From the Narrow Desert: Sun

Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Concerning shoon

The Man in the Moon

Wears silver shoon,

But gold costs twice

As much. That price

Is far too high,

And that is why

The Girl in the Sun

Wears only one.

On Venus, copper

Shoon they wore,

But copper’s dearer

Than before.

Until they’ve saved

Enough, that price

Means penny-loafers

Must suffice.

But iron’s cheap.

The shoon on Mars

Cost less than those

On other stars.

The Man that’s there

Is shod, of course,

With shoon to spare

To shoe his horse.

And what of Earth?

Men there, they say,

Make do with shoon

Of miry clay

Until, the Ancient’s

Reign restored,

They may go barefoot

Like their Lord.

Sons of Michael,

He approaches.

Rise! The Ancient

Father greet.

Bow, ye thousands,

Low before him.

Minister

Before his feet.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

I have pinched my title (only changing the capitalization so as to conform to the FTND style guide) from William Wright's February 29 post "Turning Suns into Black Holes." The post included this photo William's son had taken, in which "Through the magic of the VTech Kidizoom camera, the sun was transformed into either a black hole or a solar eclipse":

This evening I was trying to declutter my desk a bit, sorting through some stacks of books, and I ended up picking up and flipping through an old paperback I had found at a junk shop in Taichung some months ago: a 1976 English edition of Antonin Artaud's The Peyote Dance, published by The Noonday Press at 19 Union Square West, New York. (In the Tarot, 19 is the number of the Sun.)

I discovered something I hadn't noticed when I bought the book: Glued to the inside of the back cover was a little handmade envelope made of folded blue paper, and inside it turned out to be a Fujifilm Instax photo on a rather familiar theme:

Nothing is written on the photo or envelope or in the book, so we will never know who took this photo, made a special envelope for it, and glued it to the back cover of The Peyote Dance, or why.

A further coincidence is that on March 20 I myself had stuck a photo inside this very book. The ophthalmologist (see "Eye drops on 113/3/20") had given me a photo of my own bloodshot eye to take home, and not knowing what else to do with it, I had stuck it between the pages of one of the many books on my desk, figuring it could serve as a bookmark if and when I got around to reading it. Unbeknownst to me, the book I chose just happened to be the one that already had a photo hidden inside.

The last pages of The Peyote Dance, just before the envelope with the "black hole sun" photo, are devoted to a poem by the author, composed in Ivry-sur-Seine on February 16, 1948, called "Tutuguri: The Rite of Black Night." The opening lines are as follows:

Dedicated to the eternal glory of the sun Tutuguri is a black rite.
The Rite of black night and of the eternal death of the sun.
No, the sun will never come back

Is it this poem, with its blackened-sun imagery, that inspired the book's previous owner to provide it with a little pocket for a photo of a blacked-out sun? There's no way to know, but it seems as good a guess as any.

Monday, January 22, 2024

White Feathers, Strange Sights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs

As announced in my last post, I'm putting the sync fairies on hold for a few weeks while I try to make sense of what they've already given me. And like it or not, the linchpin of the recent cloud of syncs (do clouds have linchpins? Jeeves?) is this stupid and gratuitously offensive (not that there's anything wrong with that) meme I found on 4chan:

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Hercules in New York

The running man in the foreground of the meme is Arnold Strong as seen in his debut film, Hercules in New York (1970). After this breakthrough role, he would ditch this English-language stage name and replace it with his real surname, Schwarzenegger. In German, the word for a black man is Schwarzer, and their version of our "n-word" is Neger. Etymologically, Arnold's surname means "person from Schwarzenegg" ("Black Ridge") and is unrelated to the racial slur. Still, though, Mr. Strong's becoming Mr. Schwarzenegger obviously syncs with the idea of replacing English words with nigger.

By the way, there are two different places called Schwarzenegg: one in Austria, and one in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.

