From the Narrow Desert

"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours.

"Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick.

"What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?"

"It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore."

"Oh? What do you speak now?"

"English."

"English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?"

"It's a long story," said Patrick.

"Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?"

"Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?"

"I don't know," admitted William Alizio.

"When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg."

"What does that mean?"

"It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'"

"Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio.

"They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty."

"Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?"

"Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."

Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.

The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.

Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."

"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin.

"I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese."

"I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin.

"Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."

There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.

There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.

No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat.

"Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .

A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.

When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.

The end of the trailer features the Jay-Z track "Brooklyn Go Hard." The first time around, I didn't catch the lyrics beyond "I'm Jackie Robinson," so I figured it was a song about the ballplayer, perhaps even written specifically for this biopic. Well, not exactly. Aside from the refrain of "Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard," here are the lyrics that appear in the trailer:

I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them

I jack, I rob, I sin,

Ah, man, I'm Jackie Robinson

'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen

So Jay is punningly saying that he's Jackie Rob-'n'-sin, an artful Brooklyn dodger, because he fathers and abandons bastards; commits carjackings, robberies, and sins; and traffics in cocaine without being incarcerated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the black liberation Robinson represents -- Jackie Robinson led the way, and look where blacks are today! I don't think Robinson himself had any criminal background -- in his era it had yet to become the norm -- but either way, it's an odd and not exactly respectful soundtrack choice for a movie that portrays him as a hero.

I knew what base meant because at one point I had looked up the etymology of based. Before a series of repurposings -- by Lil B, 4chan, and W. M. Briggs -- transformed it into an expression of approval with right-wing connotations, based referred to a basehead, a user of a particular type of cocaine. How exactly does "freebase" cocaine differ from the common or garden form, though? I realized I didn't know, and looking it up led to a breakthrough in interpreting these syncs:

freebase /ˈfriːbeɪs/ noun: freebase cocaine

cocaine that has been purified by heating with ether, taken by inhaling the fumes or smoking the residue.

Ether! You may remember that the reason 42 caught my eye was because of syncs relating that number to the Book of Ether, documented in my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr." The phrase "forty and two years" occurs three times in Ether 10, referring to three different things, and nowhere else in the Book of Mormon.

Following a sudden hunch, I looked up how long the Empire State Building had been the tallest building in the world:

The longest world record held by the Empire State Building was for the tallest skyscraper (to structural height), which it held for 42 years until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in October 1970.

Before discovering this Ether connection, I had been trying to connect The Swiss Family Robinson with the Book of Mormon. The family has four sons, just like Lehi's when he left Jerusalem, and Bern can be linked to Jerusalem because the Bern Switzerland Temple district, oddly, includes Jerusalem.

A better link, though, is with the Jaredites (whose story is told in the Book of Ether). Lehi flees Jerusalem, but the Jaredites flee the Great Tower -- a much closer link to the Empire State Building than Bern is to Jerusalem. The Jaredites also bring lots of livestock across the sea, as do the Swiss castaways.

The people's language is confounded at the Great Tower, making it the likely source of the Tower of Babel story in the Bible (or, for skeptics, vice versa). This aspect of the story is a link to the Swiss Temple. I have mentioned several times that it was the first LDS temple to present the ceremony in the form of a movie. The reason for this change was that, unlike all previous temples, the Swiss Temple had to perform ceremonies in multiple different languages, and a film was the easiest way of dealing with that.

While the Tower of Babel was simply "a tower whose top may reach unto heaven" -- cf. our term skyscraper -- the Great Tower was "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven": not just a tall building but a means of transportation, suggesting Zecharia Sitchin's theory that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship. The video for "The Statue Got Me High" portrays the Empire State Building as a spaceship, quite literally taking its inhabitants into the heavens. See my November 1 post "The Empire State Building -- in space!"

Also, in Hercules in New York, it is from the Empire State Building that Hercules ascends to heaven -- or to Olympus, anyway.

