From the Narrow Desert: Bigfoot

Showing posts with label Bigfoot. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L

This past weekend, I picked up a little alphabet book called Animalia at a used bookstore for no other reason that the author's name was Graeme Base, and William Wright had recently posted "Golden Graham Plates." Two of the letters have since turned out to be significant.

"Stink Gorilla More" (June 14) linked the word Gorilla to the word Bigfoot. Then William Wright's June 16 post "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you" led me to revisit my October 2023 post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot," featuring a big green foot:

Base's image also features the Holy Grail -- not exactly first on most people's list of things that begin with G! -- and a golden griffin perched on a gong in the form of a golden disc.

In one of my dreams, Golden Plates took the form of a disc, as mentioned most recently in "Plates among the dead leaves." This disc, too, is in a room full of leaves, though not dead ones.

Then there's L:

It's a library with two lions in it. Among the books in it are Lassie Come Home, Limericks by Edward Lear, The Leopard [...], King Lear, Little Boy Lost by L. L. Lucky, Lover's L[...], Lacrosse, Let's Learn Latin, Life of Luxembourg, Leonardo, Love's Labour's Lost, Levitation, Doctor Livingstone, Living Legends, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and books by Longfellow and John Locke -- but the one that really got my attention was The Gospel of Luke:

Two large golden animals in a room full of books syncs with the waking dream I relate in "Étude brute?" in which there were two large golden "Bulls of Heaven," one of which went with me into a cavern full of books and told me that one of the books "is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."

In trying to make sense of that cryptic statement, I thought first of the Four Gospels. In Ezekiel, the Cherubim are represented as having four faces: those of an ox, a man, a lion, and an eagle -- but in one place (Ezek. 10:14) these are given as the faces of a cherub, a man, a lion, and an eagle, implying that the Cherubim are primarily bovine in nature. I would naturally have assumed that the two heavenly Bulls I saw were themselves the Cherubim had one of them not said what it did about the book. A very old Christian tradition associates each of the Gospels with one of the component creatures of the Cherubim -- and the ox or bull is almost invariably mapped to the Gospel of Luke. In the illustration below, from the (French) St. Riquier Gospels, a heavenly Bull holds a banner with the opening words of Luke: "Quoniam quidem multi conati sunt" -- "For indeed many have tried."

Before I entered the library in my vision, the two Bulls had been standing on either side of a Nativity scene -- and the classic Nativity scene with the manger and all that also comes from the Gospel of Luke.

Another interpretive angle is to note that there were two golden Cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant -- above the Ark but also part of it. In William Wright's June 11 post "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," he proposes that the Brass Plates are currently in France and compares the Plates themselves to an "Ark," specifically mentioning the Ark of the Covenant. Now look back up at that picture of the golden griffin perched on the golden gong. As I have mentioned in many posts, the word griffin may be related to the word Cherubim. A disc of light-colored metal (possibly gold or brass) has appeared in my dream as a "Plate" with engravings on it. If the Brass Plates are, symbolically, the Ark of the Covenant, then they are, or include, the Cherubim as well.

How does the Gospel of Luke fit in? Perhaps the significance is in the name itself: Luke means "light." In his post, William emphasizes a quote from the Book of Mormon about how the Brass Plates must "retain their brightness" -- a Bright Gospel, a Gospel of Light.

In William's post, he refers to the engravings on the Plates as "Marks," capitalized. The Graeme Base picture shows two lions in a library -- and, yes, the Evangelist whose symbol is the lion is Mark.

In "Plates among the dead leaves," I record -- in a somewhat joking tone which William found "douchey" -- the hunch that if the Brass Plates are indeed in France, they may be behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse. As discussed at great length in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," this church contains an engraving of a beardless Christ surrounded by the four Cherubic creatures, which I believe may have played an important role in the development of the Tarot de Marseille. This Christ holds a book in which is written "Pax Vobis," and he bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.

The supper at Emmaus, and Christ's saying "Pax Vobis," both occur in the final chapter of, you guessed it, the Gospel of Luke.

Monday, June 17, 2024

Up against the wall

This post is going to be all over the map. What can I say, sync is inherently nonlinear.

