From the Narrow Desert: Godzilla

Showing posts with label Godzilla. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2024

White Feathers, Strange Sights

In the late afternoon, the waxing gibbous Moon, high in the bright blue sky, kept catching my eye -- or drawing my eye, rather; I kept craning my neck up to look at it. It seemed somehow smaller than usual -- I would have estimated it at 25 arcminutes if I didn't know better -- and very, very white, without the slightest hint of yellow. Something about it made me think of a small white feather, pennaceous along the edge, plumulaceous along the ragged-looking terminator. Once while I was looking at it, a bone-white egret -- a black-legged E. garzetta, as free as the moon of any hint of yellow -- flew across my field of vision, reinforcing the white-feather imagery.

Then, as I crested a hill, the Sun came into view -- low on the horizon, deep red-orange in color, and absolutely enormous, subjectively appearing to be close to three degrees in diameter. The contrast with the Moon -- appearing under normal conditions to be the same size and color as the Sun -- couldn't have been greater.

Ordinarily, a red setting Sun will redden the whole sky around it, but in this case, perhaps due to the complete lack of clouds, this huge engorged Sun somehow coexisted with a regular blue sky. This strange combination made me think of a picture I painted in New Hampshire in 1983, when I was four years old, which I still have for some reason. I think at first it survived many years more or less by chance, and after that it was just too old to consider throwing away. When I got home, I dug it out of my files and photographed it:

(I like to think Vincent van Gogh might have painted something like this when he was four years old, and called it Wheatfield with Brontosauruses. Unfortunately, Vincent was already in his twenties when sauropods began to emerge in popular consciousness.)

I photographed the painting with my phone and uploaded it so that I could download it from my laptop for this post. When I went to get it from the cloud, I ran across this meme I had saved on January 9, which also features a dinosaur silhouetted against the setting Sun:

Come to think of it, my dinosaur painting also bears a certain resemblance to this image I posted two months ago, in "Yellow Light and the Mushroom Planet":

The dinosaurs are walking to the right, as in my painting. This despite the fact that people -- myself very much included! -- almost always find it much easier and more natural to draw animals facing left rather than right.

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Since I haven't posted anything for a while, I'll go ahead and tack a random dream onto this. It's from a few nights ago, but I wasn't online at the time.

In the dream, it was common knowledge that in a normal forest, the canopy is more or less one continuous beehive. There are leaves and things on the lower levels, but once you get up high enough, the branches are all coated with black honey-dripping material created by bees.

I was working in a library where we were trying to create the same effect. We wanted all the bookcases to have books and books and books and then when you get high enough just this tarry black material full of bees and honey. The trick was to find a way of attracting bees to set up shop on the tops of the bookcases, and I had discovered that the best way to do this was to get big brown waxed-paper bags of frozen shoestring potatoes -- the kind they use to make French fries at fast-food places -- and put a few bags on top of each bookcase. Bees would come to eat the potatoes and then stay and build the sticky black hives we were after. This was very successful, and it made our library look very old and respectable and forest-like.

One of the very special features of this library was that we had a whole bookcase devoted to books written by members of the Moody Blues, with one shelf for each member. We had to pad out Mike Pinder's shelf with a few volumes of Pindar, the Theban poet, and there were a few other random books thrown in, including Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence by Jacques Cousteau, but conceptually it was all Moody Blues. We were very proud of it. For some reason, we put all the books on the shelves while the bookcase was lying down on the floor, and then we had to carefully lift it up into position without any of the books falling out. We successfully did this and kept commenting on how great it was that we had managed to get it "perfectly vertical." We had also managed to get the sticky black beehive at the top perfectly flush with the ceiling without damaging either hive or ceiling. All in all, it was extremely satisfactory and was something no other library could offer its patrons.

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!)

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Éliphas Lévi on the spiritual meaning of Godzilla

From Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie:

This blind force, which the power of Christianity enchained and cast into the abyss, meaning into the centre of the earth, made its last efforts and manifested its final convulsions by monstrous births among barbarians. There is scarcely a district in which the preachers of the gospel did not have to contend with animals in hideous forms, being incarnations of idolatry in its death-throes. The vouivres, graouillis, gargoyles, tarasques and not allegorical only; it is certain that moral disorders produce physical deformities and do, to some extent, realise the frightful forms attributed by tradition to demons. The question arises whether those fossil remains from which Cuvier built up his mammoth monsters belong really in all cases to epochs preceding our creation. Is also that great dragon merely an allegory which Regulus is represented as attacking with machines of war and which according to Livy and Pliny lived on the borders of the river Bagrada? His skin, which measured 120 feet, was sent to Rome and was there preserved until the period of the war with Numantia. There was an ancient tradition that when the gods were angered by extraordinary crimes, they sent monsters upon earth, and this tradition is too universal not to be founded upon actual facts; it follows that the stories concerning it belong more frequently to history than mythology.

Cuvier died shortly before the discovery of dinosaurs properly so called, and the "mammoth monsters" named or described by him include the mastodon, Megatherium, Mosasaurus, and our own favorite, the Pterodactlyus antiquus.

The tarasque -- a chimerical monster of Provence, supposed to have been tamed by St. Martha, sister of Lazarus -- was later adopted and adapted by D&D as the game's biggest, baddest monster, described as "basically a kaiju" -- that is, a gigantic Japanese movie monster of the kind typified by Godzilla. Only after seeing Lévi juxtapose it with the giant reptiles of paleontology -- "dinosaurs" in the layman's sense -- did I notice how phonetically similar tarasque is to T. rex. St. George is sometimes portrayed in art as slaying what looks like a Coelophysis bauri, so why not imagine St. Martha using holy water and a cross to bring a Tyrannosaurus rex to heel? (No, I'm not proposing that this actually happened; just making connections.)

