From the Narrow Desert: Dragonflies

Showing posts with label Dragonflies. Show all posts

Sunday, May 28, 2023

Two books featuring magical children in beech trees and invisible dragonfly wings

I finished reading George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1870) today, that is to say, May 27. In the last few chapters, the main character, a rather otherworldly little boy named Diamond who has lived in London for almost the entire story, relocates to the countryside and acquires the habit of climbing up into "a great beech-tree." When the narrator first meets Diamond (Chapter 35, "I Make Diamond's Acquaintance"), he is sitting at the foot of the beech and later climbs "into the leafy branches." In the next chapter we see him climbing it again, and one of the other children asks, "What are you always going up there for, Diamond?"

Also in Chapter 35, just before he climbs the beech, Diamond describes his encounter with what must surely have been a dragonfly:

"What did the boy and girl want with you, Diamond?" I asked.

"They had seen a creature that frightened them."

. . .

"And what was it?"

"I think it was a kind of angel -- a very little one. It had a long body and great wings, which it drove about it so fast that they grew a thin cloud all round it. It flew backwards and forwards over the well, or hung right in the middle, making a mist of its wings, as if its business was to take care of the water."

All three children are recent transplants from London and have apparently never seen a dragonfly before. Apparently some children do find them frightening; I recall some scientist (Feynman?) telling the story of how he, armed with his scientific knowledge that these insects are harmless, was the only one of his peers not to be afraid of them. (The reason for Diamond's own fearlessness is quite different: "Because I'm silly. I'm never frightened at things.") Note how Diamond emphasizes the indistinct blur of the dragonfly's rapidly moving wings.

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After finishing At the Back of the North Wind, I had a stack of eight or nine books on my desk, candidates for what I should read next, ranging from Captains Courageous to a new-to-me translation of Virgil to a commentary on the Shiva Sutras. The one I ended up choosing, more or less at random, was an English translation of The Life of Elves (2015) by Muriel Barbery, an author I knew nothing about. (I had picked it up at a used bookstore because the French approach to faery is interesting to me vis-à-vis Joan of Arc and her reputed faery connections.) Here's how it begins:

The little girl spent most of her hours of leisure in the branches. When her family did not know where to find her, they would go to the trees, the tall beech to start with, the one that stood to the north above the lean-to, for that was where she liked to daydream . . . .

Right there in the first two sentences we have another little child who spends her time in the branches of a great beech! On the very next page we learn that she, too, is rather otherworldly, and this is explained with what is apparently a reference to the indistinct blur of a dragonfly's beating wings:

Only the eldest auntie, by virtue of an abiding penchant for anything that could not be explained, thought to herself that there was something magical about the little girl; but one thing was certain, that for such a young child she bore herself in a most unusual way, incorporating some of the invisibility and trembling of the air, as a dragonfly would, or palms swaying in the wind.

On the next page after that, we learn that this (as yet nameless) girl is also, like Diamond, unusually fearless:

[She] sensed the nearby presence in the mist of an invisible creature, and she knew more surely than the existence of God proclaimed by the priest that this creature was both friendly and supernatural. Thus she was not afraid.

This intuition that the unknown creature is "both friendly and supernatural" parallels Diamond's assumption that the dragonfly, so frightening to the other children, must be "a kind of angel."

At this point I decided I had better try to find out something about who this Muriel Barbery was before reading any further. I had the odd idea that she might have a thing or two in common with George MacDonald -- Muriel is as Gaelic a name as MacDonald, for starters. I didn't find much of interest, except the unexpected fact that she was born in Morocco. She "left her birthplace with her French parents when she was two months old," which I suppose means she is ethnically French; on the other hand, Barbery surely has reference to the Barbary Coast and the Berbers. It is only a coincidence, of course, that in the Bible Bar- appears as a patronymic prefix identical in meaning to Mac-.

The biographical detail that really caught my attention, though, was her birthdate: May 28, 1969. I started reading her book about half an hour before midnight on May 27 -- a very near miss on the part of the sync fairies!

