From the Narrow Desert: Tim

Showing posts with label Tim. Show all posts

Thursday, June 6, 2024

What's the connection between Joan and Claire?

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright proposes that the beings I know as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are actually one and the same, and also the same as one of the beings he has been in contact with, one of "a group of laughing women" whom he thinks of as the Daughters of Asenath. It is strongly implied that this being may not actually have anything to do with the historical Joan of Arc even though "that is how she has allowed herself to be thought of for a few reasons." In his June 4 post "The French Connection" he refers to "Joan-Claire" as if the identity has been established.

As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.

Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.

Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.

After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."

This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.

On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:

As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.

This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!

At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.

Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.

Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!

I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Tim, Claire, Diego

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright brought up Tim and Claire Delune, two beings I encountered in dreams some months back -- Tim on the night of November 6-7, and Claire on the afternoon of January 5. Then in yesterday's "Eowyn-Eve dwelling in Everlasting Burnings," he revisited another of my old dreams, from March 5, with a character named Diego. In the post, he connected Diego with Israel and with Tol Eressëa:

When I read the dream, I understood Diego to be synonymous with Israel. Diego is the Spanish equivalent to Jacob, who was renamed Israel. . . . Who fought against Israel? In my story, Pharazon and the Numenorean's attack on Eressea was an attack on Israel given that many of Finwe's House resided on that island.

Today I had a meeting with the owner of another school. One of his teachers is taking a long vacation, and he had hoped I would be able to help him arrange a substitute. The owner is someone I had only met once before, some seven years ago, so I asked why he had thought to contact me.

"Tim suggested I give you a call," he said. I know Tim. He's a sales rep for a bookstore chain, and I often order textbooks through him. Then he added, "Actually, I don't see Tim all that often these days. He's really busy, so I mostly contact him through his assistant, Claire."

I did not know Claire.

"I don't think I've met Claire," I said. "I always work with Tim and Miss Chen."

"Yes, yes, Miss Chen. Didn't you know? Her English name is Claire."

This is a Taiwanese person I was talking to. His English is extremely limited, and our whole conversation was in Chinese except for the names Tim and Claire. I've been doing business with Tim's assistant for five or six years now and never knew her by any other name than Miss Chen. The guy who doesn't speak English, though, knows her as Claire. Weird.

Later in the conversation, I asked for some information about his school's curriculum, and he said, "I'll arrange for you to meet with Diego, and he can explain it. Diego's one of our teachers. He's from Guatemala."

Curiouser and curiouser. I suppose it goes without saying that Taiwan is not blessed with an overabundance of people named Diego. And from Guatemala, too! Remember that William has connected the Diego in my dream with "Israelites" living on Eressëa. As it happens, Guatemala has come up exactly once on William's blog. In the May 20 post "Conferences in the Sawtooth Mountains," he discusses a movie about the Book of Mormon which "portrayed the events happening in the jungles of Guatemala or something... not, as we now know, on Eressea."

Looking up my Diego dream now, I find that it also features the surname Chen. Running into that name isn't that much of a coincidence -- one in every nine Taiwanese people is a Chen -- but it still counts for something.

Monday, June 3, 2024

I said hello. Can you hear me, Joe?

Back in November 2023, I posted “Read my lips: no new syncs,” calling a moratorium which was almost immediately violated by Tim, who required that I be asleep in order to deliver his message and accomplished this by chanting “Sleep now, O sleep now” until I obliged.

In my “no new syncs” post, I included this page from Dr. Seuss:

William Wright, who had been on the point of proposing a female identity for my sync fairies, saw Tim as an impostor and identified him with Saruman and with the wire-cutting mouse.

This year, on Joan’s Day, William revealed that he had also been planning on identifying Joan when things were interrupted by Tim.

A few days ago, I posted a dialogue from a textbook which begins with Joan saying, “Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello?” She wants Joe to wake up and go to the window to see the snow, but Joe wants to sleep. I tied this in with a scene from Help! in which the baddies call Ringo on his black telephone and chant, “Go to the window. Go to the window.”

