From the Narrow Desert

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Sweet Baby James

I've been reading Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers rather slowly. Today I came to Frankley's poem about Saint Brendan, with its interesting rhyme scheme:

We sailed for a year and a day and hailed
no field nor coast of men;
no boat nor bird saw we ever afloat
for forty days and ten.

As you can see, in the first and third lines of every quatrain, the first foot (not the second as in limericks) rhymes with the fourth. Sometimes this is done in a very clever way which would not have been possible if rhymes came only at the ends of lines:

We turned away, and we left astern
the rumbling and the gloom;
then the smoking cloud asunder broke,
and we saw that Tower of Doom:

What this made me think of, oddly, was the James Taylor song "Sweet Baby James." In my 2019 post "The rhyme burden of various poetic forms," I had noted the song's rhyme scheme as being slightly more challenging to write in than the ottava rima of Byron's Don Juan. (By the metric used in that post, the rhyme burden of ottava rima is 0.35, while "Sweet Baby James" is 0.357. Frankley's poem is 0.429, the same as a Spenserian sonnet.)

These thoughts led me to listen to "Sweet Baby James," and some of the lyrics hit differently than they had in the past -- "Good night, you moonlight ladies," for instance. What really got my attention was this verse, though:

There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
A song that they sing of their home in the sky
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to see
But singing seems to work fine for me

In "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy," I wrote about the song the ransomed sing as they return via a "highway" which is actually the sea. And of course this "sea" may in fact be a figurative reference to outer space, hence the song "of their home in the sky." In that post, the ransomed are portrayed as singing yaks, tying in with the cattle-herding theme of "Sweet Baby James."

Lord Byron on a motorcycle

My dreams of last night ended with this brief scene: Lord Byron, dressed in the clothing of his era, with a black cape about his shoulders, was standing astride a black Yamaha crotch rocket with a long bridge ahead of him. Behind him, the late afternoon sun was shining. Before him, dark storm clouds gathered. He stood there for a few moments, gazing into the distance as if sizing up the situation. Then he started the engine, hunched forward in the seat, and sped off over the bridge and into the storm.

This afternoon, I experienced a weird sense of déjà vu when, motorcycling back home from Taichung, I came up on a long bridge and saw black clouds lowering ahead, even as the sun shone bright behind me. I had a paper bag full of books hanging from a hook in front of me and was not prepared to deal with rain, but what choice did I have? Like Byron in the dream, I went over the bridge and into the dark. The first fat drops began falling literally seconds after I arrived at my destination.

Rolex doesn’t sound like a watch

It sounds like a prescription medication.

Ask your doctor if Rolex is right for you.

Saturday, July 6, 2024

Yaniv!

I think I've finally solved the mystery of the five playing cards on the Y page of Animalia, as discussed in "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy."

I had pretty much given up, to the point where I was trying to contact the author and ask him to reveal the answer. Graeme Base is a difficult man to contact, it turns out, but that's okay because I think I've got it. I had looked at a few lists of card games, none of which had anything beginning with Y. After checking a few more such lists, though, I found Yaniv.

Yaniv is a draw-and-discard game in which each player always has exactly five cards in his hand, and the object is to have the hand with the lowest value. Aces are low, so the hand depicted -- two aces, two deuces, and a trey -- would be a pretty good one.

In my post about the Y page, I interpreted it in terms of the return of the Lost Tribes of Israel -- particularly the House of Joseph, whose symbol is the wild ox. It is then singularly appropriate that Yaniv is not only an Israeli game but one particularly associated with Israeli backpackers -- i.e., with nominal "Israelites" who are traveling overseas.

Yaniv is named after one of the two backpackers who invented it. Yaniv is a modern Hebrew name (not biblical) and means "he will bear fruit, yield, produce." According to Wikipedia, the game is also known as Yusuf -- i.e., Joseph ("he will add") -- which also begins with a Y. The other co-inventor of the game was named Asaf, which means "collector, gatherer."

Friday, July 5, 2024

Fire and Ice 2: Geothermal Boogaloo

The first synchronicity that registered with me as such had to do with Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice." It happened around 1991, and I discussed it in my 2019 post "Fire and Ice."

I was reminded of this today when I received an English magazine with this on the cover:

I also noticed "The Little Helicopter on the Red Planet" in connection with "The Gospel of Luke on Lobsterback." In that post, I discussed the transportation of the "Gospel of Luke" from "Britain" to "Armorica" on "lobsterback" -- all in scare quotes because probably none of those terms is meant literally. "Snails" were involved in this transportation. A helicopter could also be used to transport things across the sea, and the first element in that word is the combining form of Helix, which is a genus of snails. In the post I noted that lobsterback was historical slang for a British soldier, referring to the red coats they wore, and that previous dreams and syncs had introduced the idea of "Britain as another planet." The planet the lobsterbacks are from would naturally be the Red Planet, just as the planet the little skinny creatures are from is the Little Skinny Planet. In fact, in my post "Britain as another planet," I explicitly bring in Mars, referencing, among other things, a Muse music video featuring "a planet that looks like Mars but turns out to be Britain."

