From the Narrow Desert: Gorillas

Showing posts with label Gorillas. Show all posts

Sunday, June 23, 2024

GAEL

Recent sync activity has centered around Animalia by Graeme Base, which is an alphabet book. I was thinking how funny it was to be taking an alphabet book so seriously, and then I remembered that I was well within Mormon tradition in so doing, given Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. This is commonly referred to (by those few who do refer to it) as "the GAEL," which I guess makes the language therein described -- clearly "Egyptian" in name only -- GAELic.

"The Gael" is also the name of that tune from The Last of the Mohicans. Just in case it's not playing in your head already, here's a little help:

My interest in Animalia has been focused on the G and L pages -- two of the letters in GAEL -- both of which have some "Gaelic" themes. The L page includes a leprechaun, while the main subject of the G page is green gorillas. Green is the symbol of Ireland, and Punch cartoons used to portray the stereotypical Irishman as "Mr. G-O'Rilla." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats has recently been associated with Pharaoh's butler from Genesis, who dreamed of holding a cup and pressing grapes into it:

And Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand (Gen. 40:11).

Here, from Animalia, is a green gorilla preparing to do just that:

I've just noticed for the first time that William Butler G-O'Rilla's grail is decorated with running greyhounds -- only they're not grey; they're gold. A golden dog running ties right in with Lassie Come Home on the L page:

Lassie is a stereotypically Scottish word, so there's another "Gaelic" link.

It occurred to me to look up gael on Eldamo. It's defined as "pale, glimmering" -- another link to Yeats, Claire, and The Song of Wandering Aengus, in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." Another permutation of the same letters, laeg, is also Elvish and means, what else, "green."

The G and L pages encode the two keys. One of these, remember, is associated with gold, red, the sun, and the rose; the other, with silver, green, the moon, and the lily. Lions are associated with gold and the sun, and there is a key reference in the Lions' library in the form of a book by John Locke. Gorillas are associated with silver ("silverback"), and a gorilla is in a loose sense a "monkey" -- moon-key. The green "silverback" on the G page is complemented by the red "lobsterback" on the L page.

L and G also represent the square and compass. The square obviously resembles the letter L and appears as such in Mormon symbolism. Some forms of the capital G look like an arrow indicating circular motion, which is the function of the compass. (Transliterated into Greek, the mapping is reversed: Gamma is the square; Lambda, the compass.)

Doing an image search now to try to find a particularly arrow-like form of G, I found this, which for some reason also includes a lion named Lucas -- not the most natural choice for a page about the letter G!

Lucas is another form of the name Luke. William Wright has already suggested that the "Gospel of Luke" featured on the L page might have something to do with Luke Skywalker, and this "G. Lucas" would seem to confirm that reading.

But G and L are only two of the four letters in GAEL. What of the other two? Well, I don't have much to say about A at this point, but recent syncs have strongly suggested that I give the E page another gander. "Stink Gorilla More" included a photo of a little gorilla figurine my wife keeps on one of her bookshelves. The other day I was passing that shelf and noticed the gorilla's companions:

I first noticed the lion-gorilla juxtaposition, of course, but elephant is E, another component of GAEL. This trio of animals is also prominently featured on the cover of Animalia:

The E page of Animalia is kind of boring. Unlike G and L, which include dozens of different things beginning with those letters, E pretty much just has elephants and Easter eggs.

I mean, eggs are a Humpty Dumpty link, and he's been associated with the number eight (nice belt!), but that's about it.

Then I noticed that each of the eggs has a tiny name tag. The names are Emily, Elizabeth, Eric, Esmerelda (sic), Egbert, Ethel, Ernest, and what could be either Edward or Edwin. I guess these are the elephants' names. You can click the photo above to zoom in if you want to see the names for yourself.

The relevance of some of these is immediately obvious. William Wright has already written quite a bit about Elizabeth and Egbert. Eric is interesting because if you look back at the photo of the cover, an elephant (Eric?) is standing right next to a knight on horseback (a warthog knight, but still). Eric Knight is the author of Lassie Come-Home. The one that really got my attention, though, was the misspelled Esmerelda. William Wright recently posted about how the Elfstone in Tolkien's writings is a Green Stone. The name Esmeralda means "emerald" -- i.e., a green stone -- and here the spelling has been modified so as to include elda. Elda, as I suppose even the merest dabbler in things Tolkienian will be aware, means "elf."