For now anyway, Hercules in New York is available on YouTube in its entirety, and it's a pretty decent contribution to the "so bad it's good" genre:

In the scene from which the still in the meme is taken, the demigod Hercules, having just arrived in New York and been befriended by "Pretzie," a nebbishy pretzel vendor, happens upon a park where some college athletes are training. Here's a sample of the top-notch dialogue:

Pretzie: Where are you going?
Hercules: Over there.
Pretzie: What for?
Hercules: To show them how to throw the discus.
Pretzie: No, no. You've gotta stay here. You can't go buttin' in there.
Hercules: They would not like me to instruct them?
Pretzie: No, it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed.
Hercules: I am Hercules.

So Herc wants to participate in sports with a group of white New Yorkers but is forbidden because there are "no outsiders allowed."

Throughout Herc's adventures in New York, the scene periodically changes to Olympus, where we see Zeus and various lesser gods observing him through -- uh, a big white crystal ball. You remember Zeus's famous crystal ball, right?

Near the end of the movie, Hercules is in trouble, having lost his divine powers and disappointed the gangsters who were counting on him to win a televised weight-lifting competition against a black dude. To save this wayward son of Zeus from the irate gangsters, the Olympians send down Atlas and, you guessed it, Samson! You remember all those Greek myths about Samson, don't you? No explanation is offered of how this Hebrew worthy came to be living on Mount Olympus after being crushed to death in the temple of Dagon; he is just mentioned matter-of-factly, as if he belonged there just as much as Mercury and Apollo and the rest.

Two other bodybuilders briefly show up and join the brawl without having any noticeable effect on Herc's fortunes. It's not clear which of them is supposed to be Samson, as they both have short hair, but in the end it is Hercules himself who ends up playing the Samson role of bringing down the pillars -- only in this case the "pillars" are just stacks of large cylindrical objects, wrapped in brown paper, in the warehouse or wherever it is they're fighting. (The characters never call it anything other than "that building.") Still, the allusion to Samson is obvious and obviously deliberate:

(Notice that the name Samson means "sun," and that the meme shows the sun between the pillars of a temple.)

These "pillars," unlike those of Samson, aren't actually load-bearing structures supporting the building, so nothing falls down other than the pillars themselves. Somehow this translates into a final victory for Herc -- I guess we are to assume that all the gangsters were crushed by the falling objects? -- because the scene immediately cuts to Herc and Pretzie, now apparently without a care in the world, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Throughout the whole movie, Zeus and the other gods have been trying to persuade Hercules to return to Olympus. While in the Empire State Building, he suddenly has a change of heart and decides to do so. Pretzie is admiring the view, turns around, and Herc has vanished.

Pretzie goes home and turns on his radio, only to hear Hercules speaking to him through the machine. ("Herc? Herc? Where are ya, Herc? What are you doing in my radio?") He starts having a conversation with his radio, asking Herc if he's ever going to come back even for a visit. Hercules leaves him with this:

Radio: Any time you wish me to be with you, all you need to do is think of me, and there I shall be, in your mind and in your heart, for as long as you want me to be, as long as you need me. Due to temporary atmospheric difficulties, we were interrupted in our broadcast. We resume . . .

Pretzie: Herc? Herc? "Any time you need me, any time you want me, just think of me, and I'll be there for as long as you want me to." Yeah. I think I'll eat an apple.

And, except for a brief epilogue set on Olympus, that's where the story ends: with Pretzie thinking he'll eat an apple. An exceedingly odd movie.

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The Emperor card of the Tarot

Arnold is a German name meaning "eagle ruler," and the first element in Schwarzenegger means "black." In most pre-Waite versions of the Tarot, the Emperor card features a black eagle -- the Reichsadler which has been the symbol of various German states. This same eagle appears on the coat of arms of modern Austria, Schwarzenegger's homeland. Emperor also syncs with New York and the Empire State Building.

In my January 2022 Tarot post "Pondering his orb," I note that Oswald Wirth (from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland) identified the Emperor card with Hercules, and specifically with Hercules holding apples (cf. the random "apple" reference at the end of Hercules in New York). The emperor is typically shown holding an orb, and I connected this with the "pondering my orb" meme, in which a bearded man stares into a crystal ball much like Zeus's in Hercules in New York. (This meme, in turn, derives from an illustration of Saruman using a Palantir.)