Coming back to the main cover story, though, it sent me back to my 2019 post, which included a still from This Is Spinal Tap. (That absolutely perfect movie, together with The Princess Bride, is why I will never denounce Rob Reiner, no matter how much of an ass he has made of himself since then.) The scene I was referencing was this:

Derek Smalls says of his bandmates:

We're very lucky in a sense that we've got two visionaries in the band. You know, David and Nigel are both, like, like poets, you know, like Shelley and Byron and people like that. They're two totally distinct types of visionaries. It's like fire and ice, basically, you see, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

Rewatching the clip just now, I noticed the Luke reference ("lukewarm water") and the names Shelley and Byron. Byron is, by a very wide margin, the English-language poet I have read the most and whose poetic style has most influenced my own. I haven't read too much of him recently, but just a few days ago, as documented in "No more a roving," I was nudged by Claire to take down his collected works and see what page was bookmarked. It was "So, we'll go no more a roving." This poem is very prominently featured in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, so that's another link to the Red Planet.

I'm fairly indifferent to Shelley as a poet, though he's been in the sync stream from time to time, mostly in connection with "The Sensitive Plant." When I heard the name Shelley in the video, though, my thoughts immediately went to a children's book I have at my school called What's in My Classroom? It's a very short, very simple book, only 10 pages, in which children give each other clues and try to guess what in the classroom they're thinking of. It ends with this:

Shelly appears to be a red-eared slider, a fairly close relative of the box turtle. In "Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)," I recount a vision involving a box turtle and compare it to a story by William Wright about a Herbie the Hamster. Herbie lives in a glass enclosure which apparently has no lid, because in the end he succeeds in climbing out of it. Shelly the Turtle, as you can see, also lives in a glass enclosure with no lid, and also gets out of it in the end.

Also, take a look at the books the children are reading on p. 9. The boy's book has pictures of golden autumn leaves -- a major theme here recently. The girl's book has golden flowers, something William Wright has just posted about in "Gold and Red Stars: El-Anor and the Sawtooth Stone." His "Red Star" reference is of course another link to the Red Planet.

Finally, I should mention the possible significance of the book title What's in My Classroom? In a comment on his post "Behold, God's gift! Peter-Pharazon to come back together with John," William Wright links the idea of a classroom with the Mountain (i.e., in his reading, planet) of the Lord's House:

In my story, shoes are associated with reach the Peak, just as changing one's shoes in William's school is also required to ascend the stairs to the classroom. The classroom reference at the top of the stairs is interesting because Isaiah mentions that when the Mountain of the Lord's House is again established in the top of the Mountains, people will want to go there so they can learn, like one does in a classroom.

Update (later the same day): Hours after posting the above, I was preparing for a class and saw these three pictures:

All together on the page, there’s a turtle, a snail, Mars, and a red coat (“lobsterback”).

I also got word that a new student is going to join one of my classes, and the English name he uses is Byron.

Then this evening I checked Slate Star Codex for the first time in months and found a newly posted review of Byron’s Don Juan written in the style of the poem itself.

(Don Juan has its moments, but writing it in clunky pentameter stanzas was a mistake. Tetrameter with an irregular rhyme scheme suited Byron perfectly, and a Don Juan written in Giaour-style verse would have been brilliant. No, I’m not going to do it myself.)

Unhenned

I dreamed about a soon-to-be-published book called Unhenned. The author, rumored to be a major literary figure writing anonymously (I imagined him looking like Philip Roth), had released photos of the cover — all red, with just the one word Unhenned on it — but refused to reveal anything else about it, not even whether it was a novel or a work of non-fiction. Rumors swirled, mostly about how misogynistic it was probably going to be.

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Fruit grown from a ruby in a cup (with a turtle)

I had another brief vision or waking dream today, while praying the Rosary and contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost.

I saw a large golden goblet, and a big ruby -- about the size of a large walnut -- was put inside it. I couldn't see who was putting it there. I just saw the ruby move through the air and down into the cup, but slowly and deliberately, not as if it were falling or being thrown. My impression was that it was being placed in the cup carefully by an invisible hand.

A few seconds later, a box turtle walked up to the goblet. It stood up on its hind legs and put its forefeet on the rim of the cup, trying to peer inside. As soon as it did this, all kinds of fruit started bubbling up from the goblet until it was full almost to overflowing. There were bananas, grapes, a pineapple, and lots of other fruits whose individual identities didn't register. The whole thing reminded me of Carmen Miranda's fruit hat. It was just a lot of fruit -- no plant or tree from which it was growing -- but my impression was nevertheless that it had all grown very rapidly from the ruby, and that the turtle's attempt to look into the cup was what had triggered it.

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I have no clear interpretation of this, just a few hints at possible connections. One thing I immediately thought of was the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups card:

Here, too, we have something being put into a golden goblet. The imagery of the descending dove ties in with the context of the vision (I had been contemplating the Descent of the Holy Ghost), and of course turtle is a word that can refer either to a shelled reptile or to a dove.

I also thought of "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," where a gorilla seems to be about to put a bunch of grapes into the Holy Grail.

The ruby in the cup made me think of one of Debbie's dreams, where she was given a cup with a crystal in it, and the whole thing had something to do with Heaven's Gate. Since comments aren't searchable, I can't find that dream, so Debbie, I'll have to ask you to post it again. (You might consider starting your own blog so that these things are searchable.)

I also thought of William Wright's "Herbie the Hamster: A Short Story." The story is about a seed, and the ruby in my vision functions as a seed. Hamsters and box turtles play similar roles as low-maintenance pets often kept by small children, and the turtle's standing up on its hind legs to look into the cup reminded be of Herbie's efforts to get over the wall and see what is outside.