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L

This past weekend, I picked up a little alphabet book called Animalia at a used bookstore for no other reason that the author's name was Graeme Base, and William Wright had recently posted "Golden Graham Plates." Two of the letters have since turned out to be significant.

"Stink Gorilla More" (June 14) linked the word Gorilla to the word Bigfoot. Then William Wright's June 16 post "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you" led me to revisit my October 2023 post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot," featuring a big green foot:

Base's image also features the Holy Grail -- not exactly first on most people's list of things that begin with G! -- and a golden griffin perched on a gong in the form of a golden disc.

In one of my dreams, Golden Plates took the form of a disc, as mentioned most recently in "Plates among the dead leaves." This disc, too, is in a room full of leaves, though not dead ones.

Then there's L:

It's a library with two lions in it. Among the books in it are Lassie Come Home, Limericks by Edward Lear, The Leopard [...], King Lear, Little Boy Lost by L. L. Lucky, Lover's L[...], Lacrosse, Let's Learn Latin, Life of Luxembourg, Leonardo, Love's Labour's Lost, Levitation, Doctor Livingstone, Living Legends, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and books by Longfellow and John Locke -- but the one that really got my attention was The Gospel of Luke:

Two large golden animals in a room full of books syncs with the waking dream I relate in "Étude brute?" in which there were two large golden "Bulls of Heaven," one of which went with me into a cavern full of books and told me that one of the books "is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."

In trying to make sense of that cryptic statement, I thought first of the Four Gospels. In Ezekiel, the Cherubim are represented as having four faces: those of an ox, a man, a lion, and an eagle -- but in one place (Ezek. 10:14) these are given as the faces of a cherub, a man, a lion, and an eagle, implying that the Cherubim are primarily bovine in nature. I would naturally have assumed that the two heavenly Bulls I saw were themselves the Cherubim had one of them not said what it did about the book. A very old Christian tradition associates each of the Gospels with one of the component creatures of the Cherubim -- and the ox or bull is almost invariably mapped to the Gospel of Luke. In the illustration below, from the (French) St. Riquier Gospels, a heavenly Bull holds a banner with the opening words of Luke: "Quoniam quidem multi conati sunt" -- "For indeed many have tried."

Before I entered the library in my vision, the two Bulls had been standing on either side of a Nativity scene -- and the classic Nativity scene with the manger and all that also comes from the Gospel of Luke.

Another interpretive angle is to note that there were two golden Cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant -- above the Ark but also part of it. In William Wright's June 11 post "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," he proposes that the Brass Plates are currently in France and compares the Plates themselves to an "Ark," specifically mentioning the Ark of the Covenant. Now look back up at that picture of the golden griffin perched on the golden gong. As I have mentioned in many posts, the word griffin may be related to the word Cherubim. A disc of light-colored metal (possibly gold or brass) has appeared in my dream as a "Plate" with engravings on it. If the Brass Plates are, symbolically, the Ark of the Covenant, then they are, or include, the Cherubim as well.

How does the Gospel of Luke fit in? Perhaps the significance is in the name itself: Luke means "light." In his post, William emphasizes a quote from the Book of Mormon about how the Brass Plates must "retain their brightness" -- a Bright Gospel, a Gospel of Light.

In William's post, he refers to the engravings on the Plates as "Marks," capitalized. The Graeme Base picture shows two lions in a library -- and, yes, the Evangelist whose symbol is the lion is Mark.

In "Plates among the dead leaves," I record -- in a somewhat joking tone which William found "douchey" -- the hunch that if the Brass Plates are indeed in France, they may be behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse. As discussed at great length in my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," this church contains an engraving of a beardless Christ surrounded by the four Cherubic creatures, which I believe may have played an important role in the development of the Tarot de Marseille. This Christ holds a book in which is written "Pax Vobis," and he bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.

The supper at Emmaus, and Christ's saying "Pax Vobis," both occur in the final chapter of, you guessed it, the Gospel of Luke.

