From the Narrow Desert

Something weird is going on where Google will retroactively decide that some comment that has already been published here and has been visible for days is actually spam, and then it disappears. Sometimes this even happens with signed-in comments by me, the author of the blog! I just discovered this today, when I found that the comment count on some of my recent posts was going down. I've manually restored all the spammed comments (100% of which were real comments from regular readers, not spam) and will try to figure out how to prevent shenanigans of this kind in the future.

A few weeks ago I discovered and started listening to a second Vampire Weekend song, "Step":

This is the chorus:

The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones
I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone

Given the immediate context, I don't think "the wisdom teeth are out" refers to routine dental surgery. It means "the snake has bared its fangs," snakes being a metonym for wisdom ("wise as serpents"). The third line reinforces this reading with its (probably unintentional) nod to Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Listening to "Step" now, I naturally think of Narrow Brain, "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one," the malevolent spirit in Time and Mr. Bass. In the post I've just linked, I noted with concern the link between Narrow Brain and my blog title From the Narrow Desert. It's a line from a poem by George MacDonald in Phantastes. The complete couplet is:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,
Come into the house, so high and wide.

I've been thinking of the implications of that last line because of the recent syncs relating to the Wise Men: "And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him" (Matt. 2:11).

And what does the chorus of "Step" say? "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

I started to think that maybe it was time to retire the name From the Narrow Desert. I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview. And, I thought, haven't I done that? I made it -- right, guys? Whatever else you might say about me, I'm not a narrow materialist anymore. I've made it into the house. Maybe I should change the blog name to High and Wide.

When I played "Step" just now, YouTube queued up after it an unfamiliar song by an unfamiliar band: "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco:

The video shows Brendon Urie walking up the side of a skyscraper in Los Angeles until he reaches the roof, where he performs with his band. At first I took this as confirmation -- it's a house that's very high -- but almost immediately I realized that this interpretation didn't sit well with me. Urie (a lapsed Mormon, incidentally, and not in a good way) never actually goes into the building. He stays on the outside, never entering its heart, and uses it to realize his "high hopes" -- which turn out to be no higher than some vapid dream of being a famous pop star. This isn't the imagery of the Wise Men bowing down to the infant Christ, but of the people who wanted "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven," an idea planted in their hearts by the same being who plotted with Gadianton (Hel. 6:28).

Returning to "Step," "Such a modest mouse!" now seems like a sarcastic response to "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

In 2002, They Might Be Giants released their first children's album, No!, and these lines from "The House at the Top of the Tree" startled me:

There's a plan to eat the house
In the mind of a mouse in the woods.

Back when I lived in Maryland, more than a decade before this song was released, we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. The tree was down in a ravine, so the tree house could be entered by a ramp connecting it to higher ground, without the need for a ladder. One time my sister and I went into the tree house only to find two large snakes coiled around the radio. They looked like colubrids of some kind, and therefore non-venomous, but they still scared us enough that we turned tail and ran back down the ramp.

A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house. I could feel its presence and its thoughts, like those of the nightmare toad. Although I thought of it as a "mouse," my mental image was of a very large animal almost like a rodent grizzly bear. When I saw the illustration associated with the TMBG song, it startled me even more:

Where do mental images come from? Why would we get the same one like that?

I've been reading the Psalms, a few a day, and today these two passages jumped out at me:

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me (Ps. 131:1).

Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob; Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house . . . until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob (Ps. 132:1-5).

So no, I'm not going to rename the blog. High hopes to one side, these posts remain dispatches from the narrow desert.

And he said unto me, "What desirest thou?"

And I said unto him, "To know the interpretation thereof." . . . 

And it came to pass that he said unto me, "Look!"

And I looked as if to look upon him, and I saw him not; for he had gone from before my presence.

I have a few new posts up at my Book of Mormon blog:

I have a couple more posts on my Book of Mormon blog which I haven't linked here yet, so here they are:

"The Nephites knew nothing of an 'Aaronic priesthood'" makes the case that the Aaronic/Levitical priesthood as described in the Torah as we have it today did not yet exist in Lehi's time (i.e. just before the Babylonian captivity) and is thus not a genuinely Mosaic institution.

