting closer to today, one tentative step at a time, so they’re up next to close this installment.
6. Rhettie and Wally Venture Into a Redemptive Rabbit Hole (12 minutes)
Rhettie and Wally are meeting for the first time in Newton County in northwest Indiana. Rhettie had arranged for Wally to meet her at Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area so Wally’s first impression would be a good one, and she could explain “the story” that had been growing one page at a time for years. She was clear about her intent, respecting that both of them were tired of “sly…compelling…story…telling.” It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and the weather is great.
Rhettie had created a sort of narration with graphics and text using a phone app called STQRY (an actual thing I’m trying to incorporate too), and she’s showing the app to Wally today. They start at the Willow Slough campground. From the parking lot at the campground, J.C. Murphey Lake looks like a “real lake”, except that you notice there is no motorized boat traffic, which is pretty cool here, considering the resulting quiet and natural atmosphere.
(Stu leaves some happy tears every time he visits there, because it’s so much like Beaver Lake was. You might think he’d just stay here at this relocated Beaver Lake, a very small version, but he realized there are more fundamental and intriguing issues to investigate, so he doesn’t dwell on just recovering lost realities.)
They’re on a tight schedule, so they just take in the sights and talk about them with the STQRY app in the car. Wally is impressed with both the app and the place right from the start. They tour some of Rhettie’s favorite sights, including the town of Morocco, and talk about the app and the content added by the county’s historical group. We’ll pick up their conversation as they visit one of Rhettie’s dream sites for a Landing, as she’s started calling it, now that Reset has become a politically loaded word.
Wally: Rhettie, this is beautiful. What a little hidden treasure this is. I actually noticed a lot of hidden treasures today.
Rhettie: This is my favorite. This is where I got the idea of Landings…or IndSteadlings. I haven’t decided what to call them. They used to cut ice from that pond.
Wally: This is a scene from, like, Hallmark Homesteaders or something.
Rhettie: That’s not a thing is it? I hope not. Well, it’s fine, but I’m not doing that. I don’t want it to be that kind of scene. Too contrived. Too twee.
Wally: I get that. I could see you saying that. I really do not mind Hallmark movies, to be honest. It’s a niche thing, and, I think, there is a certain honesty to them, although that will probably sound weird to hear.
Rhettie: I actually think I know what you mean about the honesty. Dark, jaded, edginess can be just as contrived. I’m not interested in showing people I’m still as cool or whatever as my sixteen-year-old self. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually. I was actually more “myself” when I left Chicago to come down here. I didn’t have to keep up my “real, authentic, fearless, interesting self” persona anymore.
Wally: When does authenticity become inauthentic itself? Yeah, I know. It’s weird. But people build their Transformers, and they’re coached to do it.
Rhettie: And then they stick with it so their inauthentic authenticity doesn’t seem like it was inauthentic, I guess. I guess I just dropped it and never went back, because there was no need anymore. I was lucky I left that scene up there. Then it was funny to see kids doing that down here, since my own friends here weren’t into it, and I’d left my old friends up there that did. I kinda wanted to tell the kids here, “Dude, you know what you’re doing, and you don’t have to do it.” Hey, let’s talk about something else. I mean yeah, this place could help with that stuff, and I want it to, but I don’t need to focus on that now, and there’s some pain from it still. I mean, Onward Squidward.
Wally: Just one more thought on that though, since we were talking about Dad’s writing and “Carpet Crawlers” from Lamb Lies Down. “The carpet crawlers…heed their callers” and “They’re pulled up by a magnet, believing they’re free.” That song gets to me. Well, I guess it really got to Dad. And he was part of the magnet realm, and he was pulled into the magnet realm, I guess you could say, into being a magnet. And once he realized he had been one of those magnets, he wanted to collapse the whole thing, and couldn’t even stand to be a lowly carpet crawler. He wanted to start burning it, but he didn’t know where to start burning, and he was worried about starting in the wrong place…and…
Rhettie: Wally, wait. Wait. Okay, I’m not exactly following you, but I think I get most of what you’re saying. I kind of know the song. It’s a big deal. It’s like…the biggest possible deal. I know there’s something big going on in your mind. I have to tell you something I’ve noticed. You’ve always been so professional and controlled and careful with your words. Your words and your demeanor are almost too…sculpted for me sometimes. You’re like, too-oo good at talking or whatever. Your emails are the same way. I’m not really complaining about that, but listen, okay?
Wally: Okay.
Rhettie: When you first emailed me about your dad’s stuff, there was this shift in your tone and your writing. You were like excited but also anxious at the time. You NEVER do that, and I know it, and I want you to know that I know. I want to know that you know I know. This is big.
Wally: Well, I guess learning how your dad really thinks or thought after all that time is a pretty big deal.
