From the Narrow Desert

This was a sort of amorphous dream, neither very visual nor very verbal, but I got the general idea.

There was a small lake and growing near it a very tall tree called a “larch-root tree.” A magician wanted to move both of these to a distant location, so he caused each of them to collapse into a little cylindrical capsule, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun shell but only half as long. He put the two capsules in the pocket of his robe and left.

When he arrived at the new location, he made the capsules expand again into a lake and a larch-root tree. However, he lacked the understanding to do this properly. Their original configuration had been stable, but the new one was not. Something about their relative position made it possible for the larch-root tree to suck up all the water in the lake, and in no time the lake was completely gone.

The magician had definitely not been expecting this, and his facial expression made it clear that it threw a spanner in his plans.

There were a few follow-up dreams revisiting this event and explaining its significance, but I can’t remember any of them.

Note added: About two hours after posting the above, I read this in Swamplandia! by Karen Russell:

Melaleuca quinquenervia was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry (p. 96).

That’s a pretty tight sync with the dream, in which a tree sucks a lake dry after being relocated to a new environment.

"Would this be the Topman residence?" inquired the little man in soft, musical tones, his thick, standing-out eyebrows going right up. At the same time all the other pairs of eyebrows went up.

Now Annabelle Topman came forward.

"I am Mrs. Topman," she said. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mistress Topman," he returned politely, and his eyebrows came down again, . . .

Last night I had a dream that I picked up my black tomcat Scipio and carried him upstairs to my study on the second floor. When I entered the study, I found that it was raining hard outside and the roof was leaking (which makes no sense on the second floor of a three-story house, but that's dream logic!), so much so that it was basically "raining" in the study, too. Water had gotten all over everything. Fortunately, my second-floor bookcases are actually cabinets with glass doors, so I figured the books themselves would be okay, but I would still have to clean up everything else. I carried Scipio downstairs and then went back up to the study to clean. When I opened the door the second time, though, everything was dry, so I decided cleaning was unnecessary.

On the bus home, headphones still cranking, I read through the then-freshly-posted "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl". As my stop drew closer I saw the bus windscreen wipers move once, though rain wasn't evident; at roughly the same time, my music player put on Outkast's Ms. Jackson. The relevance of "Jackson" should be obvious, but there's also a repeated "ooh" in the song chorus that always sounded more like "hoo" to me. And yes, there's an owl or two in the video; one specifically mouths (beak-syncs?) to an "ooh".

As I got off the bus, I realised it was indeed raining lightly. Over the past month there's been several instances of this, as if the sky decided, "Hey, you're almost home, let's turn on the water." As I pulled out my umbrella and began walking, the rain's intensity increased. Just as it seemed it couldn't get any heavier, it eased off significantly -- around the same time that Andre 3000 rapped out, "You can plan a pretty picnic but you can't control the weather" (2:20 in the video). A very weird coincidence.

Mulling over this later, I recalled Wikipedia's notes on how, in Islam, the Archangel is "said to effectuate God's providence as well as natural phenomena, such as rain." That links rather well to that Michael graffiti from earlier, which has "inshallah" ("if God wills" in Arabic) written above everything else. 

On Feb 24, 1979 Johnnie Wilder at the height of Heatwave's success, was in Dayton to visit his mother and father and his car that he was driving was broadsided at a 4 way stop. The Stop sign had fallen previously and wasn't replaced.

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Update: In the comments, Henri notes the Outkast song "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)." How had I never heard of this song?

So I posted about how a dream of mine synched with an Outkast song mentioned in my comments the next day. In the vignette that followed the main dream, I was driving a car and saw a man apparently protesting a war in Iraq by holding up a sign that said "STOP" on one side and "IRAQ WAR" on the other. Now I discover that Outkast also had a song called "Bombs Over Baghdad," and that the music video features people driving around in cars and a giant "STOP."

I also discovered today that, years after using an eagle owl in the "Ms. Jackson" video, Outkast member Big Boi began keeping owls as pets, leading Rolling Stone to do a thing about "Big Boi's Owl Obsession."

So, this is weird. The way RV Tournament works is every day it gives you a set of coordinates keyed to a target image, and you try to pick up psychically what the target image is. Then it shows you two images and you guess which is the target. The next day, the correct target is revealed, and you find out if you were right or wrong. I'm usually right -- about 80% of the time.

When Hamlet says, "We defy augury," modern readers are likely to understand this in terms of such familiar expressions as to defy comprehension and take it to mean, "Whatever is predicted of us, we can ignore the prediction and do otherwise." In fact, Hamlet's meaning is very nearly the opposite: We ignore omens that would allow us to predict and prevent future events, because all is fated and the future cannot be changed.