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Syncs: At the Back of the North Wind

As documented in my May 13 post "Syncs: The World Beneath," I recently ran across the James Gurney book Dinotopia: The World Beneath, and I did eventually manage to read the whole thing. Of all the dinos and other prehistoric creatures in the story, only one of them has an invented name: skybax, a fictional species of Quetzalcoatlus. I asked Mr. Gurney if the second element of that name meant anything in particular, but he said he could no longer remember; he had invented it because he thought Quetzalcoatlus was too much of a mouthful.

I thought skybax sounded like sky-back, which made me think of the Flammarion engraving, in which a man pokes his head through the firmament and can see what is in back of the sky. An email correspondent was reminded of skybox, a method used in video-game graphics to create the illusion of an infinitely distant sky. This "sky" actually consists of the inner surfaces of a finite cube, though; Wikipedia notes that a similar device, the skydome, works on a similar principle but uses a sphere or hemisphere instead of a cube. So two quite different free-association etymologies for skybax each leads to the Flammarion concept.

In addition to Q. skybax, the (non-fictional) type species, Q. northropi, also appears in The World Beneath, but the "northies" are only mentioned on one page: p. 150, next to a picture captioned "Casting away the ruby sunstone."

As I had already connected skybax with the idea of "the back of the sky," the juxtaposition with northies made me think of a book I had bought over a year ago but had not yet read: At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald. It was actually sitting right there on my desk, since I had been rearranging some of my books and had not yet found a suitable place for it in any of my bookcases. I picked it up, glanced at the table of contents, and saw that one of the chapter titles is "Ruby."

Then, remembering that I had used the Flammarion engraving a few times on my blog, I looked up those old posts and discovered that one of them, "Break on through to the other side" (July 2022) features an epigram from none other than George MacDonald.

That was enough to make me start reading At the Back of the North Wind, and as I write this post I'm about halfway through it. The main character is a boy named Diamond, and the reason he has such an unusual name is that he was named after his father's favorite horse. As he explains to the title character when they first meet, "Diamond is a great and good horse; . . . he's big Diamond and I'm little Diamond; and I don't know which of us my father likes best."

This talk of big and little diamonds is another link to the sunstones of The World Beneath:

As I mentioned, I have been rearranging some of the books in my rather large library, and last night I ran across my copy of Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton), which I had forgotten I owned. Since Shelley's poem about the sensitive plant was in the sync-stream a while back, I took it down and looked up that poem. Lines 106-07 caught my eye:

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out

The North Wind of MacDonald's story typically takes the form of a beautiful long-haired woman who is sometimes extremely large and other times "just about the height a dragon-fly would be, if it stood on end." (Dragonflies again!) At one point, though, she takes on rather different appearance:

At the foot of the stair North Wind stood still, and Diamond, hearing a great growl, started in terror, and there, instead of North Wind, was a huge wolf by his side. He let go of his hold in dismay, and the wolf bounded up the stair. The windows of the house rattled and shook as if guns were firing, and the sound of a great fall came from above. Diamond stood with white face staring up at the landing.

"Surely," he thought, "North Wind can't be eating one of the children!"

Incidentally, I started At the Back of the North Wind just after finishing The Uninscribed by Stephanie South (which is just about the new-agiest thing I've encountered in my puff, and I say this as someone who has read Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by Amorah Quan Yin) -- from South to North. South calls herself the Red Queen -- a reference to the nickname of an unidentified Mayan woman, but also a Lewis Carroll character who, since Carroll made it clear she is a different person from the Queen of Hearts, could only be the Queen of Diamonds. Here's the opening paragraph of The Uninscribed:

As a child, I had recurring visions of underground time tunnels in the earth. The tunnels were connected to a transport system with openings that led into past, present, and future. Through these tunnels, I witnessed world wars, a time of dinosaurs and giants, as well as possible futures.

Underground tunnels and dinosaurs are another link to The World Beneath, but also note that the very first sentence mentions time tunnels -- as in my February 24 post "Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!" (That was a gematria-inspired title, by the way. In S:E:G:, Green Lantern = pterosaur = time tunnel = story here = 133.)

