The Foes of Flourishing are Among Us, But…
An early sketch of Bug Stu and Allie Space-Owl working out countermeasures to Stralfs, the Foes of Flourishing (ca 1920)
It’s Not Like We’re Defenseless Morons…Anymore
“You can observe a lot just by watching,” said Yogi Berra, as you probably remember. Almost as obvious-but-valuable is, “You won’t notice flaws in received wisdom if you don’t take the time to watch and think with a clear mind. And if nobody has the time, no one will take the time. And if qualifying the quotidian is seen as disloyal or disturbing by a particular tribe of humies, I’d question that tribe’s commitment to flourishing and do it anyway.” That was from Bug Stu, as you might have guessed. That was actually the abridged version.
If anyone mentions qualifying the quotidian, you can bet they’ve heard the call of Bug Stu. Or sure, maybe they’ve just been reading this stuff, his stuff, here at The Pie. Alliterations with Q’s aren’t that common, but a couple of years ago at the Black Sparrow in Lafayette, The Star City, Stu shared two which even relate to each other nicely.
To qualify the quotidian is to, at least in personal reflection, openly acknowledge uncertainties, natural holes, in conventional understandings and mental models. It’s not so much a challenge to those as it is a rational and fearless (trending word, so we’ll use it here) exploration of cultural shortcuts on complex human nature, society, and interactions, via either Left or Right doctrine.
And it’s kinda cute that little Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn provides Stu with two words to encourage the q.t.q. mindset in the least threatening way: (some of you will remember, so here’s this pause where I’ll offer to buy a Special at the Black Sparrow for anyone knowing the two words already. The reward is for your attentiveness, your good memory and your integrity in not just claiming to know when you didn’t really. (Now the guilt would leave a splinter in the soul or something of tricksters : ). ) ) Yes, from Francie Nolan, “I wonder.”
Of course, I wonder also connects to our gazing at the stars, which connects to that, again…fearless…Star Eye inside, as Stu imagines in us. Then again, the Star Eye is covered with an atom suit, which shares parts of the same brain, functioning according to its 300,000+ year-old basic programming, which the Stralfs know so well, according to Stu. Intermingled entanglements in all meanings of the word, woo-woo and otherwise.
It’s a big task, and a big ask, to hold the “Star Eye” in mind, curious and caring but fearless because it has no needs, accept its entanglement with an all-kinds-of-needy atom suit, full of all kinds of fear, and imagine the insidious mumbling Stralfs, fine-tuned to the suit’s natural frequencies, contactless but somehow pulling and pushing on mental strings, like a marionette not an instrument. Yes, Stralfs can effectively push on strings of this type—according to Stu.
There Are No Fictional Ideas
All ideas are real, because they don’t need atom suits, or even energy forms. Stu pointed this out when I questioned him about referring to not only song lyrics but stories and characters so often when we spoke, mostly from children’s books. More specifically, my question was about how he expected to have any impact if he was going to rely so much on fictional stories and characters.
His explanation, the abridged version again, was that ideas are what affect atom suits, then most things go from there. And an idea cannot possibly be unreal. That wouldn’t make sense. It may or may not have much impact. It may have a positive impact or negative one, for a lot or a few, short-term or long-term, for now or later, but it can’t be unreal. And I can see that. Ideas simply are.
So I asked him if Star Eyes were more like ideas that affect atom suits. He said no, that’s not really how it works, but that in a way, the Star Eyes can fix “dents in the universe.” Those dents are really about our perceptions, including our perceptions about perceptions. The universe and the realities of the universe are true with or without our attempts at explanations.
To Stu, the dents are problematic misunderstandings about ourselves or the universe. Sometimes the dents just come from some of us humies implementing an idea, sometimes with physical effects and sometimes not, that goes against our flourishing. They are harmful/harming misunderstandings about how something’s going to work, or is working, in the universe. I guess you could say they’re going to cause some bumps as things roll along. (Some dents, and holes, are small enough to have very little effect.)
The Stralfs, according to Stu, are constantly trying to get us to dent things up, because they want us to hate life here. The big news of the last ten to fifteen years is that we’re smarter about how we fool ourselves now, which is basically what the Stralfs encourage us to do—fool ourselves about flourishing, fun, happiness, and the future.
Advances in neuroscience have helped us go back to older behavioral and wellness studies and see what was happening more clearly. The scale of internet interactions has also given us insights. In turn, we have better defense against Stralfian strategies, that is if we’re paying attention and not too committed to favorite old…dents.