The naïve reader is liable to make a similar mistake in interpreting Jesus' famously cryptic statement to Simon Peter: "The cock shall not call out till thou hast denied me thrice." Thinking of such expressions as when pigs fly or when hell freezes over, the reader is likely to understand Jesus as saying, "You will certainly never deny me."

There are multiple obvious problems with this reading, though. What can thrice mean, for instance? That Peter might deny Jesus once or twice but that three times was unthinkable? And isn't the whole construction backwards? We say, "That won't happen until pigs fly," not, "Pigs won't fly until that happens."

As it happens, there is very strong textual evidence that what Jesus meant was, "You will certainly deny me, this very night." As strange as it may seem, multiple ancient authorities attribute to the "cock" (ἀλέκτωρ) a distinctive cry or "crow," sometimes represented as kukuriku or some similar onomatopoeia, and apparently cocks used to "crow" with such regularity that farmers used to use them as a sort of natural alarm clock, rising "at cockcrow" -- that is, at dawn. Thus, Jesus almost certainly meant, "You will deny me thrice before daybreak."

What to make, then, of the fact that Peter apparently never did deny Jesus, not even once, but stood with him when all the other disciples had abandoned him and was crucified alongside him? And how to reconcile the whole story with the very obvious fact that the cock has no call and is in fact proverbial for its silence?

Secular scholars will explain it away, of course. Jesus simply made a mistake, they will say, and his prophecy did not come true. And the ἀλέκτωρ that is represented in the New Testament, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar's Odes, and elsewhere as "crowing" loudly and regularly must have been some other species than the silent barnyard fowl we know today.

The faithful, however, can recognize the very strong evidence that the biblical ἀλέκτωρ is none other than our familiar cock or rooster, that this very animal used to give a distinctive call every day at dawn, and that all this "crowing" abruptly and miraculously ceased when Peter -- in the naïve, not the Shakespearean sense -- defied augury.

I have no idea how reliable this is, but the sync fairies have it that a "bolt from the blue" is coming on August 1 -- which is this coming Sunday. I just want to say that in advance, for the record.

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.

Since we're sharing unjustifiable premonitions, the phrase "spontaneous human combustion" has been persistently presenting itself to me recently, together with the idea that some prominent person (possibly [I name a specific American politician]) is going to fall victim to that extremely unusual phenomenon, causing a sensation. Obviously the odds against any such thing happening are astronomical, but I wanted to go on the record just in case.

"[. . .] But with the help of all the brave people in different government departments and all around the country working on this case, we’ve got Alvarez on the run and are tightening the noose around his neck. Some of these people are here with us tonight. People like Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. Like Michael Gellers, a police officer who successfully defused a BOOJUM bomb in Philadelphia. Like Sonja Horah . . .”

President Bush spontaneously caught fire. “HELLLPPP!” he screamed as the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches watched on in horror. “HELLLPPP . . . HELL . . .”. By the time Secret Service agents reached him at the podium, he was already a charred corpse.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

Last night I had a dream which I had occasion to relate to some online correspondents this afternoon, and I therefore have a written record of it, from which I quote:

We were on a mountain trail, with a wide view of farmland below. . . . I looked up in the sky and saw what I at first took to be a rocket in the distance but soon realized was actually a meteor. Smallish rocks began to rain down from the sky. I could see them striking the farmland below, and then one nearly [sic; I meant narrowly] missed me on the trail. "They're meteorites!" I shouted. "Everyone get out of the way!"

Later this evening, I read a bit in The Golden Thread of World History, a (rather bad) English translation of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Mission des Juifs. Saint-Yves is arguing that the ancients had all sorts of "modern" technology, including rocketry. (Everything in the quote below is, it is my painful duty to inform you, strictly sic erat scriptum. I'll just get that out of the way now to avoid littering the text with sic after sic.)

About 4,000 years before Christ, . . . pyrotechnics were used solely for the defense of the temples and their domains . . . .

When strangers attacked the cities of Persia, says Philstratus, the Magi from the top of the walls stroke the assailants with flames and thunder.

By similar means the priests of Delphi defended their territory against the Gallics and the Persians themselves.

In their reports, Herodotus, Justin, Pausanias, describe actual explosions of mines engulfing Persians or Gallics under rains of stones and projectiles mixed with flames.

Both the dream and the passage in Saint-Yves feature rains of stones or rocks. Saint-Yves presents his "rains of stones" as evidence that the ancients used military "pyrotechnics"; my dream also connects the rain of stones with rocketry, since the meteor appears at first to be "a rocket in the distance."

I had not read anything about ancient weaponry in Saint-Yves before dreaming my dream, nor did I know that he would go on to discuss it. The similarity is therefore either precognitive or the work of the synchronicity fairies.

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.

-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week.  It cost several hundred dollars.  Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step.  The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery.  I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it.  I didn’t need it right away.  Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it.  But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere.  I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups.  After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck.  I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said.  The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang.  My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box.  He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular.  He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box.  It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside.  I hefted the battery.  It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.

Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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Much of Whitley Strieber's non-fiction book The Secret School has to do with mental time travel. He recounts a vision of Rome around 50 BC, one of the world around 10,000 BC, and one of the near future (when he himself is an old man -- i.e., around now).

In an appendix, he writes, "I have assembled a short list of prophecies and predictions for the near future. I intend it to be used as a validating tool for my work, and trust that I have been sufficiently exact for this to be possible." There is no indication at all of where these prophecies came from; they do not overlap at all with the vision of the future reported in the body of the book. This vision would, I think, make a better validating tool, since it includes some very specific events (such as Air Force One being grounded in a sandstorm in Los Angeles) and also has a very specific deadline (the death of Whitley Strieber). At any rate, here are the prophecies from the appendix, with my comments. I have added numbers to what is in the original a bulleted list but have made no other changes. It's been 23 years since the publication of The Secret School, so at least some of these "near future" prophecies should have been fulfilled by now.

1. Our present system of government, made unstable by debt, public disaffection, and the vast chasm between its secret and public sectors, will change radically in the context of economic disruptions brought on by serious environmental difficulties of various kinds.

I guess the global birdemic coup of early 2020 sort of fulfills this, though "environmental difficulties of various kinds" weren't really a factor.

2. Specifically, I see problems with a food supply disrupted by violent weather: great storms in some places, horrendous drought in others.

Uselessly vague. There are always storms, droughts, and food-supply issues somewhere in the world.

3. I see huge clouds of smoke over a great city -- Mexico City. Popocatépetl is erupting.

This is one of the most specific predictions on the list, but unfortunately turns out to be worthless. According to the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program (click on "Eruptive History" here), every year since 1994 has seen at least one eruption of Popocatépetl. If we count only "catastrophic" eruptions (VEI of 3 or higher), the most recent was in 1996, and the last before that was in 1663. The Secret School was published in 1997.

4. In the United States, there will be a struggle for control, fierce but not very bloody. The power of the military/industrial complex will end, and with it official secrecy. What will take the place of the old system will be freedom in the form of a republic that is real.

Just how wrong is it possible to be? (To be fair, some Trump supporters still hold out hope that this is just about to happen.)

5. Despite all the chaos, science continues to move from success to success. We begin to understand our deepest selves. As we unlock the meaning of our genes, we will discover that human beings and human lives are constructed in such extraordinary detail that the presence of a level of super-conscious planning prior to and hidden within our lives, as suggested by the secret school, must be seriously considered.

Trivially, science is cumulative and thus "moves from success to success"; barring total societal collapse, it never actually moves backward. However, no spectacular scientific discoveries about "the meaning of our genes" or anything else have been made since the publication of The Secret School, and in fact science seems to have been treading water for several decades now. (The Human Genome Project was in progress when The Secret School was written, and perhaps Strieber believed the hype surrounding that.)

6. Fusion is perfected as an energy source and we will want to mine the moon for fuel, but there will be an obstacle to this that will be overcome only through profound personal and social evolution.

Fusion power is about 50 years away -- always has been, always will be. Mining the moon for helium-3 for use in fusion was first proposed by Gerald Kulcinski in 1986.

7. Antimatter will be successfully created, contained, and studied. It will offer us the ability to devise weapons of appalling destructive capacity and small size, but also the chance to use it for the greater good in mega-engineering projects that will need power on an undreamed-of scale. Given the explosive power of antimatter weapons, we will also become able to deploy a meaningful system of defense against asteroids and large comets. In understanding how to contain antimatter, we will also discover how to gain access to parallel universes and eventually to traverse the universe at speeds bordering on the instantaneous.

Antimatter was first created in 1955 and first successfully stored in 2010. Only tiny quantities (nanograms) have been created. No military or engineering applications so far.

8. A man presently working inside a classified program will reveal knowledge of how psychic power works. Many research programs now secret will become public, whereupon the work will proceed with explosive energy. Average people will gain access to their own enormous psychic abilities as they realize that we all possess them and can learn techniques to make them work. Effective methods of teaching them will come into general use.

The Stargate Project was declassified in 1995, just before The Secret School was published. Effective methods of teaching psychic powers have not come into general use.

9. Memory and prophecy will be understood to be tools of the hyperconscious level of mind, and people will begin to use them as such.

Too vague.

10. Time will also come to be a tool, and travel in time will become practical. As mind frees itself from time and thus approaches singularity of consciousness, nations as we know them -- directed by power, politics, greed, and lies -- will end. They will be replaced by the only valid form of government that has any meaning to the truly free: one that is founded in love and organized around compassion.

Time travel has not become practical. Nations are still directed by power, politics, greed -- and, above all, lies.