Here’s the page immediately preceding the one I posted in November:

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Mr. Mxyztplk revisited

I recently found a copy of Superman #30 (1944), Mr. Mxyztplk's debut issue. Here are some miscellaneous notes on how Mr. Mxyztplk relates to various other parts of the sync-stream:

Whitley Strieber's The Key, a book I have associated with Tim, exists in two different versions, one with a gold key on the cover and the other with a silver one, and with slightly different text. When quoting The Key in recent posts, I have referred to the two versions not by year or publisher but rather as the "gold-key" and "silver-key" versions. Mr. Mxyztplk also exists in "gold" and "silver" versions with slightly different text. In Golden Age Superman comics, his name is Mxyztplk; in the Silver Age, this is changed to Mxyzptlk.

In my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert,'" I posted the music video for "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco, which shows Brendon Urie defying gravity by walking up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top.

In Superman #30, Mr. Mxyztplk walks in front of a truck while reading a newspaper, is hit, and pretends to be dead. When an ambulance comes, he then makes himself too heavy to lift, then steals the ambulance and drives it straight up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top:

In the final panel above, it is revealed that the newspaper Mr. Mxyztplk had been reading was printed in mirror image. As everyone knows, the newspaper in Metropolis is called the Planet. Printed backwards, that would be Tenalp. In my December 2020 post "The rain god and the weather dogs," I discuss a story called "The Planet Tennalp." (In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic. By a strange coincidence, the "rain god" post also mentions the New York Times.)

I wrote the above paragraph in the morning and then went out to deal with some things. The New York Times referred to at the end of the paragraph was a license plate that said "192 NYT." While I was out, I saw another license plate which also contained the strings "NYT" and "19."

A few pages later, Superman grabs Mr. Mxyztplk, but he slips out of his grasp:

When Supes grabs him, Mxy says, "In popular parlance, pal, ya got me!" In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name," I report hearing a song with the repeated lines, "You got me, I got no alibi," and thinking of them as being spoken by Tim.

In the third panel, Superman is holding Mxytplk very tight, but somehow he slips out anyway. This is something that Mushroom People can do in Eleanor Cameron's novels. More than once a human seizes a Mushroom Person only to have him slip free even when it seems impossible to do so. At first the boys believe that Mushroom People must have no bones at all, but later they decide their bones must be "compressible." In my November 25 post "Likeness in anything is likeness to him," I connected Mxy's flight out the window on the above page with the ascension of the Mushroom Person Tyco Bass.

Later, a giraffe puts in an appearance:

The bottom left panel above is what I was thinking of when I said earlier (in a comment on William Wright's blog) that Mxy makes music come out of a refrigerator. Actually, I see now that it's not a refrigerator but some sort of cabinet or safe.

On the last page, we discover that Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

I love how this is portrayed as Superman "outwitting" Mxy, when his sole strategy is just to ask him, "What's the magic word?"

In the third panel above, Mxy says, "I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!" This reminds me of these lines from the Muse song "Knights of Cydonia" (see "Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur"):

And how can we win
When fools can be kings?
Don't waste your time,
Or time will waste you.

The "Russian reversal" in the last line is a close cousin to the idea of saying something backwards -- and of course time is very close to Tim.

Finally, note that Superman, Inc. is located at 480 Lexington Ave. That's a four-minute walk from the Chrysler Building, which is number 405.

Thursday, November 23, 2023

The Drink of Forgetfulness and illegible notes: The Key, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, and Tim

I've been reading Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Eleanor Cameron's 1956 sequel to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. The titular stowaway is Horatio Q. Peabody, a self-important scientist who hopes to make his name by publishing a description of Basidium, the Mushroom Planet, the very existence of which the boys have been keeping secret, and open it up to explorers, miners, tourists, and so on.