That led us to the second important Q alliteration, which I mentioned Stu brought up at the Black Sparrow a couple of years ago when he was starting to get serious, and not just whispering anymore, as he calls it. Weirdly, weirdly at the time, he connected it to 1984, Steve Jobs, The Smiths, and a Super Bowl.
2019 photo from MatchBOX when I first started talking about Bug Stu’s IndSteadavision. Behind-the-scenes exclusive!
Press A Dent in the Universe?
Stu is both wary and fascinated by how “ambiguity lurks,” as he puts it. His sensitivity comes partly from the fact that, even though he can read, he processes most things through vision and sounds. Sometimes this just means reading text and processing it as if he’d heard it or seen it. That’s kinda like us, except his aural world of communication is mostly insects’ and others’ songs, which are open to broad interpretation. Does a Barred Owl really say “Who cooks for you?” Does a katydid say “Katy did”? Sometimes crickets say “cricket,” but they say more than that, just like cicadas do (which say the most).
Being so attuned to the human realm as well, Stu often sees ambiguity, confusing similarity, in both our sounds AND the meanings we apply to the very same sound (word or phrase). I attribute his near-obsession with alliterations and rhymes to his aural experiences and DNA. The repetition is especially catchy and intriguing to him, similar to sounds in the non-human world. Believe it or not, and you will need to just trust me here since we’re short on time, this is what takes the story to 1984, Orwell’s 1984, and the second Q alliteration.
Ideas Can Put the Quick in Quixotic
Quixotic: (Like quicks + exotic) An effort that would seem to require so much change that it would be futile, risky, and even embarrassing to undertake. From the 17th-century novel Don Quixote. (Then the popular 1965 musical Man From LaMancha.)
Until the mid-1990’s, Stu hadn’t been convinced that he could help, or that he really needed to start sending out his call (which will always just be a soft “hey”). Up until then he noticed the opportunities he had to maybe improve things, and he imagined what he could have done. But to Stu, what we humies really needed was a different story, and he constantly thought of ways he could have, and really should have already, introduced one. A pretty big one.
Since he’s known that he can speak to some humans for a while now, and he’s watched our particularly damaging missteps, he felt bad about not choosing to jump in back in 1984. Not only did he like the timing’s connection to George Orwell’s 1984, but he was amazed at the irony of Apple’s MacIntosh commercial during the Super Bowl that January. Amazed and alarmed. You’ll probably want to watch this short clip if you don’t know about it. (Don’t worry about not understanding the ominous announcer in the background.)
Ostensibly, and depicted very dramatically, Apple would be providing a way out of the “Orwellian control” of IBM’s offerings. The idea there, the narrative as the Savior, the Liberator, could put the quick in Apple’s quixotic hope to (Proposal 1) provide an attractive option to the dominant IBM/Microsoft personal computer AND ALSO (proposal 2) free us all, in a more philosophical way, by providing more and easier-to-use home computers and autonomous access to virtually, ultimately, limitless information.
It was the idea. It was the vision. The Villain and the Hero. The Evil and the Good Savior. The idea was compelling, and it had the underdog element, and it gave tribal identity, subtle sense of community, free with purchase of the computer. This is not a unique observation, nor was it a unique tactic back then or of course now.
But in Stu’s mind, this was the kind of opportunity and scale the Stralfs would exploit against us. We’d already gone from soul-searching in the 60’s and early 70’s to dancing then shopping and clubbing and more and more amusements, which would not provide an internally or externally harmonizing sense of purpose and sense of worth, generally. It wasn’t a morality thing, it was a mental mechanics thing. It was dent after dent, not that many humies would realize it.
….HELLO...MORONS........ENJOY...THE...GAME........ALL'S...WELL…
The blimp shown up there on the dry-erase wall is something Stu thought he should have arranged for the 1984 Super Bowl. It’s not that the country’s direction was completely illogical, but too few were taking time to reflect and to qualify the quotidian. Stralfs love this, especially when we’re bumping hard as we roll along with more and more dents and no thoughts about alternatives or adjustments.
The blimps back then had large simply-programmed lighted signs, often in red like I just did above. Stu could have pulled it off if he’d started early to find an ally. Not everyone would have appreciated the message. Some would have thought it was just humorous and a little absurd. Some would have been angry and offended.