Sunday, June 16, 2024

I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis

That's an anagram of my full name, created by one of my fellow missionaries in 1998 or 1999. He explained that Chim-Chim is the name of a chimpanzee character in Speed Racer (which I knew nothing about) and that "an Elvis" must refer to someone of that name other than the King himself -- perhaps Elvis Costello or figure skater Elvis Stojko. It occurs to me now, though, that there is a kind of sandwich called an Elvis -- peanut butter, banana, and bacon, a favorite of Presley's -- and that that reading makes much more sense. Apparently the character Chim-Chim is known for his appetite and his sweet tooth, much like Elvis himself, and of course a banana sandwich is exactly what you would expect a cartoon chimp to eat.

Peanut butter and banana sandwiches (without bacon) were one of my own favorites as a child, part of my Banana Man persona. My other nickname from that time, besides Banana Man, was in fact Elvis, because of my hairstyle. (I insisted, despite my father's objections, on growing out the hair in front of my ears to look like sideburns.) At that time I knew essentially nothing about Elvis except that he was apparently a singer who had sideburns, and I certainly didn't know that Elvis and Banana Man had such similar taste in sandwiches. The weird thing is that the guy who created the anagram knew none of this about me. He was just trying to come up with something tolerably grammatical that used all the letters in my hard-to-anagram name, and he ended up hitting on something related to monkeys, bananas, and Elvis.

If you look at my photo in the sidebar, you might even detect a hint of incipient "jowliness," I suppose. Jowls are drooping cheeks, so what a "jowly" chimp makes me think of is Cheekey the Monkey. This is character from a Mormon parenting book my mom had when I was tiny. At first I couldn't find any trace of him online because I'd been searching for Cheeky without the extra e. (My exposure to the story was well before I had learned to read.) After racking my brain a bit, though, I came up with the title of the book -- Teaching Children Joy (1980) by Linda and Richard Eyre -- and was able to find it online.

Cheekey was a baby monkey. He lived with his sister and his mother and father in a tree. Their tree was in the jungle. In the jungle were some laws. They were called Jungle Laws. Do you know what laws are? (Things that you must do right or else you get punishment.)

Do you know what punishment is? (Something sad that happens when you break a law.)

There were two laws in Cheekey's jungle. One was that whenever you were in a tree, you had to hold on with your hand, or your foot, or your tail. What do you think the punishment was if you broke the law? (You would fall!)

The other jungle law was that if you saw a lion coming, you had to quickly climb up a tree. What do you think the punishment was if you broke that law? (You would get eaten up!)

In Cheekey's own family tree, there were two family laws. One law was that you couldn't go out of the tree without asking. Why do you think they had that law? (So Cheekey wouldn't get lost.)

Why didn't his mother and father want him to get lost? (Because they loved him.)

What do you think the punishment was if Cheekey went out of his tree without asking? (His mother gave him a little swat with her tail right on his bottom.)

Why did his mother do that? (So he wouldn't go out of the tree again.)

Why didn't she want him to do it again? (Because she loved him and didn't want him to get lost.)

The other monkey family law was to never drop your banana peels on limbs of the family tree. Why do you think they had that law? (So no one would slip on them and fall out of the tree.)

Why did the monkey family decide to have a law like that? (Because they loved each other and didn't want anyone in their family to get hurt.)

The story follows Cheekey through his day as he makes various choices, and in each case the children have to say whether there's a law to tell him what to do or whether he's free to do what he likes. I heard the story many times from an extremely young age, and even now I have vivid memories of my mental images of Cheekey climbing a tree to get away from a lion, choosing whether to wear his red hat or his green one, and so on. Not sure what specific relevance it has, but I suppose the sync fairies never bring anything up without a reason.

Coming back to "an Elvis," what's the plural of Elvis? This question comes up sometimes when people have occasion to refer to "parachuting Elvises" and such, and common incorrect suggestions include Elvi and Elvii (which are properly the plurals of Elvus and Elvius, respectively.) By analogy with other singular nouns ending in -is, the correct plural would be Elves -- spelled, though not pronounced, exactly the same as the plural of elf. "An Elvis" is one of the Elves.

This idea of eating an elf made me think of a story one of my brothers wrote as a child. These stories were written to be read aloud at our local literary club, and one of the things my brother liked to do (we were pretty avant-garde for little kids) was include "intermissions" -- where the story would be unexpectedly interrupted by a short poem and then resume where it had left off. In one of these stories, a character says, "It has eaten green moss," and then there's an intermission. After the intermission, the story continues with "the elf" -- revealing that the intermission had come in the middle of a sentence, and that what had been eaten was not green moss but rather an elf named Green Moss.

