Cages, Shells, Contexts, and Want-Wells

You might not have seen young Bug Stu before. My sister made young Bug Stu for me a few years ago : ). He appears to be either thinking or telling me something. I discovered this book at the 2017 National Arts and Crafts Conference as one of the first Covergences, before we even had a name for them. It became the first book in Stu’s library.

(6 minute read)

Hi Everyone,

I mentioned in Episode Minus 4 that I’m not much of a sci-fi fan, even though I referred to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the number 42 from that book, and some Convergences, as we call them. It’s still true that I’m not a real sci-fi fan, but now I also need to mention Mystery Science Theater 3000, since my nonfictional mind used to conjure up something similar in my classroom even before I knew about “MST3K.” Elements of this are important to The Pie, IndSteadavision, and all that.

My room was a classic 1960’s era science lab/lecture room. Many of the curiosities in the cabinets and storage areas had been there since the school opened in 1967, and this was the mid-Aughts. Everything was the same as when I was a student there with Mr. Sherfey as my teacher. His granddaughter was one of my students there.

I’m sure I did some show-and-tell with the old Geiger counters and other artifacts from the days of Civil Defense training, which included a fair amount of first aid training—in addition to what canned food to buy for your bunker, and how thick to make the walls for the impending radioactive emissions, depending on what material you were using.

It’s a little early for a break here, but some of you, like me, have now thought of CPR training with a Resusci Annie, and now you’re distracted by your memory of one of the greatest 3-minute moments in television, so let’s just get that out of the way. Here it is. (Sound needed) . It brought me to tears again, laughing. Ohhhh, Dwight. Apologies upon request. Maybe I’m still a high school freshman in some ways.

So anyway, as a teacher, some days in class I would wonder “What would the aliens think?” like you might also if you imagined three different aliens sitting together on a tall storage cabinet at the front of the room behind my wide science demonstration desk. The aliens were just trying to make sense of things and looking at us all a little differently than we would look at ourselves, of course. Sometimes that separation of worlds, for perspective, seemed helpful or at least interesting.

Side note: So far, doing those lab demonstrations at “NN”, then the impromptu extensions/wondering, discovering things I hadn’t expected but that then made sense, or just messing around a little, are my lifetime favorite things. I really do not expect to match those times, but I do expect something close to come along.

In the MST3K series, an astronaut, a robot, and an alien sit together in the front row of an otherwise empty movie theater and provide ongoing “commentary” during B-grade sci-fi movies. For a while a little decal of their dark silhouettes was in the lower right corner of my classroom TV. Sigh. No, their snark and smart-assery weren’t meant to be constructive or instructive, but the mix of perspectives, the contextual shifts, must have stuck with me, or something.

Bug Stu and Allie Space-Owl are not snarky. They’re earnest, curious, helpful, and concerned but not worried. For now, Bug Stu is providing the most content and perspective, because he focuses on the small stuff and inner workings. He plays with words and concepts in order to both experience and express a different way of understanding things.

The title up there, Cages, Shells, Contexts, and Want-Wells is the kind of thing Stu comes up with regularly. Generally speaking, cages are what he sees as externally applied boundaries, sometimes applied unintentionally, on are our actions and imaginations. Shells, generally, are self-generated shelters we use as individuals in an effort to protect ourselves in different ways.

They’re also found around ideas, narratives, assumptions, and other phenomena, real or constructed. We understand things better if we break through them, either kind of shell or cage, and that can be complicated. He uses these terms in the latest poem, so I thought I should mention this. You can think of Want-wells as what we and other mobies have for getting things, since we’re not like plants which can just take in what’s around them.

Allie doesn’t play around with words and ideas all that much, but she’s very interested in us humies, and she observes things on a large scale, monitoring actual outcomes. She is very caring and very pragmatic. She loves life and loves what she does. She loves life and what she does so much that she allowed Stu to try something new on her that incorporates tardigrades performing certain internal functions.

The modifications greatly increase her longevity, and they increase the altitudes at which she can operate. She has given up some personal warmth in this, but it has not reduced her intelligence or compassion. The nature of her role and her personality tend to make her less available for chats, but we still all get together at the Black Sparrow in Lafayette occasionally.

There might not be a more fitting gathering place in the galaxy for Stu and Allie and The Pie. On the humie side, related gatherings here go back to 2018 in terms of the emerging Fellowship of The Dimly Lit (somewhat more formally established in February 2020).

If you’ve been reading earlier Episodes, you might be wondering how this will relate to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the poem “Caged Birds.” Well, since Stu wrote most of the poem I’ll be sharing next, “Free Birds in a Shell” or “Why Do Free Birds Cry?” I thought this would be a good time to explain a little more of his background. There’s more to it, like the fact that he’s a few hundred years old, grew up at a marsh in Sussex County in the U.K., eventually moved to Northwest Indiana marsh country in the early 1800’s, and met Allie—but too many people skip the background to the background, so that’s what I was covering today.

We’re not sure how old Allie is. Stu might actually know, but what he tells me is that when he brought it up she looked at him in that owl way, closed her eyes slowly and opened them again in that owl way, and said nothing. He thinks she might have been slowly blinking and hoping he’d disappear, as if he weren’t real. But he is real, a persistent image and a persistent idea.

And she likes the idea, the ideas, so they became friends even though they operate in different parts of reality. Stu still gets that look from her sometimes, but he’s decided that he doesn’t really know what it means, at least not entirely. The uncertainty is a common theme here. In fact, in a broader way, The Fellowship of the Dimly Lit is all about the apparent paradox of certainty in the quest for satisfaction, enjoyment, flourishing, and all that. Not just achieving it, but even understanding it.

And that reminds me of one of Stu’s favorite poems that I’ve done. It’s actually very fitting for this week’s introductory posts here. It’s on our relatively unseen Medium site, also called The Pie, and this link will take you right to it. Facing the Asterisks. (I’ll gradually move things here and maybe even try to grow the audience, lol.)

Thanks for reading.

Tim