Time, Love, and Teays River from Above

How Post-Millennial Modernism Began

Lori, Ron, Janet, Mike, Terry, Tim—from 1969. The year I realized I liked science, bugs, and old buildings.

I wasn’t particularly interested in girls in third grade, which is when this was taken. I had been interested way back in first grade though, and kind of in love with Lori—at top left. She was clearly the cutest girl in the galaxy in first grade, something in my mind had decided. Look at those smiling eyes. : )

Then in second grade her friend Becky (not pictured) somehow became the cutest girl in the galaxy. I’ll bring Lori back in here shortly. No designations were made by me in third or fourth grade, then in fifth grade Becky was re-confirmed to me as the cutest-and-everything-else-that-could-possibly-matter girl.

Tokens of affection were exchanged, but then we both “moved on”, and so on, and pretty soon it was most of a lifetime later, like things go. (Those designations up there were mine—the little kid in the lower right. And I remember that paisley shirt.)

Years flew by. Lori and Becky maintained their friendship even though Lori moved away in her twenties. I lost touch with both of them. Then Becky, a beloved princess-next-door in Ade Country her whole life, died of cancer a few years ago. Even though I barely knew her by then, feelings of not-fair/not-right/not-possible still appear from somewhere even as I write that. A lot of you probably know that feeling, too.

Becky’s funeral brought me and Lori back in contact. I didn’t realize she lived in Lafayette and had worked at Purdue in admissions for a while. We discovered that we thought somewhat alike, which is to say weirdly I guess, in a way, spending a fair amount of time looking down from the sky, in a way, on ourselves and our planet-mates. One of our conversations was at the Teays River pub, sitting outside at a picnic table while we endured hearing some 70’s pop hits for the 10,000th time (probably intended mostly for people who did not have long bus rides in 1973 while WLS in Chicago played and replayed its short list of hits).

At Teays River, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” came on eventually, of course. I had really never gotten tired of that particular song. And, I had recently decided that the song represented a key ingredient in This Important Project—the title kinda summed it up. I had always expressed doubts about the yellow brick road, even near the end of my senior year at Purdue, which could be seen as the home stretch on the yellow bricks. What a broad metaphor that is. (This is not an anti-college commentary really.)

Over time, I learned more about the songwriter’s weary and wary messages to Elton John in it, but there at Teays River the most salient expressions in it for me had to do with saying goodbye to the yellow brick road’s vague implied promises, saying hello to landings of different sorts, seeing the increasing relevance of rural settings, and recognizing some general psychological/philosophical applications for our postmodern era.

(I’ve edited this a few times since I first posted it, as I realized some potential misinterpretations. Today’s edits, 3/26/22 might be the most significant in terms of clarifications down in the “Is There Gonna Be a Point to This?” section.)

Conveying What Can Barely Be Conveyed

My two sisters have slowly taught me, sort of, that just because I think something is sublime, hilarious, beautiful, or otherwise awesome, does not mean others will. How inconvenient! You’ve probably been on both sides of that. Sometimes it’s a matter of tastes. Sometimes it’s a matter of it being a complicated idea that’s hard to explain unless the other person is halfway there already.

With music, finding someone who’s halfway there, or more, with a song you love, feels…like being in touch with some subcategory of love (and here’s another time when we need more than just that one word, love). Maybe it’s more like a shared moment of reaching into a kind of ethereal and general love—when it’s the right kind of music. Maybe it’s more like a super-category of love actually, above love somehow. I don’t know. Its a good thing I don’t digress.

Sure, our shared human connection and our susceptibilities to influence through aggressive or seductive music are well-documented, but I’m not thinking of that kind of music or effect. And it’s all a little too far off the subject, maybe. And in 2022 I don’t digress, as I keep re-affirming. Still…

Finding someone who, like with shared music, intuitively understands what is hard to express, seems to nicely energize a few circuits in our minds. Lori and a few others have done that for me as I try to explain what this exploration, This Important Project, is and is not all about. It was Lori that inspired what I’ve called The Landing in these writings as she told me the story of her life—from ice-fishing with her dad in the cold and wind at J.C. Murphey Lake to a life in Florida, then settling close to home here in Lafayette.

The metaphor of The Landing here is almost as broad as that for the yellow brick road. Here’s how I depict it when I’m pretending I can draw: Three mostly parallel lines swoop high up from the ground at a 45 degree angle, waver together up there for a while, then gently swoop back down. Now, in those wavering lines up high, add a limp-looking stick person. Metaphors galore.

