Showing posts with label Byrds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Byrds. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Lear, the Byrds, and 242

In "242, and crabs," I noted that, just as there are a total of eight cardinal and intercardinal directions (compass points) on a two-dimensional map, there would be 242 such directions in a five-dimensional space.

Thinking about a five-dimensional space led me to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Fifth Dimension," which took me to the Byrds album of that name. Side one begins with "5D (Fifth Dimension)" and ends with "I Come and Stand at Every Door." Side two begins with "Eight Miles High" and ends with "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)."

"I Come and Stand at Every Door" begins thus:

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead

Today, searching my own blog for the word dove, I reread "Syncs courtesy of Laura Wood (and 4chan)" (September 2022). Laura Wood and a 4chan anon had both quoted Revelation 3:20. Mrs. Wood's post was titled "The Knock at Every Door." A short time after that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and found that the latest post was called "Contact with the (so-called) dead - past and present."

Revelation has the S:E:G: value 121. Two references to Revelation makes for two 121s, which is 242.

"Eight Miles High" includes the line "Rain gray town, known for its sound." London is famously gray and foggy. Earlier today, I posted "Britain as another planet," ending with a reference to the classic 4chan greentext that began the tradition of referring to Britain as Bongland.

At least on 4chan, then, the rain-gray town is indeed "known for its sound" -- the sound being BONG!

In the greentext, no one has a watch, no one knows what time means -- but the time is "seven bong." The Byrds song "I Come and Stand at Every Door" continues:

I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

For the ghost-child, as for the inhabitants of Bongland, there is no time, but also the time is seven. My reference to the bong story was in connection with the Muse music video "Sing for Absolution," which ends with a view of a London as thoroughly destroyed as Hiroshima, but with Big Ben still standing.

In the comments, "for the benefit of any readers from planet n00b," I posted a link to a Reddit thread about the bong greentext. One of the comments was this:

And now we finally get around to the Lear connection: the juxtaposition of "trees" (r/trees is a pothead forum) and "bongs." In "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear, the two titular animals "sailed away, for a year and a day / to the land where the bong-tree grows." This tree also appears in Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose": "A light on the bong-tree stem it throws / And those who watch at that midnight hour . . . ."

"2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" has no lyrics other than "Go 'n ride the Lear Jet, baby" repeated again and again. According to Wikipedia, "The song was inspired by the band's friendship with John Lear, son of jet manufacturer Bill Lear, and the title is a reference to the registration number of Lear's own personal jet, which was N242FT."

Shortly after learning that, I checked The Secret Sun, where the newest post was "I Didn't Meme to Turn You On." One of the memes posted there was this one:

There's "fox trot" as in the Byrds' Lear Jet song, and midnight is the hour when people watch the Dong with the Luminous Nose throw light on the bong-tree stem. The Dong is perhaps a cousin to the Sleepy Manchurian Candidate with the Luminous Eyes.

In "Lear's i' the town" (January 21 -- that's 121), I posted, among other things, a comment someone had left alluding (with reference to my having eaten at two 666 restaurants) to the closing lines of the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," and my uncle William John Tychonievich's own such allusion at the end of his poem "Closing the Hemisphere":

And what rough beast,
Its hour come round last,
Pilots a Lear jet to oblivion?

Yeats's original rough beat slouches towards Bethlehem at the end of a stanza that begins:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

As already noted, revelation is 121 in S:E:G:. So is second coming. Two 121s makes 242.

The post was called "Lear's i' the town" in reference to an earlier post, "'No coincidences' implies a single-author creation" (November 2021). In that post, I tried to use the fact that that line from King Lear includes the word Israel spelt backwards as an example of a true coincidence.

Another example I used was the chance occurrence of the acronym SMILE in the Book of Mormon ("to be spiritually minded is life eternal") and in a random BBC story ("lethal microbes that killed so many in London's East End in the mid-Victorian period"). Edward Lear was born in London and lived  during the Victorian period.

I recently posted ("No B in Harley-Davidson" and "The seal of Melchizedek," February 9 and 18) about seeing "Keep smiling" juxtaposed with 666 twice: once in a barber shop, and once in one of the 666 restaurants that prompted my commenter to adapt Yeats.

Ace of Hearts

On the A page of Animalia , an Ace of Hearts is near a picture of a running man whom I interpreted as a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger....