A Closer Look in The 7th Pie

By Bria of Antartica (among many things)

Does anyone else experience "Planuary" about this time every year? I'm sure that's a thing, so I'm not even going to google it. I'm doing it though, just like the last few years. This countdown is actually part of that.

Everything is or has been a thing somewhere now it seems. Maybe Stu and Allie's 7th Pie Theory will become a thing. I just realized that one problem with my using the picture above is that it doesn't convey the idea of This Project as being a part of everything else that's already going on around us. The term IndSteadavision has the same issue maybe. I might have to address that.

7th Pie Theory is called that to specifically avoid the impression that it's a proposed replacement. It's an addition that integrates some things we either have known for a long time with those we are just now learning (or confirming) through what Stu cleverly calls The Brain Wave (of books and so forth on neuro-psychology since the 2000’s). The ideas here are about adding something that seems to be missing, not replacing or correcting everything else. Sometimes it's in the concrete world, and sometimes it's in the thought world.

I realized something interesting while writing that. I just finished Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from 1969. It's one of those books I had read about, but never had read. Actually, I listened to it, and that's how I'd recommend taking in her style of expression here, which is fun when not tragic, elaborate, lyrical at times, and includes ageless insights offered around her.

The book is autobiographical (childhood thru early college). What's interesting is I realized a lot of my mindset while writing the first three paragraphs here came from finishing that book last week. It also affected the poem I was writing.

Her book's title is from a poem by a favorite author, Paul Laurence Dunbar, written in 1899. Maya used similar imagery and themes in her poem, "Caged Bird", published in 1983. I mention this poem because it got me thinking about another issue, explored in one of Stu's poems, asking "why the free bird cries", which emerged while we were writing the email group’s poem earlier (here soon).

Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Learning that reminded me of an account of a Black teenager in the subsequent Detroit Riots.

I was at a conference in 2018 where the former teenager shared the scenes of violence he witnessed against Whites caught in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and how he and his mother armed themselves with butcher knives to safely escort her White co-workers from a commercial kitchen. He later became Treasurer in the Black Panthers organization. We also talked after the conference about its Fifty Years theme, and that's partly what has made the Fifty-Year Fit term stick here. I would love to digress, but...

From a psychological point of view, my pulling in the upsetting images and memories of anything from 1968 (horrible events and escalation in Vietnam, R.F.K. and M.L.K. assassinated, violence and riots across the country) might not seem to go well with my usual theme. I mean, there's a lot of whimsy in Stu's stories, of course. It might not seem like the ideal set-up for my meandering reflections next on teaching and what I will call "the river" that's seen in high schools, both disappearing in and affecting “the sea.”

The ambiguity, the cozy expansiveness, the dimlittedness, which I particularly embrace as a founding member of The Fellowship of the Dimly Lit, might seem to clash with the natural and self-assured Us and Them emotional undercurrent, perhaps provoked in today’s post, between generations, subcultures, races, philosophies/religions, worldviews, genders, identities, and classes, and it does.

But the clash is also the reason for everything I've written in the last four years, and it's the reason for Bug Stu. However, and this might sound odd, it's not directly meant to be about peace or being a peacemaker. It's not even about pluralism. Remember pluralism? I do believe in pluralism, but that's not what this is about. Kinda like the peace thing--I'm for peace, lol, but that's not what This Project is about directly.

Okay, my so-patient wife, Jeanne, tells me the reflections coming next will clear some things up (but that’s probably a relative thing). : )