I also connect both the orb meme and the Tarot card with Lehi and his Liahona, and even note that "The name Lehi is associated with Samson, the 'Hebrew Hercules.'" (William Wright has proposed that the Liahona was literally a Palantir. More on that later.)

Another potentially relevant post is "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," which focuses specifically on Oswald Wirth's version of the card (Oswald Wirth, who was from Bern and who identified the Emperor with Hercules). His Emperor has a breastplate with the Sun on one breast and the Moon on the other, and I connect these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's breastplate. See also "Four rams' heads," where I discuss connections between the Emperor card and Zeus.

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Run Boy Run

On October 26, William Wright posted "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" He discusses the music video for "Run Boy Run," by Woodkid. Crossed keys are a prominent theme in this video. When crossed keys are used as a papal symbol, one key is typically silver and the other gold. Mr. Wright identifies these keys with Palantiri: the golden/solar Anor Stone (Liahona) and the silver/lunar Ithil Stone.

The connection with the Reality Temple meme is that the "Run Boy Run" video begins with a shot of the Bern Switzerland Temple while we hear a bell tolling four times. We then see a boy running out of this temple as fast as he can. The boy's running, and various monsters assisting him, is the theme of the rest of the video. Woodkid, who directed the video himself, is a French Jew with no Mormon background, so his choice of this particular building is an odd one.

This temple, dedicated on September 11, 1955, was the first Mormon temple outside the United States. It was originally called the Swiss Temple, not receiving its current name until the 1990s. Like most LDS temples, it has a statue of the Angel Moroni atop its spire, but this was not added until September 7, 2005. The Woodkid video shows the pre-2005, Moroni-less version. The Swiss Temple was the first to replace much of the traditional temple ceremony with a movie. It may be also be relevant that, like all LDS temples, it was closed to black people prior to 1978.

Running out of a temple obviously syncs with the meme about "escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple." Demiurge refers to the creator of the material universe, and the story of the Creation of the universe is central to the Mormon temple ceremony.

This site gives the following account of how the site for the Swiss Temple was selected:

Kneeling in prayer with this group he was impressed to locate the temple at Bern, Switzerland’s capital. The next morning before the travelers left for Holland, they inspected several sites and chose one in the southeastern part of the city and assigned Swiss-Austrian Mission president Samuel E. Bringhurst to acquire the property. President Bringhurst, however, discovered that this parcel had just been acquired for the city of Bern as a college site. Conferring with David O. McKay by phone, President Bringhurst was directed to identify other potential sites to be inspected by President McKay when he returned for his regularly scheduled visit to Switzerland in early July.

This syncs with Hercules in New York -- the very scene used in the meme -- in which Hercules (played by an Austrian) is told to stay out of a place because "it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed." Hercules is addressed as "boy" many times throughout the movie.

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The movie 42 and Jackie Robinson

In my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr," I discovered a connection in the works of Aleister Crowley between the numbers 42 and 333. I therefore took notice when I looked up "Run Boy Run" on Wikipedia and found that the song has a duration of 3:33 and was used in the trailer for a movie called 42.

The movie is about Jackie Robinson, the first black player to join an historically white baseball team. His number was 42, and it was retired in all MLB teams in his honor. I found the trailer mentioned on Wikipedia. The main soundtrack is the Jay-Z song "Brooklyn We Go Hard," but the beginning of the trailer does feature "Run Boy Run" (without the vocals).

Like the "Run Boy Run" video, the 42 trailer begins with a shot of a building and a tolling bell. Where "Run Boy Run" has the Bern Switzerland Temple, though, the trailer has the Empire State Building:

Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, so this choice of establishing shots -- a building in Manhattan, rather than the Brooklyn Bridge or something -- is an odd one.

As I mentioned, the main music for the trailer is not Woodkid but Jay-Z. Besides "Brooklyn We Go Hard," two of Jay-Z's other songs about New York City are "Empire State of Mind" and "A Star Is Born," both from the 2009 album The Blueprint 3. I know very little about Jay-Z and his music, but I do know that that because that album -- with its motif of three horizontal red stripes -- came up back in October 2020: "Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020." One of the things I noted back then was that the cover art for "A Star Is Born" made it look like "A Star Is Bern." I connected that with Bernie Sanders at the time, but now it's yet another link to Bern, Switzerland.