"Running into the fountain of all righteousness" tries to make sense of Lehi's confusing metaphor of a river flowing into a fountain.

I've decided I need to figure out what I believe about the Book of Mormon -- rather than more-or-less ignoring it while still maintaining that Joseph Smith was a genuine prophet -- and to that end I've started a new blog for recording my notes as I go through it. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but as it happened, my first post was ready for publication today -- September 21, 2023 -- 200 years to the day after Moroni's first appearance to Joseph Smith. Then I passed a stranger on the street whose T-shirt said, among other things, "Monday 12/23."

A photo of the same shirt, from the Internet

Starting tomorrow, I will be offline almost all of the time and will not be posting anything. I also won't be reading or commenting on other people's blogs much and will be an even less than usually reliable email correspondent. I anticipate a return to normal online activity on or shortly after May 28.

Synchronicity posts have dominated this blog for the past few months. In the past, when that has happened with other "niche" topics -- ambigrams, dream precognition, Tarot, the Fourth Gospel, Whitley Strieber -- I've spun them off into separate dedicated blogs, most of which are now only sporadically active, as these various interests ebb and flow. I'm considering doing the same thing for sync but want to solicit reader feedback before making the decision.

I'm taking another break from posting, in case you haven't noticed. I've hit a snag in my philosophizing and have been spending all my free time thinking about that instead of writing blog posts, leaving comments, replying to emails, etc.

I will be posting little or nothing for a week or two.

This month is not quite finished, but already the amount of traffic on this blog is more than double my previous monthly record. Checking the blog stats, I find that essentially all of this new traffic is from Sweden!

I thought maybe I had been linked to by some site that's super popular in Sweden, but if so it's not showing up on the "top referrers" stats, which are dominated by "Other."

So, Swedes, welcome! Would any of you care to explain why you all suddenly started reading this blog?

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

-- Revelation 8:1

There's that waiting-for-something-to-happen feeling in the air again, as if something big is about to go down. Obvious candidates include the return of Trump, with all the associated ramifications; and the dawning realization of what the pecks really are. I think there's something else, though, something completely unexpected like, I don't know, a gigantic volcanic eruption or something. (That's just the first image that came to mind -- not, I think, a literal premonition.) Anything could happen, and the sync fairies aren't giving me any clues.

I sense that what I need to do right now is to disengage further from current events, and also from pre-planned projects of mine like making my way through the Fourth Gospel, and spend more time contemplating and synthesizing. I will likely be reading and commenting on other blogs less than usual, and writing either fewer posts than usual or else very different sorts of posts.

Email me if you are. Moderation is only turned on in exceptional circumstances (when, through some momentary lapse of judgment, a high-traffic site happens to link to me), so any comments you post should be immediately visible. If they’re not, something’s agley.

I've updated my blogroll (right sidebar, scroll down) to include (I think) all those blogs and only those blogs which I check at least a few times a month. I haven't deleted any for political reasons, and I haven't added any for reasons of reciprocity or general chumminess.

If your blog's not listed, it doesn't mean I don't like you. If your blog is listed, it doesn't mean I do like you, let alone agree with you most of the time. I think this kind of thing has to be honest -- rather than polite or politic -- if it's going to be of any use to anyone else.

I encourage others to make similar updates. And if you delete a link to my own blog, because after all you don't really read it all that often, no hard feelings!

I am in the process of collecting my posts on the Fourth Gospel (as well as those about other parts of the Bible, from a Fourth Gospel perspective) on a new Fourth Gospel Blog. There's not much there yet, and nothing new, but expect new content in the near future. In the meantime, any of you who have not yet read my (extremely long!) post on John 1 might want to check it out.

I have a sense that the recent fire hose of syncs is a temporary phenomenon, having to do with the events of the present week (whatever those may turn out to be), and that shortly hereafter synchronicity will return to its normal background levels in my life.

I know, I know, famous last words.

Telling the synchronicity fairies to take a hike was, it turns out, about as smart as giving a hornets' nest a whack with a baseball bat. They immediately unleashed a fire hose of syncs on me and -- okay, I give up. In true Charltonian fashion, I repent, but I'm not going to stop. See The Magician's Table for my latest post on the birdemic as the sole ill.