In order to prevent this, the Mushroom People bring out The Drink, which they present as a great honor -- "Such a person, worthy of The Drink, rarely comes to us -- he is hard to find" (p. 134). The pompous Horatio takes it for granted that he is the person they mean, and he downs The Drink. The boys are disgusted at Horatio's arrogance, but later one of the two Wise Men explains to them the true nature of The Drink:

"You see," went on Mebe, "that was The Drink of Forgetfulness. Only once or twice in a lifetime is it necessary to give some misguided person this drink, usually someone very conceited . . . . The Ancient Ones have decreed that The Drink is never to be forced on the guilty person. But it is never necessary to force him to drink. Out of vanity and pride, he always takes it eagerly and drinks it all -- every drop" (p. 137).

The Drink works slowly. By the time they arrive back on Earth, all the details of the journey are beginning to fade from Horatio's mind. Horatio, however, had been taking copious notes the whole time they were on Basidium, and he reassures himself that even if his memory fades he still has his notebook.

In this he is disappointed. For reasons that are never really explained, when humans visit Basidium they find themselves speaking and understanding the Mushroom People's language quite naturally, but when they return to Earth they find that they cannot remember a single word of it, but are left only with a vague sense that it was a tonal singsong language that sounded a bit like Chinese. When Horatio opens his notebook, he finds that written language has been similarly affected:

"All gone," he whispered. "All gone. Hen-tracks -- that's what it is, just hen-tracks."

Now Chuck darted over and picked up the book and opened it. Then he turned and held it out, his eyes wide with wonder.

"Sure," he breathed. "That's it. It's all in Basidiumite, of course. So now he can't read it. It's just scratchings, just gibberish. He can't remember the language, so now he can't remember how to read it. Poor old Horatio!" (p. 160).

Now compare this to the afterword to Whitley Strieber's The Key (2011 version). Strieber wakes up the morning after a nighttime conversation with a stranger I have identified as Tim:

As I rose from the bed, I saw my yellow notepad on the floor, covered with scrawls. It had been in my briefcase when I went to bed, so I must have pulled it out and taken notes. I grabbed it and looked at them.

They were pretty much just squiggles. They didn't seem to relate to any sort of a conversation.

Had he been real, or a dream? If you took nots in your sleep, they might look like this.

Then I remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had.

Then I thought of the Milk of Nepenthe, the drug that was mythically given to people who had visited the gods, in order that they would not suffer the anguish of remembering the pleasures of heaven when they had to return to mortal life.

I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused.

What's the connection between The Key and the Mushroom Planet novels? Tim. After my Tim dreams, I connected Tim with two other characters: the stranger from The Key and the character Tim from the William Alizio story. After posting a bit about the Little Skinny Planet from the Alizio story, and speculating that it might be connected to the Moon, I received a comment from Kevin McCall saying that The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet featured a very small planet closer to Earth than the Moon. The two books have no connection at all other than this synchronistic link with my Tim dreams -- and yet they also turn out to share these two themes: drinking a Drink of Forgetfulness, and taking copious notes that turn out to be unreadable gibberish.

The phenomenon in the Mushroom Planet stories, where people returning from Basidium can clearly remember that they have been speaking a different language but are unable to remember a single specific word of it, is also a link to my Tim dreams, of which I wrote:

I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Two cunning wise ones, "wizards," Blue gowned

In a hypnopompic state this morning before fully waking up, I was thinking about Jay Leno and how odd that he of all people -- someone in whom I had no interest and about whom I knew virtually nothing -- should have appeared in my dreams. In my hypnopompic reverie, I latched onto the fact (discovered in my post-dream research) that Leno always dresses in blue denim when he's not on TV, and that this must shed some light on the meaning of the blue clothing worn by Tim in my dream, by Tim and Patrick in the Alizio story, and by the two wizards in the Joseph story. I started thinking about various terms for blue denim clothing. Denim itself ultimately means "of the sanctuary," while Levis comes from the tribe of Levi, the priestly lineage -- Aaron! Didn't Aaron, the high priest, wear a blue robe?