11. We will meet people from other worlds, the barrier between the living and the dead will collapse, and it will become possible for the individual to store and process huge amounts of knowledge.

This has apparently been going on for a long time, as Strieber knows from his own experience. No special developments in this area since the publication of The Secret School.

12. We will throw off the bondage of assumptions that we are small, weak, and frail, and discover ourselves a rare and precious creation, immensely talented and bearing upon this tiny scrap of stone called Earth a powerful responsibility to survive, to grow, and to partake of all knowledge in full consciousness. As we do this, we will also find that others on the same quest reveal themselves to us, and we will join hands with them.

Rather than discovering "a powerful responsibility to survive," the human race is more suicidal now than it has even been before.

13. As science becomes increasingly honest, open, and powerful, it will begin to detect the presence of deity in an incontrovertibly factual manner. At that point, a Niagara of joy will flood the world as the species consciously joins the companionship for which it was created.

Or consider the polar opposite: "As science becomes increasingly dishonest and collapses, atheism and nihilism will be taken for granted, and a Niagara of despair, anomie, and alienation will flood the world." Which better describes the world you see around you?

Verdict: Epic fail.

I get the feeling that the Apocalypse, which began some fifty years ago, is reaching a crescendo Now. There is a tremendous urgency towards the goal of a global totalitarian takeover by the 'Ahrimanic' powers of evil: that is to say, the type of evil which is cold, calculating, systematic, anti-spiritual, anti-human, bureaucratic and transhumanist.

[. . .]

The interesting aspect is the sheer urgency. There is a very obvious attempt to create a worldwide sense of emergency, of imminent cataclysm, of terrible things that are Just About To Happen... unless, we hand over complete power to the Establishment (preferably the-day-after-tomorrow, or quicker).

And this handover - this Power Grab by the Global Establishment - is being aimed-at Very Soon; on a timescale of months, not years.

[. . .] 

I don't know why this should be, but I am more convinced with each passing month; what is being attempted - now and on a daily basis - is the biggest shift in power in the history of the world; the attempt of a tiny global 'elite' (possessed-by and serving demonic powers) to impose a complete system of behavioural and thought control.

And it is now; this is the Apocalypse; this is what it looks-like from the inside!

If the urgency of the Establishment has a reason, then that will soon become apparent; one way or another (depending upon the individual choices of millions of people) we shall -within the year - see huge changes in everybodys' lives.

It is difficult to believe, I hardly believe it myself; but - as I say - there must surely be a reason for the extreme urgency of this power grab. I don't know what that reason is; but it must be expected to take effect on a timescale of months. 

I can't say I am exactly looking-forward to discovering the answer; because I don't suppose the surprise will be a pleasant one. However, I haven't long to wait.

"I haven't long to wait" was an understatement. Amazingly, this was posted just four days before the first corvids appeared in China, and less than three months before the WHO declared the situation an official birdemic necessitating the ongoing worldwide totalitarian takeover which will without a doubt mean "huge changes in everybody's lives" well within the year. Talk about hitting it out of the park!

I, like others, am content to ignore the (supposed!) fact that Isaiah never actually made this iconic juxtaposition.

Isaiah's main Messianic prophecy constitutes Chapter 11 of the book that bears his name, with a shorter, possibly Messianic passage in 9:6-7. (Isaiah 7:14 is also commonly cited as a Messianic prophecy, but it is very obviously nothing of the kind, and I shall dismiss it without further ado.) Nowhere does Isaiah actually say "the Messiah," but that is the conventional title that was later applied to the ruler whose coming is prophesied in passages such as these.


Isaiah 9:6-7

[6] For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. [7] Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

"Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace" is one possible translation of a long prophetic name (Pele-joez-el-gibbor-abi-ad-sar-shalom) of the same sort as Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Like many Hebrew names, it contains theophoric elements, but no Jewish reader would understand this name to indicate that the child would be God himself. However, once we have decided this prophecy refers to Jesus, that meaning can certainly be read into it in retrospect.

As it reads, this is clearly a prophecy of a political leader: "the government shall be upon his shoulder." His sitting "upon the throne of David" refers to ruling over a reunited kingdom of Israel and Judah. He will reestablish Israel as a kingdom and establish a a just and peaceful government that will endure forever.

Against reading this as a Messianic prophecy, we have the fact that v. 6 refers to the child as having already been born, although his reign is still in the future. In this, he is similar to the other children who are given prophetic names in Isaiah 7-9, Immanuel and Maher-shalal-hash-baz, both of whom were clearly born in Isaiah's own days. Rashi's commentary in fact interprets this passage as referring to Ahaz's son Hezekiah, later to rule over Judah (including David's ancient capital, Jerusalem) in peace and righteousness, and understands "for ever" to mean "all the days of his life," as when it is said of Samuel (in 1 Samuel 1:22) that he will "abide for ever" in the Temple.