The cover art for "Empire State of Mind," unsurprisingly, shows the Empire State Building. Notice also that it features Alicia Keys -- a link to the crossed-keys motif in "Run Kid Run" and thus indirectly to Bern.

Jackie Robinson, who successfully joined a white New York baseball team which had previously excluded blacks, syncs with the running Arnold image from the meme -- which shows Hercules practicing athletics with white New Yorkers who had tried to exclude him as an "outsider." In the 42 trailer, a white man predicts that "Negroes are gonna run the white man straight out of baseball" -- using the metaphor of "running out" to say that Anglo-Saxons are going to be replaced by Negroes. The meme also shows someone "running out" after replacing all English words with a slang form of the word Negro.

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The Swiss Family Robinson

The trailer for the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 begins with music associated with the Swiss Temple in Bern -- a building which, like Major League Baseball, formerly excluded black people. Once Robinson and the Swiss Temple have been linked, this obviously brings The Swiss Family Robinson into the associative web. Its author, Johann David Wyss, was born and died in -- quelle surprise -- Bern.

The Robinson in the title is a reference to Robinson Crusoe, not the name of the family. In Wyss's original, their surname is never given, nor do we learn where in Switzerland they are from. The 1960 Disney movie makes the rather obvious choice to dub them the Robinsons and have them hail from Bern. In the novel, one of the children is usually named Jack in English translations (Jakob in the original), but the Disney movie removes this character, giving the family only three sons -- so we never quite get a Jackie Robinson.

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Psalm 19 and the Sun Tarot card

In the November 1 post "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I note connections between the meme, the 19th Psalm, and the 19th Tarot trump. The relevant passage from the psalm is this:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

Not only does the meme show "a strong man to run a race" out of "a tabernacle for the sun"; it literally shows a man named Strong -- that being the stage name used by Schwarzenegger in the film from which the picture is taken. I read Psalm 19 in the course of my regular scripture reading, just two days after finding and posting the Reality Temple meme.

The number 19 is a link to the Sun card of the Tarot, the Rider-Waite version of which is quite similar to the meme. Each shows a shirtless person moving toward the viewer and to the right, with a manmade structure and a huge sun behind him. The face on the Sun is quite similar, as is the pattern of alternating straight and squiggly rays.

One of the main differences is that Arnold is on foot, while the child on the Tarot card rides a white horse. Although Arnold never rides a horse in Hercules in New York, there is an extended chase scene in which he drives two white horses in a chariot (because you can find anything in New York City):

The color scheme matches the Tarot card pretty closely. The chariot is red, like the flag on the card, and the yellow spokes of the chariot wheels suggest the Sun:

I think that about covers the recent syncs that tie in with this meme. Did I miss anything?

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple

Have I ever mentioned how utterly promiscuous the sync fairies are? They think nothing of synching up Holy Scripture with edgy 4chan memes. And of course they lack any category of the "offensive." (So, apparently, do I, since I not only post these things but kind of enjoy it.)

I've been reading the Psalms. Yesterday I read Psalm 17 and found a minor sync, too minor to bother posting:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of they wings (Ps. 17:8).

The "apple of the eye" is the pupil, and many Bibles so translate it. The sync was with the Galahad Eridanus poem I quoted in October 30's "Newspapers, April 22, the eclipse and the peck":

Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!

Today I read Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

In a note added to the October 30 post quoted above, I posted this meme I found on /x/:

(I should mention for the benefit of my Black readers that most 4chan edgelords don't actually hate you. They like to say nigger just because it's something you're not allowed to say. In my considered opinion, that's a good enough reason.)

Just how massive of a coincidence is this? Well, the psalm has handywork, and the meme has demiurge, which is Greek for "craftsman." Both feature a temple or tabernacle of the sun, and a strong man running out. The psalm mentions that he's running a "race," and the meme prominently features a racial slur. Both feature the word language. The psalm says "there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard"; to what does their refer? The most recent possible antecedent would be the two nights of the previous verse. The meme also implies that there will be no speech nor language where a certain word -- also beginning nig- and also denoting darkness -- will not be heard.