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

BÖC is actually pretty good

I only knew them for "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and had kind of assumed they were one-hit wonders. Actually, they've done quite a lot of stuff that's good -- and synchronistically relevant.

About Godzilla:

About spontaneous human combustion:

About how just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die:

Friday, August 5, 2022

God vs. King

My last post, "When that gorilla beats his chest," featured this poster for the movie Godzilla vs. Kong, which was originally going to be released in 2020 but was delayed for the usual reason.

This synched with, among other things, these lyrics from The Script:

Yeah, you can be the greatest, you can be the best
You can be the King Kong bangin' on your chest
You can beat the world, you can beat the war
You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door

Besides the explicit mention of King Kong, it also says "You can talk to God," a link to the "God vs. King" tagline. Doing a little research online, I find that Godzilla vs. Kong features a deaf character played by a deaf half-Asian actress (Kaylee Hottle, Korean-Caucasian). The music video for the Script song, "Hall of Fame" (2012), also features a deaf character played by a half-Asian actress (Ariana Emnace, Filipino-Mexican).

Godzilla is a giant reptile from the sea, but (a commenter informs me), his name comes partly from the English word gorilla. The original Japanese name, Gojira, apparently created before the monster's reptilian nature had been decided on, is a portmanteau of gorira ("gorilla," from English) and kujira ("whale").

Kong, of course, is a giant gorilla. Where did his name come from? According to Wikipedia:

[King Kong creator Merian C.] Cooper was fascinated by [his friend Douglas] Burden's adventures as chronicled in his book Dragon Lizards of Komodo where he referred to the animal as the "King of Komodo". It was this phrase . . . that gave him the idea to name the giant ape "Kong."

So Godzilla, the giant lizard, has a name partly inspired by gorilla; and Kong, the gorilla, has a name partly inspired by a giant lizard.

The land-monster Kong and the sea-monster Godzilla made me think of Behemoth and Leviathan. In my post "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," I noted that the giant fish Bahamut, the Arabic equivalent of Leviathan, has a name that comes from Behemoth; while Behemoth-equivalent Kuyutha, the giant bull, has a name that is likely a corruption of Leviathan. There is an obvious parallel here to the way in which Godzilla and Kong got their respective names.

Bahamut is also the name, in D&D, of the king of all metallic dragons, so I connected the name with the Metal Worm in the palindrome. Bahamut -- the sea monster whose name comes from a land monster -- corresponds to Godzilla, so Godzilla is the Metal Worm. The Metal Worm's antagonist is Mr. Owl. As it happens, there is an extremely popular YouTube video (nearly 30 million views) that takes the Godzilla vs. Kong trailer and digitally replaces Kong with a cat -- a cat named, of all things, OwlKitty.

Cat vs. Godzilla also ties in with "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl," in which -- besides referencing the Metal Worm palindrome yet again -- I mention seeing a gecko and thinking "Hey, it's a dragon!" and then later having to rescue a different gecko from my cats. "When that gorilla beats his chest" also included a gecko anecdote, pairing the gecko not with a cat but with a moth -- Godzilla vs. Mothra?

To the Japanese, Gojira suggests "gorilla-whale." To my own ear, Godzilla is God + Zillah. Adah and Zillah are the two wives of Lamech in Genesis and were a source of deep fascination to me as a child. The contrast of A and Z, together with the fact that Zillah probably means "shadow" in Hebrew, led me to envision them as opposites -- Adah as a very pale white woman, and Zillah as a very dark-skinned Indian woman.

Much later, in college, I knew two women, roommates, who exactly resembled my childhood image of Adah and Zillah; I always thought of them by those names, and now I find I can only remember the real name of one of them! For some reason, the 2002 Steve Earle song "Ashes to Ashes" is also closely associated in my mind with these two women. (I think it's just that I started listening to the song about the same time I met them, and its overall vibe fit "Adah's" personality.) The lyrics do have a bit of Godzilla-vs.-Kong type imagery.

A long time ago
Before the ice and the snow
Giants walked this land
Each step they took
The mighty mountains shook
And the trees took a knee
And the seas rolled in

Searching my own blog for godzilla just now, I found a dream I had forgotten about, recounted in the post "On the threshold of lucidity," in which I watched a sea serpent (Leviathan) transform first into "a bipedal Godzilla-type creature" and then into a woman "who reminded me a bit of the actress Sarita Choudhury." As you may have gathered from the name, Sarita Choudhury is of Indian extraction, and she has dark skin. Looking her up, I find that, like the other two actresses mentioned in this post, she is only half-Asian -- though as far as I know, she has never played a deaf character. That dream ends with me being bitten by a poisonous snake, though, and adders are proverbially deaf.

Anyway, God-zillah means "God's shadow." In one of J. W. Dunne's books (I'll have to look it up later), he relates a dream in which he became aware that God's shadow was cast over the entire world, and he asked his angel guide how it was possible that people could not see something so obvious as that enormous shadow. "Because it has no edges" was the angel's reply.

(I am working on a theological post that keeps being delayed by these syncs. In it, I happen to quote Dunne: "Oh, God! Allow us to reach the open sea!")