“Is There Gonna Be a Point to This?” Sort of. A vague one.

How this all becomes Post Millennium Modernism, from the middle-of-nowhere in the East Midwest, has to do with a trend that had started building in the 1970’s, really really looked strong in the early 2000’s, but failed to launch. I was teaching high school science when it seemed to be trying to take off in the aughts, and it had to do with understanding, and caring about, how our minds work, including how sustained satisfaction works, and sense of purpose, and their opposites.

Haven’t heard of Post Millennium Modernism? Okay well, I made up the name a couple of years ago, not to say I’m the only one to have observed need for it—and the niche.

The old Moderns and the Postmodernists gave us a false either/or scenario that is hard to notice when you’re immersed in it. We kinda have to get off of the ground a ways, but not too far, to see the Potemkin nature of the market of ideas, narratives, and assumptions. I decided to make up some characters to make it easier to see and to go along with some different stories, or maybe Bug Stu decided I should. I’m not sure of the origin, but that’s how This Important Project began. I wish I could digress, but no.

The Teays, The Wabash, and All of Us

It seems counterintuitive that the youth from the 1960’s and the youth from the early 2000’s would define what our postmodern culture is like. (But there is a a reason—related to the particularly problematic aspects of capitalism and the world of ideas.) On the other hand, it seems sound and also intuitive that today’s grown-ups who were not invested in either the Boomers’ or the Millennials’ ethoses might have some different perspectives, and that’s partly why I thought the class picture above was fitting. Those are Jonesers. (Well, and Lori helped me keep things going, so it was a fun image to share.) (Oh, also, it’s not like this alternative point of view is exclusive to Jonesers or includes all Jonesers. It just seems like a reasonably real origin story, like most. Bear with me?)

A weird but related river metaphor from Star City: The Teays riverbed is now underground, a few hundred feet below the pub, and it acts as an aquifer today. This might seem a little obscure, but I say it could represent understandings of life prior to the 1960’s. I think Bug Stu might have given me this idea. And the Wabash River represents our postmodern understandings since the 1960’s. That is, the differences between ideas and those growing up along the Teays River (prior to Boomers), compared to those from along the Wabash River (after the Boomers), are much greater than anything since.

(Weirdly again, Neil Armstrong Park, right by the Teays River pub, represents the transcendence of the two rivers or epochs, according to Stu. I’m looking forward to explaining that sometime, beyond the fact that Neil was from Purdue and was the first to touch the moon. This all might seem like a lot, but considering we’re combatting the Foes of Flourishing, the Stralfs, it’s probably necessary.)

Too weird? Okay, our generational music represents this well, and I think this all matters for moving forward, determining our shared generational legacy, and expanding our horizons of possibilities—for ourselves and those to come. That’s why we’ll incorporate a lot of pop/alt music and lyrics in this story of stories.

I taught a lot of my classmates’ kids, in the same school, in the very same room that we were all in. Those were my last five years of teaching, from the fall of 2003 to spring of 2008. Kids wore Led Zeppelin t-shirts as well as Death Cab for Cutie t-shirts. In my days as a student there you’d see Led Zeppelin t-shirts, but you wouldn’t see Buddy Holly or Brenda Lee t-shirts. That’s the difference in the generational differences between now and earlier times, that is, the difference between the differences, and I think it’s a reason for optimism in discovering shared alternative narratives.

According to Stu…

According to Stu, music has to be a big part of the story here. I like that. I also like that by reconnecting with Lori I reconnected with the older music from the band Genesis, among others. I’ve tended to go with newer music because of our kids and because of our teaching days. My wife and I have been listening to music from the 1990’s through 2010’s mostly—ever since we started teaching. But Lori got me listening to a few classics from Genesis, among others, in that alt-mid-70’s vein, just like I’d done at Purdue in McCutcheon Hall, which I pass every day on my way to MatchBOX Co-working Studio, which is kind of funny.

Also according to Stu, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ s connection to The Wizard of Oz, and the other important first meetings at Teays River, nerdy conversations there about nerdy stuff, including Indiana’s state insect, Say’s Firefly, set the right course for what has happened since 2018. I’ll have to get into the Say’s Firefly connection more next time when I bring in a connection to a very unique and storied community up by Morocco, which is Hopkins Park in Pembroke Township.

The mix that’s here is partly organic and partly intentional, but I realize it’s a mix. And I realize it might seem to be meandering, but there’s meaning to that as I think will bear out as we go. (We’re working on getting more illustrations to help tie some things together.)

Thanks for reading.

More soon!