From the Narrow Desert: Space

Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts

Friday, December 22, 2023

His Dark Dove

William Wright's latest post, "A Numenorean Flying Ship," discusses Jeff Bezos's latest spaceship launch -- of a phallic rocket called New Shepard and decorated with an enormous black feather (even though Blue Origin's logo is, naturally enough, a blue feather). One of William's fellow Mormon-Tolkien-crossover thinkers has written of the Black Feathers as a group of Númenorean baddies, and William has been exploring the idea of Númenor (Tolkien's star-shaped island divided into the regions Andustar, Forostar, Orrostar, Hyarnustar, and Hyarrostar) as a heavenly body rather than a literal island. He quotes some of Tolkien's posthumously published notes suggesting that he had once toyed with the idea of spacefaring Elves and Númenoreans. This one in particular caught my eye:

For upon the Straight Road only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey; for being straight that road passed through the air of breath and flight and rose above it, and traversed Ilmen [outer space] in which no mortal flesh can endure.

The phrase Straight Road is here used to refer to space travel. This is interesting vis-à-vis New Shepard's black feather. When, a few months before the birdemic, I began a post with the word corvids, that post was called "Birds that go straight" and characterized the crow as one such because "'As the crow flies' means in a straight line." In my December 2020 post "Red crows of the sun," I discuss my childhood idea that crows and all other black-feathered birds are actually from outer space.

William Wright is far from the first to connect bald Bezos and his phallic rocket with Dr. Evil in the second Austin Powers movie (whose phallic rocket I recently referenced in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana," though William didn't catch it).

There are more parallels. Dr. Evil has a son named Scott Evil. Bezos has a son with a woman named Scott. Bezos named his rocket after Alan Shepard. Dr. Evil's rocket was part of a program named after Alan Parsons. Bezos's company is called Blue Origin. Dr. Evil sings "What if God was one of us? Blue blue blue blue blue blue blue." I'm telling you, these are some top-shelf coincidences!

My last post included the Ava Max music video for "Kings & Queens"; this begins with footage of white doves in flight, which are later replaced with parrots in the rest of the video. Parrots replacing doves made me think of my favorite Flaubert story, "A Simple Heart," which ends with the Holy Ghost appearing in the form of a parrot. With this context of subverted holy-dove imagery, Bezos's black feather made me think of the Tori Amos song "Black-Dove (January)," the lyrics of which apparently came to her in a dream:

I used to vaguely connect this song with the Waco massacre of 1993, since the lyrics repeatedly mention Texas, and David Koresh is an anagram of His Dark Dove. Listening to it again now, I notice other things:

Black-dove black-dove
You don't need a space ship
They don't know you've already lived
On the other side of the galaxy

She had a January world
So many storms not right somehow
How a lion becomes a mouse
By the woods
But I have to get to Texas
Said I have to get to Texas
And I'll give away my blue blue dress

Notice how the black dove is associated with space travel (all black birds are from outer space), and there's also mention of a "blue blue dress" (cf. the blue robes of the spacefaring "wizards"). "How a lion becomes a mouse / By the woods" is interesting, too. Satan is called a roaring lion in the Bible, but William Wright has recently been connecting "Satan-Saruman" (his term) with the rat or mouse. I recently posted about a sinister mouse in the woods.

The most interesting and unexpected link has to do with Koresh himself, though. Remember that this post began with the Texas launch of a penis-shaped spaceship called New Shepard. Today I learned that before they were called Branch Davidians, the Waco group had a different name:

Shepherd's Rod.

Thursday, December 14, 2023

The "waters" of outer space

I’ve been sailing all my life now
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the earth is my blue boat home.

-- Peter Mayer, "Blue Boat Home"

Praise ye the Lord from the heavens:
    praise him in the heights.
Praise ye him, all his angels:
    praise ye him, all his hosts.
Praise ye him, sun and moon:
    praise him, all ye stars of light.
Praise him, ye heavens of heavens,
    and ye waters that be above the heavens.

