There they were, in the reeds, watching the opening of a book, so to speak, about how humans would become too reliant on cities and city things and other things. Too reliant for their own Good—their own flourishing, and their own deep stewardship. This is the shore of the fifth dimension, which matters as much as the others do, at least, and it’s fun and serious, too.
This story is too much for one person, at least for me, as those who know me and know what all I’ve fretted over and tinkered on and on and on with might agree. In a way, this story started in 1996, the most recent year to have an identical calendar to this year, 2024. In this realm that I write in, surely the identical calendars are not trivial. I’ll at least pretend they’re not. Maybe the unseen role of pretending in all our lives will show up here.
1996 was the year we moved to the Land of Kent, in Ade Country, here in little Indiana. It’s also known as Kentland to insiders. Kentland is at the top of a newly mythical Geographical Christmas Tree I’ve actually mentioned before. But it’s not the star—that’s just a little further north.
People like to be insiders, partly for the sense of community and also for the real and imagined honor of just knowing. Of course, there can be no insiders without outsiders, because “How can you be in if there is no outside?” as I always remember Peter Gabriel wrote and sang for us four decades ago. But there can be also be a flow from out to in to out, and it can be sort of like an estuary by the ocean, of freshwater and saltwater, come to think of it.
Humans, generally, naturally seek information, generally. And they say things like “All generalizations are false,” then they laugh at the paradox there, and think about it, or they should. Maybe the word all should be replaced with most, or with some, and that gives them something to ponder and to talk about.
These are the kinds of things Bug Stu has been observing here in Ade Country since 1816, and at Walden Pond before that, and at Sussex, England, before that, at least. He’s always preferred marshy areas, which he refers to as portals to the fifth dimension. The first three dimensions of reality give things shape and beauty, the fourth sets things in time, and the fifth is for fortifying, to provide meanings to the otherwise skeletal first four dimensions, according to Stu.
In the first paragraph up there, he and his firefly friends comprised the they I referred to in the reeds, and the story they were witnessing was that of the Stralf aliens, the Boneless Bastards as Stu calls them. The year was 1851, and the leader of the Stralfian scouts was demonstrating to his troops how he’d learned to influence humans. Through him, in this very scene, the little town of Morocco, Indiana got its name, according to Stu.
A lot of other important things happened in 1851, of course. That’s what the internet is for, because it lets us put everything together that we thought didn’t matter. The internet is not just for showcasing angry people, gross people, and naked luvvers, according to Stu, who would find that all bizarre had he not figured something out a hundred years ago. I can’t digress. (But a famous book written a hundred years ago this year, by a grown-up boy from St. Paul, Minnesota, validated Stu’s theory.)
As I said, this story is too much for me, and I have other things to work on, as those who know me and what I started on ten years ago can also attest. And anyway, the story is told better by a 2009 graduate of North Newton High School, Rhettie Kovach. It’s a name you won’t find in the records, because Bug Stu created her, I will admit to the potential insiders reading this.
In a way, I wish I were Rhettie. She can get more accomplished before her time ends than I can before mine does. For one thing, I’m quite a bit older, But she’s also got that whole “face that launched a thousand ships” thing going for her, as women often do, for better and worse, according to Stu.
She’s on land, so she can’t actually use ships, clearly. But she can imagine an army, an army of Repairians and Para-agrarians, and they could create a Bright Spot, without even consulting the usual reams of ephemeral toilet paper protocols let down from ivory towers in the fleeting geist of the times, purportedly for progress, often presumptuously.
Regular readers know what a Bright Spot is, along with a few other things in the poem below, which clearly needed to appear in the newsletter today, and I will clarify these insider things before we get to the poem.
Today is the 5th Anniversary of my realization that it was Stralfs, mostly, that have caused us to do a bunch of dysfunctional things, including a bunch of stuff in the countryside that would drive more and more of us into cities. And the cities would also be unsatisfying for too many, to say the least, and we would happily board spaceships to leave for planet Stralf, and the Stralfs would be taking over here once we’d gone.
It was May 25th 2019, and it was a Saturday, like this year. (But this is a Leap Year and that wasn’t, so the calendars aren’t identical. 1996 was the last calendar year identical to this year, like I said earlier.) I had spoken to Em the day before, and to Dr. Stephanie that morning, and something was clearly up, because they both have a way. Their way hints that I’m missing something, so I look harder. I don’t know if that’s their intention.
That Saturday, I had actually started noticing a suspicious pattern while driving down from the Land of Kent to Lafayette (the Star City to historical types). I realized the Benton County windmills were transmission towers and energy sources for transmissions. The hog buildings were for providing food (from the pits) and shelter, and concealment, for large numbers of Stralfs.
The Stralfs, Stu and I figured, sang and mumbled somewhat subliminally to us Earthlings, so the invisible and often insidious hand of Adam Smith’s imagination was under their control, at least enough to be effective. But I tried to suspend these revelations once I got to Lafayette and their annual Round the Fountain Art Fair.