But between the viewers at home and at the Stadium, times 14%, which is the fraction of early adopters/wonderers he expects, “It would have been significant,” as he often laments to me, “and the 7th Pie would be well on its way by now.”
“So it goes,” I tell him. He just says, “Shut up.” We understand each other, so we smile.
“Put a dent in the universe, eh?” Stu said once, after Steve Jobs did an interview for Playboy in 1985. “Intuitively speaking here, that seems like a bad idea, in terms of outcomes, breezily denting up a universe—by any meaning of the word. Is that for a sense of significance? There sure are a lot of ways to achieve significance, if that’s what you’re after. This all seems very ambiguous. I think what you humies are needing is much more thought, slow-as-a-tortoise thought, about what sort of precedents would work out better for the future. Now is too close to you. Now is too soon. Tortoises don’t do well with now or an-hour-from-now.
“Maybe you’d say something like ‘We should be pressing dents out of the universe instead.’” I suggested, half-joking, to humor him.
“Precedents that press a dent out of the universe. I like the concept, but that’s too awkward sounding. Too deliberate,” Stu said as he continued to mull it over. “Yes though, if there are dents in the universe, you humies put them there. I mean in the thought universe. You’re the only ones defining things and saying how things are when they aren’t. Those are your dents. And you can’t fix them, like, immediately, like now.”
“Now is too soon, yes. Tortoises don’t work on now. And we need tortoise tactics,” I said, trying to keep his wheels turning.
“Tim, you wanna know what’s also weird about 1984? That’s when the Smith’s How Soon is Now? came out. Of course, it’s also when Cialdini’s book Influence came out, which is equally crazy timing. But…How Soon is Now?…that’s in this story I’m writing. You know what else?”
“Well, no.”
“The video, which was controversial because some producer just got a model to dance in it without Morrissey’s knowledge, I think it’s perfect. It needed that girl dancing and being just like she was. But don’t look at her as being cool, suave, aloof, a model doing model things in that 80’s way. “
“I’ve seen it. Okay, tell me another way to see it. And I also remember smokestacks and ugly buildings.” I always notice big ugly buildings.
(You really might want to watch and listen to that video now if you don’t know it well.)
“And you remember the lyrics. The theme. Okay, I imagine the girl as thinking about the words. The story. And she’s also thinking ‘What am I doing? What is everyone doing?’ And they put that hat on her, and liked her clothes, or didn’t and changed them. And she would do this thing and some girls would hate her and some would admire her, and boys would want her, and she would be thinking, ‘What am I doing? What is everyone doing?’ She goes through the motions thinking about the words and the world and the universe that people created that is not enough or it’s too much. And she needs and wants to be loved and everybody else does, like it says in a clubby vie, but it’s also not that simple, because it’s always been that way, she figures, so we would have figured things out. And she knows some people think she’s the most beautiful and alluring girl they’ve seen, and that that, even with love, is not going to be enough for long, even if she would never age. And she knows she’s criticized for doing shallow things, but she doesn’t see depth anywhere anyway, and no one seems to have a solution or an answer to big questions. She’s grateful that she doesn’t have the kind of pain that Morrissey is talking about, but she knows things should be a lot better, and maybe if her scene, her context, her habitat was more whole, she’d think about something else. She doesn’t think she can just think her way out. Meanwhile, she’ll do this. But, if someone were to ask her when she’d like to try something else instead…”
“Yeah.” And that’s all I could say or wanted to say.
Then Stu said, “But this has to be slow. It’s not a now thing. Not a movement thing. It just needs to be a story, and a different story, or lots of them. They’ve been ideas on tortoise’s backs in different forms for centuries. But maybe…they actually do put the quick in quixotic. I mean relatively speaking.”
“You know enough about us to write a nonfiction account of the last two hundred years at least, so we can see how this happened, because things aren’t much different been when that video was made and almost forty years later. It’s just different postures. A facade of depth. That sounds like something you’d say.”
“I think maybe they have to wonder. To have more than a facade. They can’t just care. I think they actually need Stralfs and Star Eyes, and whatever the rest is.”
“And it’s still nonfiction, isn’t it. Ideas can’t be fictional.”
“Yeah. Very good. So we’ll keep doing this, like this?“ Stu asked in a tone that revealed some uncertainty I hadn’t noticed before. But it was obvious, what I was going to say, and I think he was just confirming his mission to himself by asking. I was kinda glad to know he stops to think too—to wonder about if the two of us should really stay on this path. I definitely thought we should.
“Let’s.”