The Side of Someone That’s Inside
They might be close to you
Sometimes it takes some thoughtful cerebral songs to reset.
Rhettie and Wally — Continued
It’s a week before Thanksgiving 2021, and Wally and Rhettie are meeting at the Matches co-working space again. Wally had emailed Rhetti about papers his dad recently gave him as resignation to the fact that he was very unlikely to finish the book he’d been working on so slowly over the past several years, because of his declining mental state. There were a lot of notes turning lyrics into more poetry from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album by Genesis from 1974. The writing was centered around those lyrics, which told a story through the whole album –a concept album. Rhettie loved the 1970’s British concept albums.
They already knew they’d be incorporating some old songs and lyrics from Genesis in their show, but Rhettie could tell by the way Wally wrote the email that he was outside of his usual composed and deliberate mode with this discovery. She could tell he was sort of “marking a moment” as she called it, which meant it was kind of vague and hurried and that emotion was just under the surface instead of in a secure file, as she had teased him about doing before.
Wally had known since his graduation in 2004 that his dad had a major reset, change of heart, a change in perspective, and he’d expressed his regrets to Wally at his graduation. He said he had “fallen into himself after a lot of prodding and hay.” He liked farm analogies, and it had made Wally wonder if his dad should have just gone back to his father’s farm instead of getting into sales and marketing. “How did a hundred acres become so small when the world is the same size?” he would sometimes say.
His dad’s apologies and regrets weren’t just about leaving Wally and his mom; they were as much about what misunderstandings, as he called them, he’d passed on to Wally about the world and other people. Those core misunderstandings were why he’d left the two of them, but it explained much more than that even, and extended to his entire adult life and sense of purpose, and sense of what purpose even meant.
Rhettie and Wally had talked a little about this several weeks ago, having to do with his dad reaching a sort of crisis of internal coherence, as his mom called it –she being the only one he’d really explained it to. (His dad’s ad writing had also gotten her into the habit of using alliterations and rhymes.) It had reached that crisis level while he was listening to some old albums and paying attention to the words, which he never really had before. But the Lamb Lies Down album, or book as he called it, was his turning point. Wally called this his dad’s incendiary event, always using marketing jargon in a way that suggested Wally’s own misgivings about his field.
While Wally knew about his change of perspective, he had never seen this much of his dad’s writing and his plans for the book. Most of it was from 1999 on, which meant much of it was already written before Wally’s graduation in 2004, which was when his dad said he wished he could “gather up and erase the tapes I’ve sent out to the world,” as he’d put it.
He hadn’t actually sent literal tapes to anyone, but he was referring to how our words and lives provide instruction, “not just when you mean them to,” to others through our reasoning and personal precedent. The writing also included a several poems, and Wally reads one of them to Rhettie below.
Rhettie: Big stuff, eh Wally?
Wally: Yes. I never knew this guy. I don’t actually think he existed when he lived with us. This is amazing. I mean, I don’t mean his writing is amazing, maybe it is, but it’s what he wrote. I love this person — this person that he is here. He was my dad and I didn’t know this about him. How can that happen?
Rhettie: I don’t think you’re really asking me, right? I mean…both of you know how the stories you did work. Right? There’s this world of wonder and doubt and love and fear on the inside, based on one story, then there’s the one you weave for the outside. You guys have lived two lives, one on the inside and one on the outside as you thought would work best. Maybe more than one on the outside. Yeah, probably more than one if…
Wally: Okay yes. Stop. Yes. I guess I didn’t mean for you to answer but you’re also getting into a tough area there and maybe guessing too much. I do that, yes. He did that. I knew the story that he wanted me to know. But this is a different story, I mean even inside him. He talks about that. It’s not just that he was gonna project a different story on the outside. He has a new story, or he had a new story, on his inside. And he wrote this twenty years ago! I don’t get why he didn’t tell me, or tell me more than he did at graduation. That does not make sense.
Rhettie: It doesn’t make sense, you know, from what you know. And that’s what you know so far, I mean. Have you been through everything?
Wally: No. And no, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense from just what I know, which isn’t everything. This is all pretty new to me. I’m about 4 hours into it is all. Yeah, I don’t really mean that it doesn’t make sense that he didn’t tell me about it. I can’t say that.