Also, note that this is Psalm 19 -- or XIX in Roman numerals. Supposing you weren't as big and fast as Arnold, you might opt to escape the Reality Temple on horseback rather than on foot:

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.

This past July, ben, who comments here, alerted me to the fact that William Wright, who (as WW) wrote that interesting guest post for Bruce about orcs, had started a blog of his own, called Coat of Skins. Mr. Wright assumes that both the Book of Mormon and Tolkien's Legendarium are true and writes about how they interrelate -- Abinadi was the reincarnation of Faramir, the Book of Ether contains a hidden reference to the Brother of Jared opening the gates of Khazad-dûm, that sort of thing. It's a bit fringe even by my standards, but I find it interesting and have been reading it regularly.

One of the early posts was "The Liahona as a Palantir (the Anor Stone)" Palantiri are generally black, but Mr. Wright argues that the name Anor Stone (anor being Sindarin for "sun") suggests that this one had a golden appearance, matching the description of the "brass" Liahona in the Book of Mormon. This caught my attention because back in December 2020, I had some syncs (documented in "Red Sun, Yellow Sun") connecting the Liahona with the Sun.

Early on in my reading of Coat of Skins, I Googled an unfamiliar name used in a since-deleted post there and discovered the work of Daymon Smith, who I had never heard of before. He's a Mormon linguistic anthropologist who has written extensively about the Book of Mormon, and whose most recent work also involves treating the works of Tolkien as non-fiction and trying to integrate them with the Book of Mormon. I read a few pages of his Jaredites-from-Numenor story The Words of the Faithful but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered his sprawling Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, which I have found absolutely fascinating. I bought all eight books (it consists of five volumes published as eight books, whatever that means!) and am currently reading the final (eighth/"fifth") one.

On August 2, Mr. Wright posted "Eleanor and 'Wake Up Time.'" He recounts a dream in which he saw a man in a tailcoat playing a grand piano. When the pianist noticed he had an audience, he turned around and said, "Hello, everyone. My name is Eleanor," and then Mr. Wright immediately woke up. Upon waking, he figured the name must actually have been El-Anor, Sindarin for "Sun-Star." Later, he was reminded of this dream when he was watching a documentary about Tom Petty and saw this image:

This synched with his dream because it included a grand piano, the Sun (anor), and "Wake Up Time." (He had woken up from his dream when he heard the pianist say "My name is El-Anor.") Although the post didn't mention it, elanor is also the name of a flower in Tolkien, and "Wake Up Time" is from Tom Petty's album Wildflowers.

The "Wake Up Time" image caught my eye because WUT is visually very similar to my initials, WJT, and because when I was in college people thought I looked like Tom Petty and used to call me Tom. Despite this, I don't really know anything about Petty or his music -- except, now, this song.

Immediately after reading the post and listening to "Wake Up Time," I picked up an old book I had had printed and bound about a week before but hadn't started reading yet: Paradise Found by William Fairfield Warren. I opened it up and found that the very first sentences is, "This book is not the work of a dreamer." This insistence that he was not dreaming when he wrote the book seemed like a potential sync with the idea of "wake up time."

The next morning, I met with a businessman whom I tutor in English. He told me that he'd read an English article called "Why Are Piano Keys Black and White" but didn't want to discuss it because it was too boring. This random reference to piano keys also seemed like a potential sync. It also made me idly wonder how many keys of each color a piano has (I knew the total was 88), so I looked it up: 52 white and 36 black.

Later in the day, I wanted to get some background on William Fairfield Warren, so I checked his Wikipedia page. His first listed publication is The True Key to Ancient Cosmology. I also clicked a link to the article about his brother, Henry White Warren. Among this latter Warren's works was Fifty-two Memory Hymns. So, just after learning that a piano has 52 white keys, I ran into this reference to a musical work with the number 52 in its title, written by someone named White whose brother wrote a book called The True Key. This was enough of a sync to make me curious about the contents of Fifty-two Memory Hymns, so I found it online. The first hymn in the collection includes this stanza:

Enthroned amid the radiant spheres,
He glory like a garment wears ;
To form a robe of light divine,
Ten thousand suns around Him shine.

