From the Narrow Desert: Christmas

Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Étude brute?

I’m going to have to up my game as a punster if I’m going to keep up with Claire. This one is hers, received while I was in my study this afternoon (June 17) praying the third decade of the Rosary and contemplating the Nativity.

It means “raw study?” in French but is clearly punning on “Et tu, Brute?” — spoken on the Ides of March by the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This ties in with a few things William Wright has written recently. In “‘Naming’ Joan (and ‘Beware this one!)’” he writes of a being (presumably Claire) saying, “Beware this one!” and, “When I dream, I dream of books.” He thinks these were both references to me: the first because it suggests the Shakespeare line “Beware the Ides of March!” (my birthday), and the second because he thinks of me as someone who reads a lot of books. “Étude brute?” alludes to the same date in the same Shakespeare play, and “study” relates to the idea of reading a lot of books.

In “Grand-Rivière, France: Why not?” William writes of how one of my references to “my study” gave him the idea of the Brass Plates being in a “Study” — meaning a cave full of books — in France. Today I received the French word for “study” while in the very room that had given William that idea.

It is also significant that the words were received while I was doing a Rosary meditation on the Nativity. (I typically pray in my chapel, not my study, but today was an exception.) The last time I did that particular meditation, Saturday, June 15 — also in my study — I had a brief vision which I wasn’t going to write about, but I think now I should.

As the vision opened, I was in a large egg-shaped cavern with no visible exits, and I understood that at the center were the Holy Family, including the newborn Jesus. They were shining so brightly that I could not look at them directly, but I knew they were there. They were attended not by the humble ox and ass of the familiar Nativity scene but by two gigantic otherworldly animals I thought of as “Bulls of Heaven” — something like an aurochs, but golden and with very large, intelligent eyes, and possibly with some sort of feathers or very large scales.

These Bulls conveyed to me telepathically that I was being given permission to walk through the back wall of the cavern. I did so, passing right through the wall as if I were a ghost, and found myself in another cavern, even larger, which was full of books. One of the Bulls was still with me and conveyed a telepathic message about one of the books: “This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves.” Before I could get any clarification of that confusing statement, the vision dissolved.

Being led into a “study,” and introduced to one of its books, by silent bulls is extremely strange. Besides “raw,” another meaning of brute is “an animal without the power of speech.”

All of this is so far over my head that I don’t even know what to say about it. For now I simply report it.

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."

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window

In my last post, "Every man and every woman is an ape," I used a line from "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- "when what to my wondering eyes should appear" -- for no particular reason. It just popped into my head as I was writing. In "Stars in Animal Skins," William Wright points out that in the poem, this line comes just after the narrator goes to the window:

Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,

William thought this might have been intentional on my part, a reference to recent "go to the window" syncs, but it wasn't. So that's yet another "go to the window" sync! As I read this excerpt, my thought was that it was also a Cherubim reference. The Hebrew cherub is believed to derive from the Akkadian karibu, which I assume would be a near-homophone of caribou, another name for the reindeer.

Looking up the poem now, I find that other parts of it are also synchronistically interesting:

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.

"To the top of the wall" ties in with the Humpty Dumpty theme. Dry leaves blowing away in the wind appear in my June 13 post "Plates among the dead leaves."

My most recent "go to the window" reference was "Go to the window; it's dark but clear," which refers to Lowdham going to the window in The Notion Club Papers. In his post, William mentions that this is only the first time Lowdham goes to the window, and that "the second time he will begin to re-enact events surrounding the Fall of Numenor." I didn't know that because this is my first time reading The Notion Club Papers.

Today I read a few chapters in 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon. This verse in particular stood out to me:

And there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land (3 Ne. 8:22).

I took special notice of this because the language reminded me of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus." The poem mentions stars disappearing -- "moth-like stars were flickering out" -- and the appearance of a "glimmering girl." It ends with "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun." Thus I noticed the word glimmer -- which appears nowhere else in the scriptures -- juxtaposed with the sun, the moon, and disappearing stars.