Rhettie: I know someone who doesn’t like to talk about what they’re working on, like, at all, until they’ve really thought it out and they’re ready to really present it.
Wally: I know you do. Smart ass. Then his mind was going, so he probably slowed way down and was waiting for the best time and all that, and then it was twenty years. And he can barely speak in complete sentences now. But look. Look at this.
Rhettie: He was writing this to you wasn’t he. I’m gonna read it. “But people made copies of those tapes, you know? I want to gather up and erase the tapes I’ve sent out to the world, but I can’t. All I can do is write a counterfactual, a counterweight account of how I would have lived. People made copies of my crappy first take, you know?”
Oh, and “I’m from the no regrets generation. How many times do I have to remind myself of that to make it come true? I’ve said it. I’ve clicked my heels. I’ve believed. But I’m still here. I wasn’t before, but now I am.” Wally, he should have reached out. Or you should have.
Wally: What is should. I wish I would have, but that doesn’t mean I should have. I don’t know. But look at this. These are lyrics to “Carpet Crawlers.” He’s copied them. And he’s got all kinds of notes around them. Look what’s at the top.
Rhettie: “To Wally. To Everybody.” But it’s dated 1999. November 25, 1999. And it says E. O. Wilson. Do you know who that is?
Wally: I do now, but I had to look it up. He’s a bug guy.
Rhettie: He’s like…the bug guy. He went from his insect stuff to human societies. He’s was amazing. And misunderstood, I think. Actually, I think he’s still alive but not really working. My grandma told me about him. I think they’re almost the same age.
Wally: Right. Okay, and I’m glad I looked it up, because Dad started using a lot more insect analogies in his writing after this, and that explained why.
Here, I haven’t read these all. Just start going through them. Put some sticky notes on them or something so we know what we want to go back to. I’ll do these others.
(They use the rest of their hour reading through the papers and making notes, just occasionally talking about what they’ve found. Then Wally finds a poems and asks Rhettie to listen.)
Wally: Okay. Hey, let me read you this one. This is getting into a little different area. Then I guess we’ve gotta go. I don’t get all of this. But he put Carpet Crawlers next to Needle’s eye down here. I don’t think he’s saying the termites are the carpet crawlers in the…Carpet Crawlers song he went crazy on. Huh. I like it, but there are a couple things I don’t really get. Okay here, I’ll read it.
11/25/99
Oh…E.O. Wilson
Postmodernism: An interesting unworkable intellectual tantrum that clears out the rest and makes Self our main anthem.
Like a termite it bites
its way into the wood
of structures that-won’t fight
— nor be understood.
Hence the termites’ determined
deconstruction of the shelter,
while Manson, in satisfaction,
taps out…Helter Skelter.
But “Whoa,” they say, “Whoa!
We went Postmodern for peace.
We see beliefs as causing woe.
We see dysfunction that needs to cease.”
So, the tiny termite brains
insist upon their quest
despite pained groans and strains.
They had volumes to digest.
And I’d love those little termites,
if they’d think beyond their hole,
if they’d think of what they’re missing
beyond the box, beyond the pole.
But they can’t see
complex connections
in this sea of entropy.
They just see
proposed corrections
per their pop psychology.
They don’t think about their thinking,
just that others…have been wrong.
Another needle’s eye is winking.
They’ll close it…on their throng.
That needle’s-eye is not Heaven’s-gate
but Peace and Smiles, so don’t hesitate.
The rich-man’s bags were big enough,
but Self’s now more than all his stuff.
I survived on Me and More and Now
— and asking what Life’s for.
But thriving never came that way.
(Seligman sells some better hay.)
And Termite Minds still chew away.
Their droppings feed the frenzied Fray
that follows…finding More and Me.
They’re ants whose rants can’t set them free.
“But with no Heaven
then what’s this worth,
this call to think of thinking first.”
To tend toward Heaven- not Hell-on-Earth.
They promise pleasure, but I fear the worst.
(Y’know…if you strand termites, they die of thirst.)
Rhettie: Wow. Hey will you make me a copy of that? This sounds kinda like something my grandma would like. Maybe two copies.
Wally: I haven’t figured it all out, but yeah. And then I gotta so, so meet before Thanksgiving still?
Rhettie: I want to if you do.
Wally: Let’s. I’ll email you.
