From the Narrow Desert

Cheekey was a baby monkey. He lived with his sister and his mother and father in a tree. Their tree was in the jungle. In the jungle were some laws. They were called Jungle Laws. Do you know what laws are? (Things that you must do right or else you get punishment.)

Do you know what punishment is? (Something sad that happens when you break a law.)

There were two laws in Cheekey's jungle. One was that whenever you were in a tree, you had to hold on with your hand, or your foot, or your tail. What do you think the punishment was if you broke the law? (You would fall!)

The other jungle law was that if you saw a lion coming, you had to quickly climb up a tree. What do you think the punishment was if you broke that law? (You would get eaten up!)

In Cheekey's own family tree, there were two family laws. One law was that you couldn't go out of the tree without asking. Why do you think they had that law? (So Cheekey wouldn't get lost.)

Why didn't his mother and father want him to get lost? (Because they loved him.)

What do you think the punishment was if Cheekey went out of his tree without asking? (His mother gave him a little swat with her tail right on his bottom.)

Why did his mother do that? (So he wouldn't go out of the tree again.)

Why didn't she want him to do it again? (Because she loved him and didn't want him to get lost.)

The other monkey family law was to never drop your banana peels on limbs of the family tree. Why do you think they had that law? (So no one would slip on them and fall out of the tree.)

Why did the monkey family decide to have a law like that? (Because they loved each other and didn't want anyone in their family to get hurt.)

One upon a time there lived a gnome named Fuloo. Fuloo lived by himself in the Buck Horn Forest.

One night Fuloo was sitting by his fire, making rope, when suddenly he heard what sounded like 900 deer stampeding through the forest. Fuloo poked his head out of his hole to see what was scaring the deer like that. . . . A gigantic griffin was soaring through the forest, gulping down deer left and right.

"Well," said Will, "it has eaten Green Moss

INTERMISSION: The Snowflake

Small and light, beautiful white is the snowflake falling down. Whirling, twirling on the breeze, it keeps on twirling round and round and then it softly comes falling to the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

the elf, Romut the gnome, 463 deer, and 47 wolves."

"Wow," said Fuloo. "It must have been hungry."

"Yep," said Will, "it certainly wh--"

Suddenly they were interrupted by Soto the monkey-elf. "What is a monkey-elf?" you're probably asking right now, so I'll tell you: It is a half-monkey, half-elf creature, and unfortunately they didn't get much of the human intelligence, so they were mostly messengers, and this one was doing that, and it had carefully dropped a message right into Will's mouth.

On March 24, I posted "Turning suns into black holes," about syncs that had drawn my attention to The Peyote Dance, Helen Weaver's English translation of Antonin Artaud's Au pays des Tarahumaras (1947). That night, I dreamed of seeing a blog post with a particular title, and the next day (yesterday, March 25) I created a post with that title, "I am the wizard Lion." I proposed several possible interpretations of that phrase, but the one I ended up running with was that it was an anagram of rationalized whim.

Today, having been influenced by the syncs of two days ago, I picked up The Peyote Dance and started reading. When I got to the section called "The Mountain of Signs," which begins on p. 12, I was astonished to find that it dealt with the idea of rational whims. I quote the first few paragraphs (italics are the author's; bold is mine):

The land of the Tarahumara is full of signs, forms, and natural effigies which in no way seem the result of chance -- as if the gods themselves, whom one feels everywhere here, had chosen to express their powers by means of these strange signatures in which the figure of man is hunted down from all sides.

Of course, there are places on the earth where Nature, moved by a kind of intelligent whim, has sculptured human forms. But here the case is different, for it is over the whole geographic expanse of a race that Nature has chosen to speak.