The plural reference to "ten thousand suns" may be referring to the stars as "suns," making it a link to El-Anor, "Sun-Star."

I discovered all this on August 3. Later that same evening, I was reading the first volume of Daymon Smith's Cultural History. Although ostensibly a history of the Book of Mormon, it includes many long digressions on a variety of other topics, and one of the things I read in it that night was Keith Richards's story of how he "wrote 'Satisfaction' in my sleep. I had no idea I'd written it." He woke up the next morning and found that he had recorded it on a cassette during the night, with no memory of having done so. This happened, Smith mentions, while Richards was "living in St. John's Wood."

So "Satisfaction" is "the work of a dreamer" -- an obvious sync with Warren's assertion that his book is no such thing. The dreaming happened in St. John's Wood, which syncs with the opening lines of Petty's "Wake Up Time":

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams,
You follow your leader into the trees

The strangest sync, though, was that the story was about Keith Richards, one of the Rolling Stones. William Wright writes that, in thinking about his "Eleanor" dream, he began considering the possibility of "the man introducing himself actually representing a stone," or "that the man and his piano could have represented both of these possibilities -- an actual man and a stone." Keith Richards: an actual man, and an actual Stone.

When I went out on the morning of August 4, I found that this cardboard box had been left out in front of my house for the recycling people to pick up.

SUNSTAR -- a pretty on-the-nose sync with El-Anor. If you've got good eyes and can recognize some basic Chinese/Kanji characters, you might notice that there's a 石, "stone," in the fine print, too (in the phrase 第二石油類, "second petroleum category").

Around noon on August 4, I was pacing around my study thinking of this and that, and I thought how "Wake Up Time" begins with following your dreams into the trees -- similar to how Dante's Comedy begins with the poet sleepwalking into a forest. The very last words of the Comedy are "il sole e l'altre stelle" -- "the sun and the other stars," El-Anor again. Dante's journey takes him in the end to Paradise, so there's also another sync with Paradise Found.

Then I remembered that WW’s post had mentioned that El was also a name of God, and that Dante discusses this somewhere in Paradiso. I thought for a second that Dante even connected El with the Sun, but then I remembered that, no, that was the Irish poet known as A.E. or Æ. (For the relevant quotes from each poet, see my 2019 post "U.E. echoes A.E.") I was, as I have said, pacing around as I thought about all this, and just as I thought of A.E., I turned and saw this on my wife's desk:

She has a whole set of these yellow apples, each marked with a different phonetic symbol. The one marked with the pen name of an Irish poet just happened to be the only one visible, and my eyes just happened to fall on it just as I was thinking about that poet, who wrote of our earliest ancestors, "I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored."

The apple is the traditional fruit of Eden, or Paradise, and in the Greek version (Garden of the Hesperides), it's even the golden apple. The golden apple is a solar symbol, too: "The Song of Wandering Aengus," by A.E.'s lifelong friend Yeats, begins (like Dante and Tom Petty) in a forest -- "I went out to the hazel wood" -- and ends with the line "The golden apples of the sun."

Then I remembered what had happened the night before (August 3). I was teaching a children's English class in which one of the students used to go by the English name Apple but later changed it when she found out it wasn't really a very normal name. Some of the other students like to tease her about it, and on the evening of August 3, one of them had made a pencil sketch in which there was a big apple in the sky radiating light. The student formerly known as Apple accused him of drawing an apple on purpose to annoy her, but he insisted (in bad faith, obviously) that it wasn't an apple, it was the sun. It was a monochrome pencil sketch, but of course the apple/sun would be understood to be yellow in color. I'm sure Eris was looking down from Olympus and chuckling at these two arguing and fighting over, of all things, a golden apple.

On August 9, I discovered one of Daymon Smith's now-defunct blogs -- called (there's the forest theme again) these mystry woods -- and skimmed, among other things, a 2015 post called "It is what It is," which begins with a picture of a Klein bottle.

This series of thoughts in the post -- I'm quoting three non-contiguous passages here -- got my attention:

"I am that I am" must be saying something about Language, capital L.

Maybe L and the Word, and what-ever-Is-is are really "just" light? Different kinds of Light?