Yesterday I was in the mood for a harder sound after a few days of listening to Emily Linge and Simon & Garfunkel, so I listened to Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails, "My Blood" by Twenty One Pilots, and instrumentals from an electronic group called 3OH!3. People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like:

"Head Like a Hole" made me think of William Wright's February 20 post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," which includes this doodle:

Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN, made me think of NINbad the Nailer, whose career is summarized as follows in "With":

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood
And did the only thing he could.

This is of course an allusion to Martin Luther, famous for nailing his 95 Theses to the church door and for saying "Here I stand; I can do no other" -- preferring to risk being burned as a heretic rather than recant. Say what you will about his theology, Luther was a badass, and I respect him. A lot of the "Head Like a Hole" lyrics actually fit him: Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

And, what do you know, it turns out that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was raised Lutheran. You can't escape your roots.

I wasn't familiar with the Twenty One Pilots song, but looking up the lyrics, I see that they have certain Lutheran resonances as well:

Surrounded and
Up against a wall
I'll shred them all
And go with you
When choices end
You must defend
I'll grab my bat
And go with you

"When choices end / You must defend" -- "Here I stand; I can do no other." The line "Up against a wall" is something the two songs have in common:

God money, I'll do anything for you
God money, just tell me what you want me to
God money, nail me up against the wall
God money don't want everything, he wants it all

"Up against the wall" has an additional meaning in the synchronistic context of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (see "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window"). When dry leaves are blown against a wall, they go up:

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

"Humpty Dumpty revisited" associates Humpty's "great fall" with falling autumn leaves. "To the top of the wall" suggests putting Humpty in his place again, and dry leaves that "mount to the sky" seem to be reversing the fall. This imagery made me think of the Moody Blues line "Like the rain rising from the sea." I'd forgotten that the song it's from also includes the repeated line "I've reached the top of my wall."

Since we've already brought so many of my childhood writings into this, why not throw in another. This was a "spellcheck poem," created by typing song lyrics into a word processor backwards, running spellcheck, and then adjusting the resulting word salad a bit to make it grammatical:

You shall forever think
yet thought's era of rhetoric is dead.
The nets of reason, the webs of speech are many,
and yet we think beyond the choking net.
Are we wise?
A falling leaf, a dying man:
Both sink against the wind, I say.

The idea of a falling leaf sinking "against the wind" ties right in with the St. Nicholas poem, where the wind blows the fallen leaves up into the sky.

Speaking of the St. Nicholas poem, it says of St. Nick that "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot" and "the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Yet "His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! . . . a right jolly old elf." And of course, he goes up and down chimneys.

When I was writing "I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis," I ran a web search for chim chim. Most of the hits were not for the Speed Racer character but for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," the song sung by the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke) in Mary Poppins. The sweep sings:

Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke

Coming back to falling leaves for a moment, the Chim-Chim post quoted one of my brother's stories with an "intermission." Looking through my copies of old stories, I found only one other with such an intermission. Here it is:

"Well, the sheath was named after the sword."
"And the sword?" asked Pron.
"The sword was named after the

INTERMISSION: The Autumn Leaf
With it's Red and golden fire
Comes the leaf swirling swooping on the breeze
Down in between the barren trees
With a dive all glory flies
And the leaf lays crumpled on the ground.
END OF INTERMISSION

sheath."
"That's sort of weird," said Pron.

William Wright recently posted "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you," the title coming from a T-shirt he got for Father's Day. I commented "Fact check: true" and liked to my post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot." That post begins with a reference to an older post, "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex" and goes on to describe a similar experience, only with Bigfoot rather than a mini T. rex.

I've been reading through the Book of Mormon a few chapters a day. Today I just happened to read 3 Nephi 10-14. Included there is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount, nearly word for word, including this bit:

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (3 Ne. 13:24).

God? Money? Bow down before the one you serve. Then, in the next chapter:

Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened (3 Ne. 14:7-8).

No conditions are attached to this promise. He doesn't say, "Unless you ask for something stupid, like Bigfoot or a mini T. rex."