(Rashi also, I regret to report, reads the second part of v. 6 as "his name shall be called -- by the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father -- 'the Prince of Peace'" -- thus demonstrating the sort of tin-eared obtuseness which has, alas, so often been typically rabbinical.)


Isaiah 11

While Rashi believes 9:6-7 to be a non-Messianic prophecy about Hezekiah, he does see Chapters 11 as being about the Messiah.

[1] And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

Jesse was the father of David, so this refers to someone of the Davidic line.

[2] And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; [3] And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: [4] But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. [5] And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

While the reader might naturally assume that a king is being described, nothing in this passage says that directly. He will judge and reprove and smite, but it is not said that he will rule or reign. The obviously metaphorical bit about his smiting and slaying "with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips" leaves open the possibility that this Messiah will be primarily a teacher or prophet rather than an actual king.

[6] The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. [7] And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. [8] And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den. [9] They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

I would tend to interpret this is a hyperbolic way of saying that the Messiah will bring peace -- and he will bring it by spreading "the knowledge of the Lord" over the earth, not by exercising political power. Again, this is consistent with the Messiah's being a teacher and not a king.

[10] And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

Commentators generally understand "his rest" to mean "the place where he lives" -- i.e., Judah.

[11] And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. [12] And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. [13] The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim. [14] But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab; and the children of Ammon shall obey them. [15] And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod. [16] And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt.

The Israelites will leave the lands where they now live scattered and will return to Israel, as happened in the Exodus. There is even a reference to the Red Sea being parted again. This seems to connect the Messiah with the prophet like unto Moses, suggesting that they are after all the same person.


Applicability to Jesus

The only thing about Isaiah 9:6-7 that would bring Jesus to mind is the name itself, with its implication that a child could be born who would be God himself. As I have said, I don't think it actually implies that in context, though, and nothing else in this brief prophecy has anything to do with Jesus. All in all, I think I agree with Rashi that, pace Handel, this was never intended to be a Messianic prophecy at all.

Isaiah 11 is indisputably Messianic in character, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in it suggests a literal king on the throne of David. Everything in vv. 2-5 is more or less consistent with Jesus. However, vv. 6-9, describing a peaceable kingdom in which even predators will cease to prey, is harder to apply to Jesus, who did not after all bring anything resembling world peace. The bit about how "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea" seems to have been at least partly fulfilled by Jesus. Knowledge of the God of the Hebrews is now virtually universal -- that is, very nearly everyone in the world has heard of him and knows a bit about him -- and that happened because of Jesus. However, Isaiah seems to be predicting a "knowledge of the Lord" that runs deeper than mere information -- seems to be saying that people will really know the Lord and will thus become peaceful -- and that has not happened. In v. 10, we are told that the gentiles will turn their attention to the Messiah and his homeland, and that certainly came true because of Jesus. The remainder of the chapter, which is about the return of the scattered Israelites to their ancient homeland, arguably began to be fulfilled with the creation of the modern state of Israel, but that was long after Jesus' time. Many of the details of this prophecy refer to nations that were already irrelevant even in the time of Jesus, to say nothing of the 20th century.

I think it's safe to say that if Isaiah had consciously foreseen Jesus' life and work with any degree of clarity or accuracy, this isn't what he would have written. At best, he had a vague intuition that a "savior" was coming -- but what exactly that meant, and what he would save people from, was filled in by his own preconceptions, or possibly by prophetic inklings of other things to come, not directly related to the life of Jesus, which unintentionally got mixed up with his Messianic vision.

Proust, as everyone knows, dipped a madeleine in tea and put it in a mouth, and a vivid childhood memory unexpectedly "revealed itself" -- a phenomenon he dubbed la mémoire involontaire. Sometimes a stimulus triggers a very specific memory, which then invades our consciousness in all its immediacy, will we, nill we.

One would assume that each such experience is a one-off. One would assume that if Proust had taken up the habit of eating tea-soaked madeleines every day, he would not have experienced daily clockwork revelations of le temps perdu. One would assume that only a relatively uncommon stimulus would have the power to call to mind a specific previous instance of the same.

"One would assume," I say -- would, were it not for direct experience to the contrary.

*


The relatives at whose home I saw the movie live fairly close to our own house, but we don't visit them that often. However, I pass through that general area several times a month, and every time I get within a half-mile or so of their home -- the area in which I had walked after seeing 47 Ronin -- it triggers an memory of impressive (if perhaps not quite Proustian) vividness. I remember walking along the road, passing a rather handsome stray Formosan mountain dog, seeing a white sedan drive past me and then turn left. I remember a long row of Roman-style banners which had been put out to advertise for an election (and which have long since been taken down), and how their fluttering in the dark struck me as somehow uncanny. And I remember what I was thinking at the time -- mostly about the many-eyed beast, of course, and the dream which had anticipated it.