-- Psalm 148:1-4

The lines from Psalm 148 quoted above use the typical Hebrew poetic device of parallelism, where each line is followed by one that parallels it -- either a paraphrase or a similar idea. In the first two couplets quoted, the two lines are more-or-less synonymous; "the heavens" and "the heights" probably mean about the same thing, as do "his angels" and "his hosts." In the third couplet, the lines are not synonymous -- the sun and moon are not considered to be "stars" in the Bible -- but are obviously thematically related.

What about the fourth couplet? I propose that the two lines are synonymous there, too. The "heaven of heavens" and the "waters that be above the heavens" refer to the same thing -- namely, outer space. (The standard reading, that "waters above the heavens" refers to clouds, strikes me as ridiculous.) In Genesis 1, the "heaven" is the atmosphere, the place where birds fly, and the "waters" are "above" that -- outer space. Outer space is the heaven of heavens in a fairly literal sense, since many different "heavens" -- i.e., the atmospheres of many different planets -- are contained in it. Space is called "waters" simply because that's a metaphor that comes very naturally, as seen in the Peter Mayer song.

If "waters" can mean space, then the story of the City of Enoch floating away into space and Atlantis sinking beneath the waters could be variants of the same original story.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

DD, hourglass, lemniscate, gate, time

Found this on /x/ today. It looks like a slide from a PowerPoint presentation, but only one slide was posted: the one numbered 8.

We've connected the hourglass with the lemniscate or figure-eight, and the lemniscate with two letter Ds. Here we have an hourglass in the shape of two letter Ds, and a figure-eight next to it. The lemniscate has been connected with the door as a portal to another time. Here we see how the neck of the hourglass functions as a gate or door, and passing through that gate are tiny clocks, each apparently representing one Planck time.

An hourglass resembles a figure-eight, but the lemniscate of infinity is a lazy eight. If you turned an hourglass on its side, wouldn't that represent stopping the flow of time?

Notice also the geometric relationship between the DD-hourglass and 101.

The /x/ post has the subject line "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail," and the text of the post is as follows:

The Grail isn't anything you might have heard it is except for perhaps the generative principle of nature itself. We are all within the grail. This is how God comes to know us. We are like fish in a great ocean, bound to our school. When the question is asked the realm is restored.

The first reply (not clear if it's the OP or someone else) adds:

Time is the chalice that holds within it Space.
Space is the great wine dark Ocean of Life
Space is Fortified by Life.
Drink well and be drunken of! This is the final commandment!

Time as a grail or chalice fits with my thoughts on the Temperance card as (among other things) a symbol of the passage of time.

"Drink well and be drunken of," in connection with "quantum spacetime," brings to mind these lines from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

"Drink well and be drunken of! This is the final commandment!" -- this sounds so exactly like Aleister Crowley that I was certain it was him and tried to search out which of his books it came from. But apparently it's not the Beast himself at all, just a pitch-perfect pastiche by this anon.

Note added: I found the source of the image in the /x/ post. It's from page 88 of a Scientific American magazine.

Thursday, December 29, 2022

"Roaring silence" resurfaces

In my December 2020 post "Here come the twenties," I proposed as a theme song for the whole decade a track from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence.

Did you know that the oxymoronic idea of a "roaring silence" is actually biblical? I didn't until my recent engagement with the Penitential Psalms: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long" (Ps. 32:3).

Recently the sync fairies have been drawing my attention to the old They Might Be Giants song "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" -- the first track from their first album (1986).

The bridge contains these lines:

You know everything that I know,

so I know you've heard the voice

that makes the silent noise

They don't actually use the word roar, but the concept is similar -- and the silent roar syncs with another TMBG theme: a lion in space:

In the spaceship, the silver spaceship,
The lion takes control

In a lion were in space, his roaring would naturally be silent, as They remind us in another song:

I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there

On a whim, I ran a search for can't hear the roar, and it turned up a Science Daily article about how the paralyzing power of a tiger's roar may come from the part we can't hear. The article is dated December 29, 2000. I found it today, December 29, 2022 -- the same date, only in the Year of the Tiger.