Friday, June 14, 2024

Stink Gorilla More

This morning, I woke up with the phrase "Stink Gorilla More" in my head. For those who slept through Art History, that's the name of one of the most famous paintings ever produced by a gorilla, probably second only to "Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink." Michael and Koko, the gorilla artists behind these two pieces had, apparently, adapted the sign for "stink" to mean "flower."

In the context of the previous morning's dream about "A Sasquatch-eating party every week," I thought "Stink Gorilla" was suggestive of the "skunk ape," a Sasquatch-like creature also known as the "Florida Bigfoot." Actually, this second name also matches up with "Stink Gorilla," since Florida means "flowery," and Michael used stink to refer to flowers.

Then my attention was drawn to the fitted sheet I had been sleeping on. Foreign languages are often used decoratively here, and the design includes words in both French and slightly garbled English:

It's obviously supposed to say "love yourself more," but it's been misprinted so that it looks like an old-fashioned spelling of Jove, from a time when j was considered a variant of i and was generally only used at the end of a word -- or, more often, of a lowercase Roman numeral. In the days of Shakespeare and Spenser, v was still used only as a word-initial variant of u, and so the latter invokes Cupid as "moſt dreaded impe of higheſt Ioue." The capital form was always V, though, so he would have written IOVE in all caps.

"Jove yourself more" is also an ungrammatical series of three words, ending in more, and so my not-quite-awake mind decided that this, too, mapped to "Stink Gorilla More." If mapping Jove to stink seems impious, remember that the latter also means "flower," and that animals were decked with flowers before being sacrificed to that god (see Acts 14:13). The second mapping is what got my attention, though:

In a comment on my last post, William Wright relates a dream in which he sees "a big, hairy beast . . . something like Bigfoot," only later to conclude, "I was seeing myself in a bit of a caricature of how these 'aliens' [Heavenly Beings] must view us." (The bracketed gloss is William's.) Bigfoot = yourself.

What can "Jove yourself more" mean, though? I've never seen Jove used as a verb, but Shakespeare does use god that way, which should give us a clue. This is from Coriolanus:

This last old man,
Whom with a crack'd heart I have sent to Rome,
Loved me above the measure of a father;
Nay, godded me, indeed.

Coriolanus first says loved and then decides godded is more appropriate. In the same way, the sheet replaces the verb love with the name Jove used as a verb. As Shakespeare uses it, to god apparently means to look on someone as a god, or to treat someone as a god. Jove, or Jupiter, is the lowercase-god par excellence -- I believe Roget's original Thesaurus uses Jupiter as the heading under which terms for polytheistic gods and idols are grouped -- and mainstream Christian theology, when it has regarded such beings as real at all, classifies them as "angels." This brings to mind Disraeli's famous question, "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- and "Jove yourself more" could mean to take, like Disraeli, the side of the angels, while still acknowledging the ape/Bigfoot/gorilla side of things. As it happens, a popular meme expresses just this synthesis:

After making the above connections, I happened to see this on one of my wife's bookcases -- on which books have to share space with various tchotchkes and knickknacks:

It's a little figurine of a gorilla raising the roof in front of a book called Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. The Egyptian Jove would be the syncretic deity "Jupiter Ammon." We've already played around with different meanings of Ammon and Ammonite in "Milkommen."

What does that gorilla's color and posture remind me of? Oh, that's right:

Friday, October 6, 2023

Bigfoot? Bigfoot.

Sometimes there really does seem to be something paranormal about Randonautica, the app I described in my January 10 post "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex." As you may recall, it works by generating a lot of truly-random map coordinates within a specified radius of the user and then identifying anomalies -- either "attractor" anomalies with an improbably large number of randomly generated points near them of "void" anomalies with an improbably small number. While it's generating the points and finding the strongest anomaly, you're supposed to "visualize your intention," which is supposed to affect the whole process in some mysterious way.

As recounted in the linked post, the first two times I used it I randomly chose "mini T. rex" as my "intention," and both times it led me to something answering to that description.

Today I wanted to do some walking, so I thought why not use Randonautica again. I had just been reading the cryptid section of Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls and remembering my childhood obsession with Bigfoot, which I had been sure was lurking somewhere in the woods of suburban Maryland and could be summoned by continually ringing a concierge bell I had bought for the purpose (the neighbors must have just loved me!) -- so when the "visualize your intention" thing came up, I thought, "Okay, Randonautica, point me to a Bigfoot!"