I still have copies of lots of these old stories, so I looked it up. Here's how it begins:

One upon a time there lived a gnome named Fuloo. Fuloo lived by himself in the Buck Horn Forest.

One night Fuloo was sitting by his fire, making rope, when suddenly he heard what sounded like 900 deer stampeding through the forest. Fuloo poked his head out of his hole to see what was scaring the deer like that. . . . A gigantic griffin was soaring through the forest, gulping down deer left and right.

The grffin thing is totally plagiarized from a very similar scene in The Tinleys, The guy sitting by the fire making rope is also ripped off, from one of my other brother's yarns. But don't worry, it's about to get a lot more original. Here's Fuloo's friend Will summarizing the damage done by the griffin -- interrupted by an intermission -- after which a rather singular character makes his appearance:

"Well," said Will, "it has eaten Green Moss

INTERMISSION: The Snowflake

Small and light, beautiful white is the snowflake falling down. Whirling, twirling on the breeze, it keeps on twirling round and round and then it softly comes falling to the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

the elf, Romut the gnome, 463 deer, and 47 wolves."

"Wow," said Fuloo. "It must have been hungry."

"Yep," said Will, "it certainly wh--"

Suddenly they were interrupted by Soto the monkey-elf. "What is a monkey-elf?" you're probably asking right now, so I'll tell you: It is a half-monkey, half-elf creature, and unfortunately they didn't get much of the human intelligence, so they were mostly messengers, and this one was doing that, and it had carefully dropped a message right into Will's mouth.

A monkey-elf! I'd forgotten about that, but what led me to look this old story up was the idea of a chimp eating an elf. Recent posts here have featured apes as stars and apes as angels. In Tolkien, Elves are Eldar, literally "Star-folk." The story says that monkey-elves were "mostly messengers" -- which is the literal meaning of the word angel.

Saturday, June 15, 2024

Every man and every woman is an ape

My June 14 post "Stink Gorilla More" explored the idea that apes represent ourselves, human beings, as seen by beings more heavenly. In a comment there, William Wright referred to human beings at worship as "Gorilla-men (Beings clothed in coats of Gorilla-skins) asking to be heard and enter into God's presence."

In Chinese, the term for a great ape is xīng-xīng (猩猩), with the x being roughly similar to our "sh" in pronunciation. A chimp is a "black xīng-xīng," a gorilla is a "big xīng-xīng," and an orangutan is a "red fur xīng-xīng." The word for "star" is xīng-xīng (星星), which is pronounced exactly the same. One of the terms for "planet" is xīng-qiú (星球), literally "star-globe." When the titles of the various Planet of the Apes movies were translated into Chinese, the translator went straight for the low-hanging pun-fruit and swapped out the "star" character for the "ape" one: 猩球 -- literally "ape-ball," but pronounced exactly the same as the word for "planet." Concise.

Thus it was that as I was thinking about this idea that all humans are "apes" from the point of view of higher beings, my mind jumped to one of Aleister Crowley's most famous lines, one of the very first sentences in The Book of the Law:

There are various options for the translator here, but the one I thought of -- and one of which I'm sure the old Beast would have heartily approved (one of his groupies went by the handle "Ape of Thoth") -- is 每一名男女都是星星。 -- "Every man and every woman is a star," but sounding exactly the same as "Every man and every woman is an ape."

This is very much in the spirit of "Stink Gorilla More," where I quoted Disraeli's question -- "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- followed by a Harambe meme implying that one could be both simultaneously.

Despite the impression a casual reader might get, I am very much not a fan of Crowley and own none of his books. To get the image above, I had to look up The Book of the Law on archive.org. The thing is, whenever I try to go to that site, autocomplete always guesses that want I really want is archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, a randomly selected thread from /x/ -- and for sync's sake, I usually go ahead and press enter before bringing up archive.org in a new window. The random /x/ thread it served up when I was trying to find the Crowley book was this one, soliciting comments on a schizo meme about symbolism. Since some of the "galaxy brain" level symbols -- deer, rainbow, bee, sunflower -- seemed potentially relevant, I scrolled down a bit until what to my wondering eyes should appear but this:

To be clear, I had typed everything before the Crowley screenshot -- including the little digression on what Planet of the Apes is called in Chinese -- before getting the random /x/ thread that randomly included the cover of a Planet of the Apes novel.