Among other newly fascinating things at Lafayette’s Round the Fountain Art Fair that day I found this, a Star Gazer, which I realized was probably actually an artifact from Stralfian training sessions meant to teach the Stralfs about the kinds of humans they’ll have the most trouble influencing, those that look up at the stars, with the Star Eyes looking back at them.
After the art fair, I drove west to an old Methodist Church by Pence, Indiana, because the church was expected to be demolished, and a friend wanted me to check for treasures. Pence is used mostly just for launching small rockets from Purdue and other Indiana rocketry clubs now. The cornerstone on the church said 1914, which is the year the Stralfs made WWI happen while they were in Europe, according to Stu. Ominous, or helpful, clues, both the old church and the repurposing of Pence.
Several months earlier I had joined the MatchBOX Coworking Studio in Lafayette in order to figure this all out. Since then I conducted dozens of essential offsites at The Black Sparrow Pub and at Teays River Brewing and Public House, putting Morocco on hold, painfully, the place where it all began, to give myself time to get to the root cause of the demise of small town economies, which we refer to as fading black dots, as they’re shown on maps.
I knew it would take an army of sorts, and some imagination, and we would need Rhettie to create that army. “Who is Rhettie?” was the last question to answer, along with “Who would care?” I eventually found answers to both.
Rhettie has taken the story of Bug Stu from here, which is intended to show up in a few different books as a set, the first of which is receiving its final edit this very weekend, with illustrations in the wings. They’re all intended to be volumes of Turning Back the Foes of Flourishing: A Manual of Imaginative Galactic Embetterment for the Effeat Idiot, as a nod to John Muir’s VW repair manuals.
Bright Spots
I won’t fully explain why today, but creating a Bright Spot takes five people, according to Stu. It has to do with putting the right five people together in a circle, then they turn around away from each other and gather what they each know and who they know. This, magically but not magically, depicted graphically, creates a star, which is a Bright Spot, which is what we need a lot of to turn back the foes of flourishing, according to Stu. The technical name for a Bright Spot phenomenon is positive deviance. It’s a real thing about how unexpected outcomes become real.
In Stu’s version, the five people have to be smart but still dimly lit, which is also referred to as epistemological humility. It’s a concept found in many religious and wisdom traditions. The specific wording here, dimly lit, is taken most directly from 1 Corinthians in the New Testament, as some of you will recognize. It also applies to the most enlightened materialistic scientific types.
The Fellowship of the Dimly Lit (FiDdLers) is curious about what has brought about the understandings or misunderstandings of today. I’ve met a lot of FiDdLers over the last several years. This past Thursday, four of us FiDdLers had lunch at the Black Sparrow, where most offsites were held through the years since 2019 when there was only Bug Stu, and then came Allie Space-Owl, the Stralfs, Star Eyes, and eventually Rhettie and Wally to make it all real for more people.
The other three FiDdLers on Thursday had never met, but I knew each of them to be great FiDdLers. From a cosmic or galactic point of view, this needed to happen in the middle of our country and next to Purdue. That has to do with fresh water and the Great Lakes, agriculture, space programs, food science, philosophy, figuring out how things work, and providing more enjoyment and more fun, in spite of the Boneless Bastards known to me as the Stralfs.
That should cover most of the cryptic stuff in the poem below, a sort of declaration, which needed to happen on the 25th of May, the fifth month, exactly five years after the discovery of the Stralfs, during the celebration of five decades of the Round the Fountain Art Fair, in order for the five-pointed Bright Spots to get started, on the shore of the fifth dimension, through IndStead Institute, to be established at the location described below, clearly, at least to insiders.
A Different Kind of Difference
The first IndStead…Institute,
by an island, once, of ill repute,
on the shore of, once, a marshy lake,
to a different kind of difference make.
We’ve overdone almost everything,
oblivious to…what it might bring.
So here we’ll bake a 7th Pie,
unblinded by an ultimate Why.
Yes, here we are just Dimly Lit,
a fellowship, in spite of it,
with a vague attraction to more Bright Spots,
replacing, bracing, fading black dots.
From The Eerie Wind in the Willows Slough,
Murphey and Ade would know what to do.
As Pan, his band, at the gates of dawn,
age out of favor—it’s time to move on.
A spirit in the air and a spirit inside,
a Star Eye, Bug Stu, and Allie, allied,
to help turn back our diminutive foes,
at least as the story of Bug Stu goes.
Choose on this day the fruit you will bear.
As for us in the Middle, we only know where.
We FiDdLers of…the pastures and ponds
use hammers and saws and not magical wands.
We make masons and painters and stewards of land,
gardeners and farmers, a little engine that can,
and knowing the visions we seldom discuss,
there’s a little Bug Stu inside each of us.
That Bug Stu, the Star Eyes,
might whisper to you,
“There once was a place…”
and you’ll know what to do.
If you’re called to the country
so others may see,
first take in Today,
and ask “What makes Is be?”
[I realize that Pan, the 7th Pie, and the fictional-so-far book title weren’t explained up above, but it’s already 11 minutes long, so…]
Have a great Memorial Day weekend, and thanks for reading : ).
Tim