*

What would cause this sort of recurring Madeleine Effect? My guess is that it has to do with the fact that, while the stimulus is one I encounter often, it is never accompanied by any other memorable events which might compete with the original. When I visit those relatives, actually being in the house where I saw the movie does not trigger any vivid memories -- probably because all kinds of different things have happened in that house, of which watching 47 Ronin is just one. The house is not haunted by a single dominating memory. On the roads near their house, though, nothing ever happens. I just pass through. I've only been walking there that one time, which was memorable because of the uncanny experience I had just had, and which imparted its uncanniness to the otherwise unremarkable scenery. The first time I passed through after that, I experienced an unusually vivid memory -- which was itself a memorable experience, and thus reinforced the memory of the original walk. Aside from my walk, and my vivid memories of that walk, nothing at all memorable has ever happened to me in that area, so no real new memories are formed to swamp out the original one.

In a recent post, Bruce Charlton asks "Can the past be changed?" -- and answers, "Obviously not," going on to pronounce the contrary opinion "demonic." Since I have been guilty of entertaining a version of this doctrine from the pit of hell (see this post), I thought I would revisit the idea.

*

The first matter of business is to establish exactly what is meant by change. As a simple example of a change, consider my marital status, which changed in the latter part of 2010. Prior to that date, I was not married; after that date, I was and am. That's what change means: that a given proposition ("William James Tychonievich is married") is/was/will be true at some points in time and false at others.

We can represent this change graphically by means of a colored line. The dimension represented by the line is "time," with the past to the left and the future to the right, and the color of any given point on the line represents my marital status at that point in time (blue for single, gold for married). Below is a portion of such a timeline, covering the years from 2009 to 2020.

Now, we have already established that my marriage in 2010 constitutes an example of a change, and our timeline above locates that change to the left of the present moment -- that is, in the past. Is this, then, what we mean by "changing the past? Obviously not -- but why not, and what do we mean?

Well, the natural answer is something like this: The change in question occurred in 2010 -- which means that at that time, 2010 was not in the past but was the present year. If what happened in 2010 were to change now, that would be what we mean by "changing the past." But this introduces a distinction between 2010-in-2010 and 2010-now which cannot be represented on a one-dimensional timeline. Such time designations require two coordinates -- (2010, 2010), (2010, 2019) -- which means our simple timeline must be expanded into a two-dimensional "timeplane" of the type pioneered by J. W. Dunne and discussed in my post "The present now will later be past."

The title of that post, taken from the Bob Dylan Song "The Times They Are a-Changin'," was chosen because, while it seems very obviously true, it implicitly assumes a two-dimensional model of time. A simple timeline, like Fig. 2 above, can represent past, present, and future, but not the idea that "the present now will later be past." The very phrase "will later be past" describes the same state of affairs as being future in one sense and past in another -- which requires a rectangular coordinate system comprising two perpendicular timelines.

Fig. 3

Now I know from experience -- my own included -- that this is point at which readers' eyes start to glaze over, but I'm afraid there's just no avoiding these diagrams. I can only ask for the reader's patience and do my best to explain. The color of each point on the timeplane in Fig. 3 represents a proposition regarding my marital status: The hue represents the content of the proposition (blue for single, gold for married), and the tint represents its tense (pure colors for past, light colors for future). Each point is located in two different temporal dimensions: The x-axis ("object time") represents the time the proposition refers to, and the y-axis ("meta-time") represent the time at which the proposition is true.

I've marked two (arbitrarily selected) regions on the plane "A" and "B," respectively, in order to use them as examples. They represent the following meta-propositions:

A: In 2010, the proposition "WJT will be married in 2012" was true.

B: In 2014, the proposition "WJT was married in 2012" was true. 

For completeness, we really ought to indicate the tense of the meta-proposition as well. Fig. 4, below, is so modified as to express this. Solid colors (such as were used in Fig. 3) represent meta-past, and stippling represents meta-future.

Fig. 4

The region marked "C" in Fig. 4 represents the following meta-proposition:

In 2020, the proposition "WJT was married in 2011" will be true.

The "was" in the object proposition is indicated by the use of a pure color as opposed to a tint, and the "will be" of the meta-proposition is indicated by stippling.

The red dot in Fig. 4 marks the place where the true present may be found. (Or at least, this was true when I wrote it, about a third of the way through the year 2019.) When we say, "2019 is the present year," the word "present" corresponds to the diagonal line separating pure colors from tints, and the present-tense verb "is" corresponds to the horizontal line separating solid colors from stippling. The intersection of those two lines, marked with the red dot, is "the present now." Dylan's statement that "the present now will later be past" means that if we start at the red dot ("the present now") and move vertically down into the stippled region ("will later be"), we find a pure color ("past") rather than a tint.

