Everything is Pie
“A steadier, steadying, studious place. A headier, readying, studious pace. A rallying respite. A respecting, reflective, place to embrace.” —Bug Stu 2018
(Revised 1/31/22 because Stu’s ideas about our Want-wells, atom departments, and Appetites needed words. 11 minute read time)
The Insides, the Outsides, the Play
My theory is that Stu likes the repeating sounds, like in that caption, because they remind him of the how insects sing. He’s gone on at length to me about the benefits of having reminders of the reflection, circumspection, and even direction that all mobies need from time to time to stay happy, the “whole kind of happy,” he says. He says the singing insects have always helped to provide the reminders.
As Stu sees it, since we and our fellow mobies can’t have roots like plants do, we all have Want-wells instead, for getting things, in lieu of having roots for that. A mobie without a Want-well would be like a plant with no water or minerals. That means we also need reminders, resets, and revisions to the many requests that go into our Want-wells (not that they’re like wishing wells.)
Those requests come from the Appetites in our various atom departments, confusingly referred to as needs in psychology for about a hundred years in spite of lurking ambiguities in the implications. I’ll have to tell you more about all that another time, but the Appetites are representatives from departments like Eating, Learning, Status, Love, Reproduction, Rest, Novelty, Motion, Safety, Violence, and Joy. Plus there are meta-Appetites. Anyway, he says there was a time when more humans listened to the helpful chants of insects (especially cicadas’ chants) for figuring out how their Want-wells worked.
It can be a little confusing at first to translate from Stu’s mental models and terms to our own. Of course, the same issue comes up between different human cultures/languages. Sometimes one culture has better labels than another for certain elements of life. I’m not saying that’s always the case with Stu’s terms, which he mostly picked up from Indiana fireflies, especially the Say’s Firefly, but it’s something to keep in mind as we deal with the different perspectives here, since it’s unavoidable while talking about Stu’s story(ies).
I’ve resisted three potential digressions here already, staying mindful of my 2022 resolution, but I do need to talk about some of those terms—referred to as Stu-isms by some readers. Mobies are any organism that normally moves, is mobile, in order to survive. To Stu, living things are mostly divided between plants and mobies. I won’t cover his whole taxonomy, but bonies are vertebrates, baggies are invertebrates, and humans are humies. He’s actually adopted a lot of our labels at this point or blended them with his. Plants are plants, for example. Insects are insects (there’s a funny story about that one).
His use of atoms takes some unpacking. For Stu, the term atom is a general term for elements that make up an emergent phenomenon, like how the firing of synapses in our brains creates a thought, or blades of grass create a pasture, or invisible (microscopic and smaller) particles make up our bodies.
That is, the atoms of a thing aren’t really like the thing, and tracing from the thing back to atoms is such a leap that it’s hard to truly conceive of the direct relationship between the two or where the thing really “comes from” out of those atoms. In a way, cells in your body could be called atoms in Stu’s use of the word. Even your consciousness could be. He also uses atoms in our conventional way when he needs to.
And being an amateur insectual linguist, as he calls himself, he goes down a lot of rabbit holes in terms of how sounds and words work with us humies and other mobies. I might have mentioned before that some of our practices “nearly irritate” him (he doesn’t like to submit to his internal irritation, as he puts it). In particular, our broad use of the word love perplexes him. And, I’ve now leapt over another rabbit hole of digressions.
I should mention wasp holes from Stu’s lexicon. Most rabbit holes of linguistics, history, and philosophy are truly for exploration. Wasp holes, and he knows this isn’t exactly fair to wasps, are smaller holes intentionally made to entice and trap. They’re not really about exploring broad ideas. There’s not enough mental space in them to really wonder, and that’s always makes him wary.
They have the attraction of suggesting little-known information to dig into, like rabbit holes, but they’re really intended for a specific thought outcome, not exploring, hence the name. They’re the basis for Stu’s expression “the recollection that introspection fends off injection” (sometimes just rifi, like re-fee, for short, because that one’s a little too much, imo).
He stresses that it’s just a mnemonic aid, not necessarily based on actual wasp behavior. But a gruesome-for-bugs truth about wasps is that a very large number of them inject eggs inside other insects, establishing unwitting future nurseries you might say. You can probably guess that this does not work out well for the host insect, sometimes very young, sometimes older.
You can probably see how a lot of metaphors then get generated from this feeding phenomenon. The reason Stu says “introspection fends off injection” is that if a little bug will think about the hole it’s going down, why it’s going, what its whole self might want to do, and the clearly suspicious appearances of certain holes, it can avoid being eaten from the inside out later by parasites.
Other misfortunes might come upon the little guy, sure, “but seriously…this time with a little more introspection, okay everyone? We can do this!” Sorry, but that line of Stu’s just popped into my head. Stu says that quite a bit. It’s his way of responding to the dystopo stuff and other aspects of human life he considers “soooo two hundred thousand years ago.”
Okay, that was the inside stuff, which is Stu’s specialty. Allie Space-Owl’s specialty is the outside stuff, or how it all works together in societies, and that’s coming up. But I need to explain why I talk about a play or musical from time to time.
Stu’s Plays
He imagines life as a play, a musical usually. He points out that since no one can do or express absolutely everything they think of, life really is sort of like a play. It’s not that it’s fake, but it is curated selections of what’s inside minds. It’s not a matter of fake vs real, that is. The fakest idea is that real-and-complete real could ever really appear. There could never be enough time in a life.
You might remember several months ago when I explained how Stu and the fireflies, the original Fellowship of the Dimly Lit, used a model of the solar system to show that any planet in the solar system could be seen as the center just as well as the sun could.