Rhettie: Of course. But…okay I’m not trying to be all girls’ intuition, but is there something else? It seems like there’s something else. Something besides your dad’s thoughts. It seems like there is, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t think it’s about, like, your mom and dad possibly getting back together, although…
Wally: Right. No. They’re not. He won’t, because he’s too sick. Well, they’ll talk more, but he won’t let her take care of him, and I don’t think she wants to. Too much history and hurt, and he has good options at the home.
Rhettie: Right.
(long pause)
Wally: This place is really something. And you’re thinking of, I mean you’re dreaming of, there being a lot of places like this. I get it. I think we’ve got to get one of the shows out first.
Rhettie: Yeah, I know. That’s why I came to Matches and to you, I guess. I didn’t know exactly how it was gonna work, but it seemed like a good place to start.
Wally: Hey it’s almost Thanksgiving, and I want you to know I’d list you as one of the things I’m thankful for this year.
Rhettie: Awww. You don’t just see me as a future revenue stream? Or maybe you do and that’s why you’re thankful.
Wally: Okay, not only do I see you has a future revenue stream, and an extra nice stream, but it’s nice to have someone care about my dad. Someone to talk to. I mean, he’s someone who really only has existed this way after he left his family, me and mom, and he only had ten years of this, his new self or whatever, his new perspective, before the Alzheimer’s hit him. All we really have is his papers. And you’re going over them with me, and you get it.
Rhettie: You should probably talk to your mom more about it.
Wally: I think it gives her some pain. It’s like it’s a near miss or something, of what could have been, so she’d rather just stay on her path and let things stay in the past. That can’t really be reconciled now. I get her.
Rhettie: He was chasing only cheese, you’ve said. Yeah. People get hurt.
Wally: Yeah, I remember. But Mom too, lots of the time. I think they read the same book. Ayn Rand probably.
Rhettie: You know Ayn Rand? We haven’t talked about this. My grandma hated when mom had to read her in school.
Wally: Yes. Something Dad said at my graduation about “what’s in the water” and how pages of ink of certain books “run through the river for a while.” He said, “Beware of the fountainhead,” so I looked it up. I know what it’s about, but I haven’t really read it. I just read about it. Oh, and Dad made up another word from all that, which I didn’t understand at all until I looked up The Fountainhead. Something he calls Pan-Randianism. I’m still not exactly sure what he meant.
Rhettie: Do you remember what he said? She was a sort of philosopher too. Maybe it’s tied to her philosophy. She called it Objectivism. I know about her mostly because of how my grandma despised her ideas and her books.
Wally: Yeah, he said something about it justifying chasing and eating any cheese with fake reasoning. Yeah, he actually wrote CHEESONING! on one of his papers about “Carpet Crawlers.” He was just messing around and he didn’t write more about it. It’s the only place I’ve seen cheesoning in his notes. I also remember now that the Pan in Pan-Randianism meant she had a way of justifying anything we wanted to do, not just for getting material things and money.
Rhettie: My grandma would probably like your dad.
Wally: I remember some of his notes talking about our ideas about reality, our assumptions about happiness and everything, being from what’s dissolved in the water we’re swimming in. “It’s what’s in the water that makes what’s so so.” He was referring to the Three Fish joke, like David Foster Wallace used in his This is Water speech. He liked him.
Rhettie: I don’t know that. This is water? I don’t know that.
Wally: That’s okay. Hey, are those fruit trees over there?
Rhettie: Yeah, some. Most have died. Let’s go check them out.
Wally: (while walking) Hey listen, I’ve been thinking. You know, we’ve been talking about this musical thing. I mean…I wanna help you do the musical thing still, of course, but reading through all Dad’s stuff and thinking about the story of the Stralfs and Bug Stu and all, and this Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album…these are the kind of things I’ve been thinking about for probably ten years. I don’t want to end up like my dad with all these papers and thought, but no mind to do anything with them. And I know you connect with this stuff, too.
Nobody’s really trying to connect the dots about what makes so so or what makes Is be. Dad realized he was one of those kinds of makers. He was in marketing, making people’s realities, and it wasn’t for the people. That’s what I’ve been doing too. But I couldn’t justify getting out. I couldn’t see the bigger picture. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been excited about. That’s what you noticed a couple of weeks ago that mentioned when we got here. I’m just trying to be careful about saying what it is I guess.
Rhettie: Okay good. And thanks for telling me. I’ve never been in marketing, but I think I understand.
Wally: Yeah, you don’t have to be in marketing to get this. You don’t even have to be in marketing to be afraid of getting out. I mean getting out of this way of thinking. Cheesoning and stuff. Pan-Randianism.
Rhettie: Hey, these are my two favorite trees out here. That one’s a persimmon, and this one’s a pawpaw. But try to imagine this all in the summer. I love Thanksgiving, but it’s kind of bleak, color-wise. Leaves are mostly gone, there aren’t any wildflowers, the black raspberry bushes are just thorns. I’m imagining it’s…July 1st. Black raspberries are ready, the wildflowers are up, and there are buzzing bugs and singing frogs at the pond. It’s the best time to be out here.