Take a minute to digest that. I want to be sure the meaning of these timeplane diagrams is clear before proceeding.

Now look back at the region marked "A" in Fig. 3 and the meta-proposition to which it corresponds: "In 2010, the proposition 'WJT will be married in 2012' was [already] true." And consider this: If I were to extend my timeplane diagram to cover a wider range of past times, there would be a region on that diagram corresponding to the meta-proposition "In 4000 BC, the proposition 'WJT will be married in 2012' was already true." This is fatalism, of the unassailable variety spelled out by Richard Taylor (whose argument I discuss here) -- unassailable because it does not depend on the doctrine of causal determinism. From the mere assumption that all possible statements about the future are (already) either true or false, and that their truth-value cannot change, it follows that all is fated, that whatever happens is inevitable.

 To escape Taylorian fatalism, it is necessary to believe that we can change the future -- an idea which is common enough in naive discourse, and which our two-dimensional timeplane allows us to model. Let us modify our diagram, then. Instead of assuming (as Fig. 4 does) that my getting married in late 2010 is something that was always going to happen, something that was already written in the book of fate hundreds of years before my birth, or as far back as you care to imagine -- instead of assuming that, let's assume instead that I wasn't going to get married on that date, not until I actually made the decision to do so. Let's assume that my decision, rather than being just another step in the inevitable unfolding of fate, actually decided something, literally changed the future. And let's further assume (as seems reasonable) that this future-altering decision was made some months before the actual event of the marriage.

Fig. 5

The black dot on the timeplane in Fig. 5 represents the moment I exercised my agency and made the fateful decision (which, I need hardly mention, is entirely different from a fated decision, the latter being a contradiction in terms and no decision at all).

The diagonal line that passes through the black and red dots, and divides the pure colors on the left from the tints on the right, represents the timeline of my life as I experience it, as a succession of object-time "presents." The horizontal line that passes through the red dot, and divides the solid colors from the stippling, represents the meta-time present. (The object-time present is a point; the meta-time present is a line.) The intersection of these two lines divides the plane into four quadrants, representing (clockwise from the upper left), what had happened (solid pure colors), what was going to happen (solid tints), what will be going to happen (stippled tints), and what will have happened (stippled pure colors).

*

The diagonal line -- my life as I experience it -- is exactly the same in Fig. 4 (where the future is fated) and in Fig. 5 (where it can change). It would appear, then, that there can be no empirical evidence for the one model or the other, no possible experience that would be more consistent with the one than with the other. Choosing one over the other would be a metaphysical assumption, not a conclusion from evidence.

However, that may not be entirely true. There is considerable evidence (see J. W. Dunne's Experiment with Time for starters) that, while the attention is generally confined to the point-present represented by the red dot, it can sometimes extend to other regions of the linear meta-time present, especially during dreams or similar states of relaxed or diffuse attention. In such states, we have access to the object-time future (precognition) and past (retrocognition) -- at least as they exist at the meta-time present. Under Taylorian fatalism (as diagrammed in Fig. 4), the content of object time does not vary across meta-time; the only meta-time change is that of tense (as the future becomes the past), so whatever future events are perceived through genuine Dunnean precognition will infallibly come to pass when the future times in question become present. There would be no possibility of seeing the future and then changing your behavior as a result of what you see, with the result that the foreseen event is averted. This is precisely what fatalism -- of the sort seen in the Greek myths, for example -- means. Cassandra's prophetic warnings are ignored and have no power to prevent the events they foretell. The prophecies regarding Oedipus are not ignored, but the very attempt to thwart them leads to their fulfillment. Either way, fate ineluctably plays out.

In the model where the future can be changed (as diagrammed in Fig. 5), even true precognitions need not necessarily come true. For example, look back at Fig. 5 and imagine that in 2009 (in both object time and meta-time -- that is, at a point on the diagonal line) I had a precognitive vision of 2011. Since such a vision would be of object-time 2011 at meta-time 2009, I would see myself as still single at that date. However, by the time object-time 2011 becomes the meta-time present, it will already have changed, so that the 2011 I experience will be different from the 2011 I foresaw. Nonetheless, what I foresaw was true. (If that seems like a contradiction, consider this analogy. I turn on the TV to the weather channel and discover that it is sunny in Taipei. I then get in my car, drive to Taipei, and upon my arrival find that it is raining. But what I saw on TV was true.) Instances of true precognition that do not come true would be evidence that the future can be changed.