After reading that, I turned to The Notion Club Papers and soon came to Lowdham's second time going to the window. Guess what word Tolkien just happens to throw in at that moment?

He strode to the window and flung it open.

The early summer night was still and glimmering, warmer than usual for the time of year.

Then several other club members join Lowdham at the window, where they see great mists of darkness causing the stars to disappear:

We were all startled. Several of us went to the window and stood behind Lowdham, looking out. A great cloud, coming up slowly out of the West, was eating up the stars. As it approached it opened two vast sable wings, spreading north and south.

After that, I checked the blog of Bruce Charlton -- who has made The Notion Club Papers an object of special study -- and found that his latest post quotes a Rupert Brooke poem that mentions the night before Christmas:

And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas

William Blake, The Descent of Peace

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me; and he said unto me: Nephi, what beholdest thou?

And I said unto him: A virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins.

And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?

And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.

And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the God, after the manner of the flesh.

And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto me, saying: Look!

And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.

And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?

And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.

And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.

-- 1 Nephi 11:14-23

Monday, December 18, 2023

Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens

Last night I dreamed that I was hearing a "spidery" (slow, high-pitched, ethereal) performance of the Monkees song "Listen to the Band." I awoke with a vague sense that the lyrics had been in Latin but couldn't remember any of them.

In the morning, I said my Rosary, and the Salve Regina brought the dream back to my memory. After all, what is Salve, . . . Mater misericordiae but a Latin translation of "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman"? Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae -- "To thee do we cry, Eve's exiled children" -- what are we asking but that she "listen to the banned"? Of course the problem is that we are so intent on being listened to that we forget to listen: "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens."

After the Rosary, I attended a sacrament meeting at the tiny English-speaking branch in Taichung -- the first time I have set foot in a Mormon church in well over a decade and probably closer to two. The CJCLDS has changed a lot in that time, but the sacrament meeting experience is just exactly the same as ever -- including, yes, its characteristic boringness, but not only that. I appreciated the total silence at some points in the service -- a commodity in short supply in Taiwan. I found myself thinking of it as "Quakerish," though I know Quakerism only through books.

Mormons don't do anything remotely like a liturgical calendar -- they don't even go to church on Christmas Day unless it happens to fall on a Sunday -- but one concession to the season is that Christmas carols are sung instead of ordinary hymns. Today, one of the selections happened to feature the only Latin in the Mormon hymnal: "Angels We Have Heard on High," with the Latin refrain Gloria in exclesis Deo. I thought it was funny: Earlier this year, I had tried and failed to find a Latin Mass in Taiwan, and then the one day I decide to go to a Mormon church instead, they have Latin!

Then I realized -- how had I not noticed it before? -- that "Angels We Have Heard on High" has pretty much the same tune as "Listen to the Band." Transpose "Angels" into G major (Mormons sing it in F major), map two measures of "Angels" to each measure of "Listen," and they fit almost perfectly. I don't have the musical talent to do it properly myself, but someone ought to. You can listen to a quick and dirty proof of concept here.

There's a certain thematic overlap, too: "Angels we have heard" -- "Listen to the band" -- the angel band. You could introduce the combined songs with that Negro spiritual about "ten little angels in de band."

I guess YouTube knows it's Christmastime, too. This evening the algorithm served up Denmark + Winter's version of "Little Drummer Boy." That syncs with "Listen to the Band," too. "Shall I play for you, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum, on my drum? Mary nodded. . . ." -- "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman . . . play the drum a little bit louder."

Friday, December 8, 2023

The White Tree of Life . . . Saver

I change the wallpaper on my phone from time to time, probably every month or so on average. In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I describe how on August 29 I changed my wallpaper to an image of the White Tree of Gondor, and then less than a month later I found very similar imagery in a book I was reading, The Unseen by Mike Clelland. Since then, I've changed the wallpaper four or five times.