Today I gave some of my very young English students a test. It was an old test I had made for a different group of students two years ago, well before the pterosaur or dragonfly syncs started. It's testing extremely basic English grammar -- the use of is and are, and giving short answers to yes/no questions. There's a picture and a question of the form "Is it . . .?" or "Are they . . .?" and they have to complete and answer the question. If the correct answer is "No," of course, almost any picture will do, so just for kicks I had thrown in a few random prehistoric creatures. For example:

This is the one that really got my attention today, though:

Not only is it a pterosaur, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a Quetzalcoatlus northropi. I may have chosen it as a sort of pun (pterosaurs are called "winged dragons" in Chinese), or maybe it was just totally random, like the hamster titanotheres. Either way, it was a strange coincidence running into it again now.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Mini T. rex, dragonfly, One33

Yesterday, May 16, in the very same spot where I had earlier found an iron Green Lantern emblem, I found yet another mini T. rex.

996 + 996 = 1992, when the first Dinotopia book was published.

This is the Lonely T. Rex, protagonist of Google Chrome's Dinosaur Game. As in Green Lantern #30, the T. rex and the ptero are enemies. According to Wikipedia:

During the game, the Lonely T-Rex continuously moves from left to right across a black-and-white desert landscape, with the player attempting to avoid oncoming obstacles such as cacti and Pteranodons by jumping or ducking. . . . As the game progresses, the speed of play gradually increases until the user hits an obstacle or a Pterosaur, prompting an instant game over.

Later the same day, I went to Taichung, which I don't do very often, and saw this new-to-me billboard:

One33. As noted in my February 22 post "Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!" 133 is the S:E:G: value of Green Lantern, will power, and pterosaur. In Dinotopia, the pterosaur ("skybax") rider is named Will. Note also that the S:E:G: value of the word one is 34, so here's another juxtaposition of 34 and 33.

In the evening, I went to my school. (I have most of Tuesday off, with just two classes in the evening.) We have a big magnetic bulletin board, and several of the magnets used to hold things up there have the form of insects: eight or nine butterflies and one dragonfly. When I arrived last night, I found that one of these had been placed on my desk because the magnetic part had fallen off, making it unusable. No points for guessing which one it was.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Dragonflies and double-D lemniscates

In my May 13 post "Syncs: The World Beneath," I mention parallels between Dinotopia: The World Beneath and the trailer for the upcoming movie Meg 2: The Trench. -- the most noticeable being that both begin with "dragonfly" scenes.

Less than 24 hours after publishing that post, I happened to see the trailer for the 2017 movie Kong: Skull Island, and it, too, throws in some dragonfly footage.

Both trailers also prominently feature helicopters, but that's pretty much a given in a monster movie. Anyway, the dragonfly sync was enough to make me watch the whole movie. Skull Island features two fictional organizations: LandSat, whose satellites discovered the titular island (which, like Dinotopia, is kept isolated by permanent storm systems that surround it); and Monarch, a secret organization that deals with monsters and which apparently originally comes from the Godzilla franchise. (I've never actually watched a Godzilla movie myself.) LandSat's logo features the double-D, and Monarch's is a double-delta lemniscate. Monarch has its own Twitter page, with the slogan "Discovery and Defense in a Time of Monsters."

Discovery and Defense = D&D, and Time is a link to the hourglass. The logo looks like a sideways hourglass, but I suppose it is intended to suggest the letter M and a butterfly.

A secret government program that calls itself Monarch and uses butterfly imagery? I suppose anyone who reads this blog is conspiracy-adjacent enough to recognize that as an MKUltra reference. In the 2009 movie The Men Who Stare at Goats (part of an extremely improbable sync of its own), a reporter works to expose MKUltra-type activity, but is dismayed when the media only picks up one point, which it plays for laughs: that the government tortures people by forcing them to listen non-stop to the theme song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

This is a pretty clear link to the Dinotopia concept: humans and dinosaurs living together in harmony.