The problem, of course, is that, if a vision or premonition does not come true, there would seem to be no grounds for considering it genuinely precognitive. For example, once in my late teens, at a time when I had no plans to go overseas, I had a very vivid and detailed dream in which I was about 30 and living in Vietnam. I'm 40 now and have never set foot in that particular country. It's possible that my Vietnam dream was genuinely precognitive, revealing what was (at that time) going to happen in the future, but that the future it foretold has since changed because of choices I or others have made. It could also be considered a garbled precognition of what in fact came to pass. (I do live in Asia and have for most of my adult life.) But there's no good reason to believe that, and the simplest explanation is that it was just a dream and not precognitive at all. Certainly such a dream cannot constitute evidence that the future can be changed. Is such evidence possible?

Consider the premise of the Final Destination series of horror movies. The protagonist has a sudden vision of a series of events leading up to all his friends dying horribly in a freak accident. When the foreseen events begin to play out in real life, he panics and manages to prevent his friends from getting on the doomed plane or roller coaster or whatever. Then the freak accident occurs as foreseen, except that his friends are not among those killed by it. Later they all go on to die horribly anyway, in different freak accidents, because "you can't cheat death," but that's not germane to my point here, which is that the originally premonition is clearly a true one even though it does not come to pass exactly as foreseen. When people act on a precognitive warning so that the foreseen event does not happen, but subsequent events make it abundantly clear that it would have happened had they not taken action, that is evidence that the future can be changed.

Such evidence in fact exists. The literature on precognition is full of Final Destination type stories (minus the post-accident bit where everyone dies horribly anyway). Someone has a premonition of being in a plane crash, they cancel their tickets, and then the flight they would have been on crashes. That kind of thing.

*

What about changing the past? Well, it's a bizarre idea, so our illustrative example will be a little bizarre as well. I must ask the reader to suspend disbelief, ignoring for the moment the question of whether or not such things can really happen. Our question is what it would mean for the past to change, and, supposing it did change, whether there could be any empirical evidence of that change.

Suppose that "originally" I chose not to get married in 2010. Years later, in 2015, I looked back on that choice with regret and said to myself, "I wish I'd married that girl when I had the chance!" A passing genie happened to hear my remark and granted the wish. From that moment, it suddenly became true that I had gotten married in 2010. We can represent this hypothetical story graphically as below, in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6

The black dot on the plane in Fig. 6 indicates the moment at which my wish was granted. Notice that, when the past changes, the present and future change as well, since chains of cause-and-effect run horizontally from left to right across the diagram (i.e., causation is an object-time phenomenon).

Remember that the diagonal line dividing the pure colors from the tints represents my life as I actually experience it, as a succession of presents -- and notice that in the world depicted by Fig. 6, I never actually experience my own wedding or the first several years of my married life. I go directly from being a bachelor to having been married for nearly five years! Surely such an obvious discontinuity in my experience could not possibly go unnoticed, and surely the fact that people's lives don't include such discontinuities is evidence that the past cannot change -- right?

Well, not exactly. Remember that causation is an object-time phenomenon. When object-time 2010 changed in meta-time 2015, all subsequent points in object time also changed as a result of the causal effects of that 2010 wedding. For example, if photos were taken at the wedding, those photos will (after the granting of my wish) still be there in 2015 and after. But if the creation of photos is one of the effects of the wedding, the creation of memories in the minds of the participants is another. If my memories of the past are understood to be effects of those past events in the ordinary sense of that word (i.e., one of the effects of a given past event is an alteration in the state of my brain, which alteration persists through time and constitutes my memory of that event), then my memories at any given point in my life will be of what preceded that point horizontally (i.e., in object time), not diagonally along the line of my actual experience. If the past cannot be changed, the difference is immaterial, since the content of the horizontal and diagonal pasts will be identical. If it can be changed, then as soon as the change has happened, the content of my "original" past is inaccessible to me. When, at the moment marked with the black dot, I suddenly transform from a bachelor into someone who has been married for five years, my memories change as well. I would have no memory of ever having chosen not to get married in 2010, nor of regretting my choice and having my wish granted by a genie. My memory would tell me that I had "always" gotten married in 2010, and all observable effects in the present would also be consistent with that. No evidence that the past had changed would be possible.

What about retrocognition -- "paranormal" direct access to the past, corresponding to precognition and different from ordinary memory? Would that give us access to the "original" past, before it had changed? No, because like precognition, it represents an expansion of attention from the point-present to the linear present of meta-time (represented in the figures by the horizontal line passing through the red dot).

*

I had originally planned to discuss the so-called "Mandela Effect" -- the phenomenon of memories that don't match documented history (such as many people's memories of Nelson Mandela having died in prison, or of the Berenstain bears being called the Berenstein Bears) -- as possibly representing memories of the past before it was changed, but our two-dimensional time model has no way of accounting for such "memories" (except to say that they are simply errors). That will require us to venture into the even-more-confusing domain of meta-meta-time -- and, this post already being quite long enough, I think I will reserve that discussion (and a discussion of the moral significance of changeable vs. unchangeable pasts, as raised by Bruce Charlton) for the sequel.