Wally: Okay, it’s July 1st. Hey I know — you can close your eyes and think of that, but I sent you a link to the Carpet Crawlers song. Let’s listen to that together. You’ve gotta have earbuds in. You got em, right? You miss too much of the feeling if you don’t have it either loud or on earbuds. And then I want to read you something when it’s done. I’m listening too. (You might might want to click there and listen to a little at least -lyrics are included.)
(It’s five minutes long, and they make just a couple of comments during the song)
Rhettie: Wally, why didn’t we get music like this?
Wally: I don’t think it would be very popular. It was only in for a few years.
Rhettie: It’s not just the sound, it’s the words. You can’t read Ayn Rand and listen to this. “We’ve got to get in to get out.” Yes, that’s the chant we hear. “Pulled up by a magnet, believing they’re free.”
Wally: It goes with our wiring. All we need is justification.
Rhettie: I don’t want to think about Pan-Randianism right now. I’m just gonna let it finish and be quiet. (The song finishes a few minutes later.)
Wally: Okay. My dad started a poem about this. Well, maybe he just did a short poem. It’s just two stanza’s, but I’m adding a third. He did some research on the album. He was surprised at their lyrics, they’re actually Peter Gabriel’s lyrics on this album, because he was only twenty-four when he wrote them.
And Genesis had done all this British pastoral-progressive stuff, and this was different for them, because it’s set in New York City and like, dark, but hopeful or perceptive or something. They’d been together seven years, and Peter Gabriel left after this album, which is like “the Ulysses of concept albums,” it said in The New Yorker a while back. Pretty cool. It was actually released on November 18, 1974, so about this time of year. Funny.
It’d be cool if you could get music on that STQRY app, and this would be great. It’s so different. Anyway, okay, back to July 1st, and you should close your eyes, and imagine you knew a guy that had been the most Pan-Randian disciple of “If it feels good, think it and do it” imaginable for twenty years, and he’s waking up, and he writes this after listening to that song and others and reading the lyrics seriously for the first time.
Rhettie: Okay.
Wally: I’m going to read it slowly.
Why’d I buy this tale I bought?
To flail against the cage it wrought?
This age tried fixing fear and dread.
No sages saw just where that’s led.
The Want of More and limits shed.
But still dependent, slaves instead.
Someone sang the song I’d sought.
I’d sung that song but hadn’t thought
of what it meant or what he saw,
those decades back, so young and all,
their seventh year, released that Fall.
It calls the Crawlers from their crawl.
Now here’s what I added:
Someone wrote a thing I’d thought.
I’d thought that thing but thought I ought
to work on it and maybe see
if another would agree with me,
if another would join me…and we
could qualify…what makes Is be.
Rhettie: (Opens her eyes suddenly) Me?
Wally: I think maybe we should be thinking bigger. Together. Go deeper. You know, you’re not the everyday…whatever you are.
Rhettie: (Rhettie tears up a little, smiling still) I’m not? Not to you? I’m not a goofy girl with a goofy idea?
Wally: No…you are. And I’m a goofy guy with a goofy idea I’ve never even talked to anyone about. But it goes with what you’re doing. It’d be more than the story of Stu and the musicals and the retreats even.
Rhettie: It’s not already too big? Too much? (Still smiling)
Wally: It probably is. Well actually, this would just add another dimension to your idea. Your awesome idea. I just see it differently now. I’ve always loved it, you know. “The Landing” means something bigger to me now. Would you do me a favor? A big favor?
Rhettie: It’s sounds like it’s gonna be something I’d say yes to. What though?
Wally: Would you come with me to meet my dad, and tell him what you think of his stuff and this music and that we’re gonna use both and try to do these Landings and Insteadlings or whatever, and thank him for helping us?
Rhettie: He would understand? I mean, he’s still able to make sense of things?
Wally: Yes. On good days. And maybe I’m wrong. And maybe we can’t know. But we will know if he smiles. And if we don’t try, we’ll never know. I know you would make him smile anyway, just by meeting him with me. We can play the song.
Rhettie: Let’s. And yes, let’s do it all. I think we’re sure enough to try. That’s what my grandma would say. We’re sure enough to try. Yes. And I guess we’re ready to get some helpers.
They both beamed and then nodded their heads as a sort of unspoken pact, then they talked nearly over each other all the way back in the car to Willow Slough and J.C. Murphey Lake, where Wally got his car and headed back to Lafayette with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway blaring.
Then Rhettie headed back to her grandma and grandpa’s farm and called her parents to talk more about their Genesis days and the album that she knew they’d loved too.
Something seemed to finally be moving them to boldly go.
More soon.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