Friday, June 14, 2024

Stink Gorilla More

This morning, I woke up with the phrase "Stink Gorilla More" in my head. For those who slept through Art History, that's the name of one of the most famous paintings ever produced by a gorilla, probably second only to "Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink." Michael and Koko, the gorilla artists behind these two pieces had, apparently, adapted the sign for "stink" to mean "flower."

In the context of the previous morning's dream about "A Sasquatch-eating party every week," I thought "Stink Gorilla" was suggestive of the "skunk ape," a Sasquatch-like creature also known as the "Florida Bigfoot." Actually, this second name also matches up with "Stink Gorilla," since Florida means "flowery," and Michael used stink to refer to flowers.

Then my attention was drawn to the fitted sheet I had been sleeping on. Foreign languages are often used decoratively here, and the design includes words in both French and slightly garbled English:

It's obviously supposed to say "love yourself more," but it's been misprinted so that it looks like an old-fashioned spelling of Jove, from a time when j was considered a variant of i and was generally only used at the end of a word -- or, more often, of a lowercase Roman numeral. In the days of Shakespeare and Spenser, v was still used only as a word-initial variant of u, and so the latter invokes Cupid as "moſt dreaded impe of higheſt Ioue." The capital form was always V, though, so he would have written IOVE in all caps.

"Jove yourself more" is also an ungrammatical series of three words, ending in more, and so my not-quite-awake mind decided that this, too, mapped to "Stink Gorilla More." If mapping Jove to stink seems impious, remember that the latter also means "flower," and that animals were decked with flowers before being sacrificed to that god (see Acts 14:13). The second mapping is what got my attention, though:

In a comment on my last post, William Wright relates a dream in which he sees "a big, hairy beast . . . something like Bigfoot," only later to conclude, "I was seeing myself in a bit of a caricature of how these 'aliens' [Heavenly Beings] must view us." (The bracketed gloss is William's.) Bigfoot = yourself.

What can "Jove yourself more" mean, though? I've never seen Jove used as a verb, but Shakespeare does use god that way, which should give us a clue. This is from Coriolanus:

This last old man,
Whom with a crack'd heart I have sent to Rome,
Loved me above the measure of a father;
Nay, godded me, indeed.

Coriolanus first says loved and then decides godded is more appropriate. In the same way, the sheet replaces the verb love with the name Jove used as a verb. As Shakespeare uses it, to god apparently means to look on someone as a god, or to treat someone as a god. Jove, or Jupiter, is the lowercase-god par excellence -- I believe Roget's original Thesaurus uses Jupiter as the heading under which terms for polytheistic gods and idols are grouped -- and mainstream Christian theology, when it has regarded such beings as real at all, classifies them as "angels." This brings to mind Disraeli's famous question, "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- and "Jove yourself more" could mean to take, like Disraeli, the side of the angels, while still acknowledging the ape/Bigfoot/gorilla side of things. As it happens, a popular meme expresses just this synthesis:

After making the above connections, I happened to see this on one of my wife's bookcases -- on which books have to share space with various tchotchkes and knickknacks:

It's a little figurine of a gorilla raising the roof in front of a book called Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. The Egyptian Jove would be the syncretic deity "Jupiter Ammon." We've already played around with different meanings of Ammon and Ammonite in "Milkommen."

What does that gorilla's color and posture remind me of? Oh, that's right:

Friday, August 5, 2022

When that gorilla beats his chest

Yesterday evening (August 4) I taught a children's English class. They had read an article about the eating utensils used in different cultures -- forks, spoons, chopsticks, etc. -- and a sidebar mentioned that some chimpanzees used sticks to eat ants.

I asked if everyone knew what chimpanzee meant, and one of the kids responded by beating his chest. I said, "No, that's a gorilla. A chimpanzee is a bit like a gorilla, but it's a lot smaller."

"King Kong!" said one of the kids.

"King Kong is a giant gorilla," I said. "A chimpanzee is a big ape with black fur, like a gorilla, but it's a lot smaller than a gorilla, and certainly a lot smaller than King Kong."

"Oh, I know!" said another student, finally getting it right. "A chimpanzee is a 'black star'!"