Another thing that caught my eye in the 42 trailer was a building labeled Ebbets Field -- where the Dodgers used to play, apparently. It's an odd name, so I looked up the etymology. It means "son of Isabel" or "son of Elizabeth." The original son of Elizabeth was John the Baptist (who, like the Jaredites, is associated with the honeybee), but the connection I made was with the Björk song "Isobel." I started listening to Björk shortly before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films came out, and I associate "Isobel" with the scene where Gandalf escapes from Isengard. There are these lines from the third verse:

In a tower of steel

Nature forges a deal

To raise wonderful hell

Like me, like me

But the key line is from the chorus:

Moth delivers her message

In the Peter Jackson movie -- though I don't remember it from the novel -- Gandalf escapes from Saruman in the tower of Orthanc in Isengard by sending a moth out as a messenger to summon an eagle.

I note parenthetically, as a sync probably intended for William Wright -- see "The Honey Maid (OR: What crazy people see on graham cracker boxes and Oreos)" -- that when I looked up the above video clip for inclusion in this post, I first had to sit through an ad for Oreo cookies.

I'm not touching this -- I'm ignoring new syncs, remember -- but there it is in case Mr. Wright wants to conclude anything from it.

Saruman in Isengard has already been connected with the orb-pondering Zeus seen in Hercules in New York.

I listened to Björk back in the days when people bought CDs, so I had never seen the music video for "Isobel" until today:

The man reading from his book of keys (Saruman) is first juxtaposed with those organ pipes.  As he reads and speaks, we see cuts to the pipes, continuously zooming in on them.  Are they playing?  It is hard to say right off the bat, since the music of the actual song is playing.  But I believe what we see here, or at least one thing, is the voice of Saruman being piped through those organ pipes.

"I run continental drift, and guide the butterfly migration, and keep icebergs in the right place, and prevent people from boiling goats in their mothers' milk. . . . I have never seen anything to convince me that God plays an active part in the universe. His role seems to be entirely ontological."

"You can't be a deist! You're an archangel!"

"I am not a very good archangel."

"What about San Francisco?" [which in the novel has been transformed into heaven on earth]

"God can have a right hand as well as a left hand. I see no evidence that either is controlled by any head. . . . God created Adam Kadmon, the fundamental structure that binds everything together. . . ."

I've said to a few friends of mine that I see [Aleister Crowley's philosophy of] Thelema as a decapitated version of the same philosophy in my work -- that the two systems bear some philosophical resemblance to each other and that there is a certain resonance between them. However, my ideas find their symbolic head in Christ and the spirit of Christianity. This can be seen in the fact that the head of Abraxas represents Christ in my cosmogram. Thelema, by contrast, has no such authority. . . . Because of this choice of words, "decapitated," it gave me pause when I discovered that the Bornless Ritual which Crowley performed inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was originally called the Headless Rite, and it begins with these words: "I summon you, Headless One!"

And when [Riplakish] had reigned for the space of forty and two years the people did rise up in rebellion against him; and there began to be war again in the land, insomuch that Riplakish was killed, and his descendants were driven out of the land (Ether 10:8).

And it came to pass that Levi did serve in captivity after the death of his father, for the space of forty and two years (Ether 10:15).

And it came to pass that Com drew away the half of the kingdom. And he reigned over the half of the kingdom forty and two years (Ether 10:32).

This Aethyr being accursèd, and the seer forewarned, he taketh these precautions for the scribe.

First let the scribe be seated in the centre of the circle in the desert sand, and let the circle be fortified by the Holy Names of God --- Tetragrammaton and Shaddai El Chai and Ararita.

And let the Demon be invoked within a triangle, wherein is inscribed the name of Choronzon, and about it let him write ANAPHAXETON --- ANAPHANETON -- PRIMEUMATON, and in the angles MI-CA-EL: and at each angle the Seer shall slay a pigeon, and having done this, let him retire to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing, and sit within his black robe, secretly invoking the Aethyr.

This number 42 is the Great Number of the Curse.  See Liber 418, Liber 500, and the essay on the Qabalah in the Temple of Solomon the King.  This number is said to be all hotch-potch and accursed.

The chapter should be read most carefully in connection with the 10th Aethyr.  It is to that dramatic experience that it refers.

And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died (Ether 15:31).

It took a little longer to realise the "drowning boy" figures into this too. Majora is rather dark and disturbing, to the point it spawned a popular creepypasta-thing, Ben Drowned. I knew little about it before reading Wiki; figures it started on /x/.