If a cul-de-sac outside Baltimore seems an unlikely place for Sasquatch hunting, it's got nothing on urban Taiwan! Nevertheless, Randonautica delivered. Everyone knows these trickster spirits delight in puns and in granting requests in an over-literal way. Here's where I ended up:

That's a footprint and the English word foot, both very big (the wall was approximately seven feet tall), with a big finger pointing it out for me. (Except for the finger, that's the logo of a very small local office supplies company. I used to work for the older and much more successful "Hand" brand, "Foot" being to them what the Byrds, the Monkees, and the Allegators were to the Beatles.)

Along the way, Randonautica led me past a little clothing shop I'd never seen before. One of the T-shirts caught my eye through the window.

Some time ago, I discovered David Talbott's fringe astronomy theories and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about them on the "Thunderbolts" channel. Since then, the algorithm occasionally suggests more videos in that vein. A few weeks ago, it suggested this one:

I didn't watch it, but the thumbnail makes the main point clear enough. According to the theory, at some point in the distant past our "sun" was actually an alignment of several planets, which were much closer to the Earth than they are now, and electrical discharges between them formed an eight-rayed pattern (the "octopus" configuration discussed in my March 2022 Tarot/sync post "Lightning from the Sun?"). When this eight-pointed "sun" was not visible, that would be "night," and this video presumably tries to back that theory up with linguistic evidence that the word night is derived from eight with a negative prefix (see also acht/Nacht, huit/nuit, etc. -- clever, really).

The T-shirt is obviously supposed to mean "Number Eight," but the sync fairies don't care about intentions. It says "No Eight," with a night-black background and what looks like a partially illuminated planet. Does it say Neptune? That would make sense, since it's the number eight planet. I couldn't see much more from outside, so I tried googling "no eight" "neptune" to see if I could find the T-shirt online. I couldn't, but I did unexpectedly run into an old friend -- twice, in case I missed it the first time:

The Eight of Cups is normally Saturn in Pisces, but I guess this one blogger identifies it with Neptune. Note that the card shows a night sky with a crescent, just like the T-shirt.

Since I couldn't find the T-shirt online, I went into the shop to take a look. Here's a clearer shot of it:

It was a strange shop. Here's another of their T-shirts:

That's a guy on a bicycle, made up of random letters of the alphabet, together with a few repeated lines from Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun (plus a little introduction explaining that the North Wind is cold). In Aesop, the Sun proves itself stronger by making a man take off his coat, the North Wind having failed to blow it off. In this version, weirdly, the Sun denies the North Wind's ability to make typhoons and huge waves.

There was also this little gem. I'm not sure if it's meant to be worn by a man or a woman, but either way, it's a little weird.

Since the unplanned an unexpected strikes so many, why even bother trying to plan anything?

I'm pretty sure "double cuppin'" is a reference to that cough syrup drank singers of a certain race are always on about. How this stuff ends up printed on T-shirts in Taiwan, I'll never know. (Having just looked it up, I see these lyrics come from an American song that includes the line "Tomorrow got a flight headed to Taiwan" -- to rhyme with a reference to cocaine being "all white like Parmesan." Real art gives me chills sometimes.)

After my walk, I read a few more pages in Ecology of Souls -- the book responsible for making me think of Bigfoot -- and found this:

This may be what several Penobscot tribesmen observed when spying on medicine man John Neptune, who met the approach of "an immense eel" not with terror but affection, gently cradling its head and "drumming on it softly."

That's the only occurrence of Neptune in this 1405-page book, and I read it just after a sync involving a Neptune T-shirt. The combination of Penob-scot, fearlessness, and "an immense eel" made me think of a Moody Blues song:

Captain Scott, you were so bold
Now you're looking rather cold
Out there in the snow
What did you find there?
Did you stand a while and stare?
Did you meet anyone?

I've seen polar bears and seals
I've seen giant Antarctic eels
I've still not found what I'm looking for

The reference is to Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer, who I'm sure never saw polar bears. By a strange coincidence, an East India Company ship called the Neptune (admittedly a popular name for ships) was piloted by a different captain also named Robert Scott, perhaps a relative.