They're not allowed to use Chinese in class without permission, so they often take advantage of the pun-translation loophole. The Chinese for "chimpanzee" is 黑猩猩, literally "black ape," and the word for "ape" is a homophone of the word for "star" (星星).

One of the other kids asked if the ants the chimpanzees ate were honey ants. I said, "No, because honey ants live in Australia, but chimpanzees live in Africa. I think the 'ants' they eat are actually white ants, or termites."

⁂

The day before that (August 3), in the comments on "Good riddance, Big Ben!" I had left a link to the 2020 Black Dog Star post "The Cronus Virus - It's Time!" without actually rereading the post myself. After the class, though, I checked my blog comments and saw one from Debbie that began thus:

I clicked on the Black Dog Star link and I'm very impressed with a lot of the information that mirrors my own. . . .

Her wording put the They Might Be Giants song "I'm Impressed" in my head:

I'm impressed, I'm impressed
When that gorilla beats his chest
Fall to bits, I confess, I admit, I'm impressed . . .

With this playing in my head, I clicked my own link and reread the Black Dog Star post. I had linked to it because it connected Saturn and clocks with the birdemic and was thus relevant to my own post giving "Taiwan's Dr. Fauci" (whose Chinese name sounds like the Chinese for "clock," just as Fauci means "sickle") the nickname Big Ben. I had forgotten that it also included this image:

King Kong and the Black (Dog) Star!

⁂

That night, I listened to music on YouTube while doing the dishes, as usual. One of the songs it played was a Kill_mR_DJ mashup of Toto's "Africa" and Enigma's "Return to Innocence."

Looking at the screen, I saw that, in addition to Toto and Enigma, a band called "The Script" was credited, as the source of the instrumentals. I'd never heard of them.

Today (August 5), I had lunch at a restaurant, where a TV was playing music videos. I wasn't really paying attention until a live video from a concert came on. Before the song actually started, the singer was giving a little speech on the stage, in which he kept repeating that their band was The Script. Something like, "Whether you've been a Script fan since our first song, or whether this is your first Script concert, we want to say welcome to the Script family!" Then the music started, and I instantly recognized it as the track Kill_mR_DJ had sampled. My attention was now fully engaged, and then the lyrics started:

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

King Kong beating his chest again! No black stars in this song, but Kill_mR_DJ had put it together with a song by Toto (the name of a famous black dog) -- called "Africa" (home of the "black stars," a.k.a. chimpanzees).

⁂

The reference to banging on God's door also caught my attention. Just before lunch I had, on a sudden whim, paid a visit to the Guashan Shaolin Temple, which I hadn't been to in years. It was the middle of a weekday, and the temple was virtually empty. On the ground floor is an emormous statue of Bodhidharma which has a very powerful presence, but I was there for the meditation room on the second floor. There's framed Chinese calligraphy on the walls -- 18 channeled poems dedicated to each of the 18 Arhats. When I first visited this temple, 12 years ago or so, one of these 18 poems attracted me as if by magnetism (it really feels pretty literally like magnetism!) even though I was basically illiterate in Chinese at that time, and when I touched the paper, I felt a powerful stream of energy flowing through me. (I hate to use "energy" in a New-Agey way like that, but I'm afraid it's the mot juste.) Today I immediately recognized the poem again, felt the same magnetic attraction, and felt the same rush of energy when I touched it. I'm much better at reading Chinese now, and it is the poem dedicated to Cudapanthaka -- called in Chinese 看門羅漢, literally "the Arhat who watches the door."

As I exited the meditation room, I looked back and realized that I had not entered by the main doorway -- a large circular opening with no door -- but by a side door.. This was a green door which, though it was propped open with a chair, had a sign saying "Arhat Energy Room Temporarily Closed."

Way to watch the door, Cudapanthaka! It's not the first time in recent weeks I've passed through a green door into a place that was supposed to be closed.

⁂

In the temple stairwell, I passed a window where a moth had become trapped between the glass and the screen. After some coaxing and a lot of sliding the glass and the screen back and forth, I finally got it to fly outside. The exact moment the moth flew out the window, a gecko jumped in the window and onto my arm.

⁂

Update: Immediately after posting this, I taught a different children's English class. Their assignment for today included this:

Two references to Toto the dog. Also Oz, a nickname for Australia. (I had had to explain that chimps can't eat honey ants because they don't live in Australia.) See also the references to Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion in this recent comment by WanderingGondola.