On November 22, as described in "They shall take up serpents," I somehow changed my wallpaper to a picture of a coiled rattlesnake while I was asleep or half-asleep, with no conscious awareness of having done so. I didn't like having that as my wallpaper, but I couldn't decide what I wanted instead. I briefly tried various things and finally, a couple of days ago, reverted to the White Tree of Gondor. (It's unusual for me to go back to an old wallpaper like that.) Once again, the imagery was reflected in what I was reading -- in this case Green by Laura Peyton Roberts.

Spoiler warning, I guess, in case any of you were planning to read a novel about leprechauns written for teenage girls. A peppermint Life Saver falls into the mud, and then this happens:

Where the candy had fallen, something was rising out of the muck. Something weird and spindly and shaped like a . . . tree? Its pointed trunk stretched up toward the moon. Boughs sprouted and began to spread. [. . .] Still the tree kept growing -- up, out, bigger, faster, until it was truly huge. And every inch of root, trunk, and needle was peppermint white, glowing in the moonlight like a bleached bone.

A spindly, all-white tree at night -- matching my phone wallpaper quite closely.

For Mormons, the first connotation of a white tree is not Gondor but the Tree of Life as seen in the desert visions of Lehi and Nephi. The white tree in Green grows from a Life Saver.

My reading about the Life Saver tree also coincided with my employee putting up an all-white Christmas tree at our school. The white tree in Green is not explicitly Christmas-related (the story takes place in summer), but peppermint is a Christmassy flavor (candy canes), and the mention of needles rather than leaves suggests a Christmas-type tree.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas

William Blake, The Descent of Peace (c. 1815)

Friends, readers, commenters, God rest you merry.

Friday, December 24, 2021

Merry Christmas

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Madonna and Child

Jesus said, "I am, above all, the Light. . . . From me did the All come forth, and unto me does the All extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there."

-- Gospel of Thomas, 77

By what we dismissively call "coincidence," Francis Berger is also thinking of the Gospel of Thomas this Christmastide.

It is a bleak world we find ourselves in this Christmas, bleak almost beyond imagining -- and yet it is a world into which the Christ of God has incarnated, permanently, and that makes all the difference. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22).

Merry Christmas to all my readers, old friends and newcomers alike. Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

The last Christmas

Here's the Fake President speaking on March 11, 2021, to mark the one-year anniversary of the birdemic coup.

Photos and videos from 2019 feel like they were taken in another era. The last vacation, the last birthday with friends, the last holiday with extended family.

And here's an email from a friend, dated March 8, 2020, three days before the revolution.

This isn't quite a synchronicity but I was very struck throughout December by the number of times I heard 'Last Christmas' by Wham being played on radios, in shops, building sites, etc. It's the kind of tune you hear a lot every Christmas, of course, but I really did seem to hear it everywhere I went.
I found it odd at the time, but it's only just stuck me that maybe there's something in it - some kind of coded message from the powers that be perhaps - that 2019 really was the 'last Christmas.'
Or is that me just 'over-imaginating'?

My reply, sent the same day:

Okay, the synchronicity fairies have officially been summoned! Just hours after reading [your] email (and mentioning it to no one), I was in the car with family, and [someone] started singing "Last Christmas" -- in March, apropos of absolutely nothing.

Remember this was before anything was shut down -- and when it was, it was just for a few weeks, to flatten the curve. No sane person was predicting that it would go on for a full year, let alone that we were permanently entering a totalitarian twilight zone where it was always flu season and never Christmas!

There are always signs.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Merry Christmas

My first Christmas as a Christian in a very long time, and thus significant. Despite the near-complete lack of outer observances in the non-Christian country where I live, "somehow or other, it came just the same." I wish a very merry Christmas to my little circle of readers and friends.

Douglas Taylor, Alpha to Omega