And the strange thing is that those who travel through the region, as if seized by an unconscious paralysis, close their senses in order to remain ignorant of everything. When Nature, by a strange whim, suddenly shows the body of a man being tortured on a rock, one can think at first that this is merely a whim and that this whim signifies nothing. But when in the course of many days on horseback the same intelligent charm is repeated, and when Nature obstinately manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms recur; when the heads of familiar gods appear on the rocks, and when the theme of death emanates from them, a death for which man obstinately bears the expense -- when the dismembered form of man is answered by the forms of the gods who have always tortured him, become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter -- when a whole area of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its inhabitants; when one knows that the first men utilized a language of signs, and when one finds this language formidably expanded on the rocks, then one surely cannot continue to think that this is a whim, and that this whim signifies nothing.

He doesn't actually use the word rationalized, but whim is repeated again and again -- and again and again is expressed the idea that these whims are "intelligent," that they signify something, that they constitute a "language" and express a "philosophy." Clearly the idea of rationality is implied in all this.

For Artaud, it is the repetition of the same patterns that makes the whims begin to appear rational -- that rationalizes them. This is essentially the idea of synchronicity: that any sufficiently striking coincidence implies meaning.

And so this post's title turns out to be as self-referential as that of "I am the wizard Lion." Deciding to read that phrase as an anagram of rationalized whim was nothing if not whimsical, but now, reinforced by this coincidence, the whim seems to have been at least partially rationalized.

Last night I dreamed that I saw a blog post with that title (including the odd capitalization), though I wasn't sure whether it was on my own blog or someone else's. I didn't read the post; I only saw the title.

By posting this, I am making my dream come true.

In the dream, I thought it was an allusion to Jim Morrison's "The Celebration of the Lizard," with its famous lines "I am the Lizard King / I can do anything." Wizard sounds like lizard, and the lion is the king of beasts -- ergo, Wizard Lion = Lizard King.

Immediately upon waking, I thought, no, the wizard/lizard lion is the chameleon, a lizard with a lion in its name and with the "magical" ability to change color.

Not until this evening did I get around to looking up "The Celebration of the Lizard." Like most Gen-X Mormons, I am a half-assed Doors fan at best and only knew a few lines -- "Is everybody in? / The ceremony is about to begin," plus the Lizard King bit. As it turns out, the very first word of the poem is lions, which would seem to confirm my in-dream interpretation.

I was sync-posting about "The invincible Lizard King" back in January 2023.

Given Mr. Mojo Risin's penchant for anagrams, I thought "I am the wizard Lion" might be one. It's an anagram of "rationalized whim," which seems like a phrase people might use on occasion, so I tried googling it. Only four results -- but the first one was very recent: a March 1, 2024, article for The Lamp by Jude Russo, called "Whim All the Way Down" -- about, of all things, the watches owned by dictators. The key phrase occurs in the first paragraph:

Most Americans, I think, fancy themselves collectors of something or other. It is the natural consequence of our superabundant material culture; with the specter of famine having shuffled almost out of our living memory, people are free to devote a decent portion of their earnings to whim. Collecting is just rationalized whim.

I am no exception. I have my little whims -- books, guns, watches -- but . . .

Note that though the rest of the article is about watches, early on he pairs them with guns.

Scrolling down a bit, I noticed a "colonel" reference:

Col. Muammar Gaddhafi kept up a steady stream of inexpensive quartz watches bearing his likeness at every stage of his fashion sensibility . . .

This led me to the colonel's Wikipedia article, where I found this:

Colonel Gaddafi's golden gun caught my eye because, due to recent Corn Flakes syncs, I had been thinking about songs that mention that cereal: "I Am The Walrus," "Punky's Dilemma" by Simon & Garfunkel, and of course Tori Amos's "Cornflake Girl" -- which has the repeated line "And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much."

I hadn't listened to any of those songs or even searched for them -- I had just been thinking about them -- when I opened up the YouTube Music on my phone and found that the first song it had queued up in my "Supermix" was called "Gold Guns Girls":

After that, running into a real-life Colonel with a Golden Gun -- found by searching for an anagram of a line from a dream! -- was quite the coincidence.