I should also mention that a shape like the Monarch logo puts in an appearance in the music video for Muse's "Sing for Absolution":

As one final sync wink on the night of May 13, I listened to Alex Jones on Joe Rogan (from 2019), and one of the many things they discussed was Dragonfly, a (since-abandoned) project by Google to create a search engine that would be compatible with Chinese censorship requirements and thus be allowed to operate in that country. (The idea of Google cooperating with government censorship was considered shocking back then. How times change!)

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Syncs: The World Beneath

On the afternoon of May 12, I was in my school's library looking for a particular book when a book spontaneously fell from its place on the shelf. Stooping to pick it up, I was startled to see on the cover a yellow (mostly yellow) ptero.

I was vaguely aware that there was a series of books called Dinotopia (Greek for "terrible place"!) but had never read any of them. Naturally, after it had jumped out at me, with a sync-fairy calling card on the cover, I had to pick it up and take a look. There were, unsurprisingly, numerous syncs, only some of which I can get into in this post.

I first checked the copyright page and saw that the book had been published in 1995. I thought, "Wow, that's kind of a long time ago. I was 16." Then, skimming the first few pages, I discovered that the boy on the cover -- the character who rides the yellow-winged ptero -- is named Will and is 16 years old.

I tried to read the book but just couldn't manage to plow through it. James Gurney is an artist, not a writer, and the story -- which really exists only as an excuse for the wonderful illustrations -- is very poorly written. I skimmed it, though, and basically there are two parallel plotlines: Will has to fly his ptero into T. rex territory to get a medicinal plant to save a baby Triceratops; meanwhile, his father, Arthur, takes a submarine down to the titular "world beneath," where he discovers the ruins of the dino version of Atlantis.

The story opens with Will testing, and crashing, a "dragoncopter" designed by his father. This is an ornithopter patterned after a dragonfly. This was a minor sync, because earlier that day I had created a vocabulary quiz for my students. One of the target words was dragonfly, and on the quiz I put a picture of a dragonfly and wrote "The _____ has four wings." The illustration in the Dinotopia book also emphasized the four wings.

Later in the story, a key is needed to open a door in the world beneath. Two of the characters each have a half-key, and these must be combined in order to open the door. Each half-key features a spiral and a semicircle (D-shape), and when combined they form something very close to a lemniscate -- so, another double-D lemniscate sync, combined with the "opening the door" theme.

I was also surprised to run into this picture on p. 68:

Recognize that image? Back in December, I illustrated my post "Nutmeg is a drug" with this meme:

It was just some random meme I had run into a few weeks before and saved because I thought it was funny. (I don't remember where I got it; possibly 4chan or Secret Sun.) When I wrote a post about accidentally taking a psychoactive dose of nutmeg, I remembered that meme and put it in the post. Well, apparently this is where the picture originally came from.

Later that evening, I was at home doing some housework and playing some music on YouTube. I don't have a paid account, which means my playlist is interrupted from time to time with ads. One of these ads had just started playing, and I was going to tap "skip" when I noticed what it was saying: ". . . deep in the trench. It's an ancient ecosystem, untouched by man." Since Dinotopia: The World Beneath had featured an underwater journey to "Gold Digger Trench," home to an ancient ecosystem untouched by man (trilobites, a Devonian Dunkleosteus, etc.), that got my attention. It was a movie trailer, and I decided to watch it to the end to see what the movie was. The title was displayed only in Chinese, but it looked like it must be a sequel to the Jason Stathan shark movie The Meg.

After I'd finished the chores, I got on my computer and looked up the trailer for said sequel, which turns out to be called Meg 2: The Trench. The Dinotopia book not only features "Gold Digger Trench" but also has a minor character named Meg.

Here's the trailer:

Despite the fact that this is a shark movie, the first thing we see in the trailer is a dragonfly, followed shortly by a T. rex. This closely parallels Dinotopia: The World Beneath, which opens with Will attempting to pilot a dragoncopter, "designed after a dragonfly," and then has him go off on a mission to T. rex land. Near the end of the trailer, we see a helicopter fall down into the sea and disappear beneath the surface. This is also the fate of Will's dragoncopter: "The Dragoncopter buried its head in the foam and was instantly dragged down, never to be seen again."

I suppose the name Meg is also another sync with the "Nutmeg is a drug" post.