How can we understand L? or EL?

Here the letter L is used to represent Language, and Light, and the divine name El. Remember A.E.'s fantasy of our ancestors looking up at the sun and "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored"?

Smith ends his post by finally talking about the impossible Klein bottle: Klein bottles "don’t exist here as bottles, but we can describe them. They exist in L."

The next day, August 10, I was reading Smith's Cultural History -- Volume 2A now -- and Smith mentioned that the CJCLDS is "a corporate body with rights of ownership irrespective of human life-spans." This made it sound like copyrights owned by a corporation never expire, which would mean the Book of Mormon isn't in the public domain -- but I was quite sure that it is in the public domain. I ended up Googling it to make sure, and the highlighted answer was no!

Still thinking that must be wrong, I scrolled down to the fourth result, which was from the church’s own website and said the text itself was in the public domain.

Clicking that link for details, I found a forum conversation in which one of the participants had a name and avatar that caught my eye:

That's another Klein bottle, and the guy's name appears to be A.E. The thread is about the possibility of publishing an edition of the Book of Mormon with no verse numbers -- and just such an edition of the Book of Mormon has been published by none other than Daymon Smith, who posted the first Klein bottle!

Oh, and on August 25 I happened upon someone wearing this "Wake Up Time"-esque T-shirt:

Note added: On the same day that I posted this -- September 13, even though it's reporting syncs from early August -- William Wright revisited Tom Petty on his blog, with "Rock & Roll in Rivendell: Tom Petty, Elrond, and Alma the Younger." I'm not sure which of us posted first, but I didn't see his post until the next morning, and there's no indication in his post that he had read mine. Looks like just more synchronicity.

Friday, March 24, 2023

Assorted syncs: Going to the Moon and the Sun, Tori Amos's "Winter," inverted crosses, moonwalks

In my March 20 post "Further green motorcycle syncs," I quoted the Jonathan King song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon." Besides the title line, which is repeated several times, the lyrics also include the line, "Everyone went to the Sun."

In the comments on yesterday's post "Aladdin's three elder brothers," I was reminded of a particular scene from Ali G Indahouse (a crap movie, by the way; the original Ali G TV interviews are orders of magnitude funnier than any of SBC's movies) but had trouble finding a clip of it on the Internet. In the course of my search, I ended up watching a bunch of old Ali G clips on YouTube, including this interview with Buzz Aldrin.

After asking a few questions about Aldrin's experience on the Moon, Ali asks, "Do you think man will ever walk on the Sun?"

BA: No. The Sun is too hot. It is not a good place to go to.

AG: What happens if they went in winter, when the Sun is cold?

BA: The Sun is not cold in the winter.

A couple of days ago (March 22), I received an email asking my opinion of Miles Mathis. I hadn't read any of Mathis's stuff for quite some time, so today I checked his updates page and found an article on Tori Amos -- not very new, but new to me (posted on Christmas 2022 according to the updates page, Christmas 2020 according to the document itself). It got my attention because, after 20-some years of not thinking about Tori Amos at all, I had recently mentioned her in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the grail." The Mathis article -- not actually by Mathis himself but by someone called Coyote -- is 39 pages of the usual mind-numbing everyone's-secretly-a-j00 stuff (there's my opinion of Mathis for you), but I scrolled through it a bit, and this caught my eye. The green highlighting is in the original; the red underlining is mine.

He mentions an inverted cross and singles out "Winter" as one Tori Amos song he actually likes. In my post, I had written that Amos was a singer "whose persona and most of whose music I've come to find actively repellent. . . . 'Winter' is good, though." I then went on to note the similarity between part of the "Winter" music video and the logo for Charles III's coronation, pointing out "the inverted crosses hidden in the shamrocks" in the latter.

Just after that, I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, and one of the words I needed a Chinese translation for was spacewalk. For technical terms like that, I generally use Wikipedia rather than a dictionary -- but spacewalk redirects to a page that is about both spacewalks and moonwalks:

In the Buzz Aldrin interview, Ali G asks, "Is you upset that Michael Jackson got all the credit for inventing the moonwalk, but you was the first geezer that ever, to actually do it?"

From the Narrow Desert