The fireflies didn’t believe Stu when he proposed this. He did not have the credentials the fireflies did, so it was reasonable to be asked for more background and proof. They actually helped him with his demonstrations, because they just wanted to understand things--without fear of what it would mean or who it is was that brought the understanding.
Just real quick. To see the planetary motions that were involved, they all took turns as planets and saw that it was true: any planet could be the center, in terms of matching appearances of the night sky. That is, it wasn’t clearly wrong to have a planet at center with everything going around it (and life wouldn’t be different there either way). What makes the sun the real center is because of how things actually work below mere appearances, causes under causes. Ignoring that, a good orator could have made a compelling case, with complicated esoteric explanations, for any planet as the center.
Sure, there might be some intuitive guesses about the sun’s true position even from appearances, like by pointing to Occam’s Razor, which says the simplest explanations (sort of) are usually correct. And yes, that rule-of-thumb would make the sun-at-center the best model. BUT, that’s not the proof. Meeting some rule-of-thumb isn’t proof, just like debate winners don’t provide proof—they provide persuasion and rationale for more exploration in a particular direction.
The proof for the sun-at-center, the heliocentric model, depended on knowing forces needed to be at work to change motion from a straight path to a circular path, and also knowing where the forces came from (although not the ultimate cause of the force, i.e., the cause of gravitational pull). It was only when the bugs included these factors that they could understand and validate both Stu’s point and the heliocentric model. That was their play. (In the historical humie world, a detectable shift in location of background stars beyond that was required by some as an extra measure of confirmation, but that was beyond this part of the demonstration.)
Practicality and Caring for The Farmers’ Care
Humies are incomparably more complex than planets, Stu realized, unlike many Enlightenment era thinkers and their predecessors. So digging into the how-things-work of humies would be a way different deal than anything the sciences had explained. He doubted it could be done.
But he also realized we’re the farmers of the planet in literal and figurative ways, and that our few hundred thousand years of existence hadn’t prepared us for really running the farm. Stu’s basic lineage goes back a few hundred million years, so they are a little more settled in than we are. Could he help? Possibly, maybe, and again, the play would be the thing, according to Stu. It wouldn’t be like regular science.
Anyway, that’s where the play idea came from. So that’s why he throws lines in occasionally, like, “…this time with a little more introspection, okay everyone? We can do this!” Stu is 95% snark-free, but he admits that he says this, on occasion, in a snarky way. He jokingly blames Allie for it. Allie just does her long blink when he does that.
Speaking of Allie
“But beetles don’t generally produce plays,” Allie told him. Stu knew this wasn’t really an attempt to shut him down. This was her pragmatic mode, which she used to make Stu process his musings further, to create something that might actually materialize, something that mattered.
She wasn’t beyond musing herself. It was Allie’s musings during night flights that later became the idea of the Star Eyes. It was also Allie’s idea that the Star Eyes don’t happen to the universe or to other people. Star Eyes are like ideas. They don’t happen to anything unless they’re covered in an atom suit. Atom suits are what do the happening.
After some long conversations at The Black Sparrow on this, Stu and Allie decided that they could say Star Eyes are inside our atom suits, and that’s how we happen to others and to the universe. Again, atom suits do the happening, and the Star Eye just abides, mostly.
But what does it mean to happen? They decided it could be summed up with three P’s: People, the Place, and Probabilities. It’s pretty clear how we happen to other people and to a place, but probabilities was more abstract. Stu explained it like this, with another p-word as it turned out.
The Three P’s, Maybe Four
“Precedents usually have a great impact on probabilities of something happening. Well, especially with the way you sheepy humies work, but it makes sense. But…keep in mind that the internet sort of did away with the funnel of occurrence of the old days. It used to be that an idea about living needed a certain amount of track record, time on the ground, before it would get noticed. And it would come to the stage of reality, if it made it there, with a lot of field experiences and notes. Now that’s not the case. Now everybody and their brand is on a stage, proposing things, and usually without long term field reports. The funnel of occurrence used to naturally screen out ideas that weren’t resilient, weren’t workable, weren’t whole enough—not that it filtered out all problematic ideas. It’s like…”
I interrupted Stu because I knew he and Allie had probably discussed and dissected it down to the quarks, and I didn’t have time for quarks. It was a good thing I stopped him, because here’s what he came up with, which I thought was pretty useful.
“In a complex reality, futures depend on probabilities, and probabilities come from precedents, and whether they are satisfying or not. The Is Train, essentially, runs on precedents, right or wrong.”
You might remember that the Is Train idea came from a painting at The Black Sparrow, and it’s actually called the Ghost Train. The meaning of Is Train, for the most part, is just as it sounds, but we’ll get further into that again another time. We need to close with the recent re-beginnings of Stu and Allie’s play.
Practicality and The Play
No, beetles don’t generally produce plays. But beetles do end up in people’s dreams, and those people can produce plays and plays about plays. If you’ve been following this for a long time, you know that Rhettie is the person that often dreams of Bug Stu. You might also be realizing that I’ve looped back around to The Black Sparrow, which is where this all started and which has been the site for so many gatherings of meaningful, even if not quite aware, people in the story behind this story, a couple of levels up from Stu’s story.
So pictured up above is Rhettie, in a way, reflecting on a steadier, steadying, studious place. Like Stu said some time ago, everything is pie. Even a pie, often depicted as two-dimensional, even of a slice of pie, has depth into the third dimension of reality, and even into the fourth—time and history. Stu and Allie are sure that as The Farmers, because who else would it be, we would be interested in this depth for affecting precedents and probabilities in the future. So Stu keeps coming back to the play, or really…a play about a play : ).
More soon.
Thanks for reading.
Tim