The light was boring down on us, glaring malevolently through the evening. Fear literally rolled over me, transforming me in an instant from a competent if slightly uneasy CIG officer into a terrified little boy.

One moment I was standing there and the next I was racing through the underbrush. I had no clear thoughts. I just wanted to get away from that light. I was drowning in the ocean of desert.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The light of sun and star and moon

In shining lamps of crystal hewn

Undimmed by cloud or shade of night

There shone for ever fair and bright.

But still the sunken stars appear

In dark and windless Mirrormere;

There lies his crown in water deep,

Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

Yesterday one of my employees and I went through the twice-yearly ritual of completing the meaningless fire-safety paperwork that gives the fire department something to do between fires. As always, a series of photos have to be attached: of a staff member holding a fire extinguisher, opening the door, answering the phone, etc. One of the required photos was this:

That's a pointing finger and an electric ceiling light, plus a mask for good measure.

This morning, less than 24 hours after taking the above photo, I was browsing a meme dump and found this:

The ceiling-light "sun" also suggests a UFO, of course, and it reminded me of "The time I mistook the sun for the Andromeda Galaxy."

I had no morning classes today, so, as is my habit these days, I went to a coffee shop to read the Book of Mormon -- Chapters 2 through 5 of the Book of Ether. Ether is the name of a prophet, no relation to the quintessence or to anaesthesia ("etherized upon a table"), though plenty of jokes have been made about the latter (cf. Mark Twain's quip that the BoM is "chloroform in print"). This section covers the Jaredites' creation of "barges" (actually hermetically sealed vessels) to cross the ocean, with supernatural shining crystals providing the illumination. The main character is the unnamed "Brother of Jared," whose real name Mormon tradition holds was Mahonri Moriancumer. In his September 2 post "Jaredites in Moria: Making sense out of the Brother of Jared and his shining stones," William Wright proposes that the first element in the name Moriancumer refers to Moria -- the Dwarrowdelf of Tolkien, subject of the Song of Durin -- and that there is a hidden reference in the Book of Mormon to the Brother of Jared, like Gandalf, opening the gates of Khazad-dûm by uttering the password friend.

The shining stones in Ether shine because -- fitting right into a major theme of this post -- they were literally touched by the finger of God:

And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea. . . .

And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear (Ether 3:4, 6).

And they were built after a manner that they were exceedingly tight, even that they would hold water like unto a dish; and the bottom thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the sides thereof were tight like unto a dish; and the ends thereof were peaked; and the top thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the length thereof was the length of a tree; and the door thereof, when it was shut, was tight like unto a dish (Ether 2:17).

Saucer, dish, disk -- it's all the same thing.

Drowning -- or asphyxiating underwater, anyway -- is also a concern as the dish-tight vessels are being created:

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, I have performed the work which thou hast commanded me, and I have made the barges according as thou hast directed me. And behold, O Lord, in them . . . we shall perish, for in them we cannot breathe, save it is the air which is in them; therefore we shall perish.

And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air. And if it be so that the water come in upon thee, behold, ye shall stop the hole, that ye may not perish in the flood (Ether 2:18-20).

When it rains, it pours

But you didn't even notice it ain't rainin' anymore

It's hard to breathe when all you know is

The struggle of stayin' above the risin' water line

An unpredictably rising water line was a worry for the Jaredites, too: "ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you" (Ether 2:24).

Remember that Will Stone describes himself as "drowning in the ocean of the desert." In my September 15 post "When life gives you lemons, make le monde," I mentioned that as a child I always thought the Mormon word Deseret was just desert, expanded to three syllables to fit the meter of the song "In Our Lovely Deseret." The word originates in the Book of Ether, where it refers to the honeybees the Jaredites carry with them across the ocean: "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:3).

Here's a coloring-book page from the CJCLDS, showing UFO-esque "barges" complete with honeybees and shining stones:

When I returned home from the coffee shop and went into my study, I found that the desk (etymologically another disk or dish) where I usually read had several small stones on it. They weren't there when I left; I later found my wife had just acquired them and hadn't found a place to put them yet.

Small stones sync with the Brother of Jared story, as he prepared "sixteen small stones" (Ether 3:1) for God to touch with his finger. There weren't 16 stones on my desk, but I guess there were 1 + 6, since the pyrite is clearly the odd man out.