At this point I was fully awake. A quick word search on a Bible app confirmed that, yes, the only "blue robe" mentioned in the Bible is the one worn by Aaron (Ex. 28:31, 39:22). But Aaron is just one person, and the Blue Wizards are a pair. I had a hunch that I should look up the etymology of jeans. I already knew it -- it comes from Genoa, and Genoa means "knee" -- but I looked it up anyway, and saw something that I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not just been thinking about Aaron:

Did you notice it, too? Jeans comes from the Old French name for Genoa, which was Jannes. Jannes and Jambres are the names given by tradition and in the New Testament (2 Tim. 3:8) to the "wise men" or "magicians of Egypt" (Ex. 7:11) against whom Moses and Aaron faced off in the court of Pharaoh. I had previously mentioned that in the Joseph story and Mushroom Planet we have two Wise Men, in contrast to the traditional three, but in Jannes and Jambres we have a biblical set of two Wise Men. One Midrash has it that they left the Pharaoh and followed Moses out of Egypt.

Yesterday, thinking about Jay Leno and his blue denim outfits led me to "Blue Jays," the album by Justin Hayward and John Lodge. I assume that the album title has no reference to birds except as a pun but refers to Blue J's -- Justin and John, the two Moody Blues members whose names begin with that letter. Jannes and Jambres would be another such pair of J's.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Blue Jays

In a comment on "Jay Leno, Coco, and the killer rabbit," William Wright discusses the possible meanings of the name Jay. When he's not on TV, Leno apparently always wears the same outfit -- blue jeans and a blue shirt -- making him a "blue Jay," and also a possible link to Tim and to the Blue Wizards.

In "William Alizio's links to other stories," I identified the Blue Wizards with the two figures standing in the background of this picture, from the cover or Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil:

After the blue jay theme had been introduced, I realized that Blue Jays -- the 1975 album by Moody Blues members Justin Hayward and John Lodge -- features two very similar figures:

As in the Murdoch cover illustration, the two men in blue are standing side by side under an arch and looking across a chasm to the other side.

I've never been a huge fan of Blue Jays, but one of the songs has some potentially relevant lyrics:

Oh, I dreamed last night I was hearing
Hearing your voice
And the things you said, well they left me
Left me no choice
And you told me we had the power
And you told me this was the hour
But that you don't know how
If I could show you now
Well, I dreamed last night you were calling
Calling my name
You were locked inside of your secrets
Calling my name
And you told me lost was the key
And you told me how you long to be free
But that you don't know how
Oh, let me show you now

I introduced Tim (half of the Blue Wizard duo Tim and Patrick) in my post "Well, that didn't take long"; he appeared in the kind of dream where "it's just some guy talking." I later connected him with the stranger in The Key.

Many years ago, I used to entertain the idea that Justin Hayward was the reincarnation of Arnaut Daniel, though I don't remember what first suggested the connection -- probably a dream or something. Possibly relevant in connection with the white rabbit:

I am Arnaut who nets the breeze
and with an ox pursues the hare
and swims against the rising seas.

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Jay Leno, Coco, and the killer rabbit

My other potentially significant fever dreams (I don't actually have a fever, but "head-cold dreams" just doesn't have the same ring!):

I was in a room with a lot of people -- Europeans, I thought, some speaking English and others French. Someone mentioned the name Jay Leno, and everyone suddenly turned and stared at him aghast, as if he had committed some unthinkable breach of decorum in uttering that name.

I was confused by this, and I said, "What? What did Jay Leno do? Did he rape somebody? Did he say nigger?"

Now everyone turned and stared aghast at me, partly because I hadn't used the more genteel terms sexual assault and the n-word, but mostly because I had somehow missed the memo about Jay Leno being unpersoned. An elderly woman hissed at me, "Le n-mot, s'il vous plaît!" -- which I don't think is even proper French, but which struck me as funny because it punned simultaneously on the name Leno and the slang expression "nigga, please!" Under the circumstances, I didn't dare crack a smile. Everyone else was silent, but I could "hear" their thoughts: "He doesn't know! Everyone knows. Everyone knows!" I woke up.

Several hours later, Jay Leno reappeared in another mini-dream. It wasn't even a proper dream, just a static image: a paperback book with a pulp-style illustration of two or three distraught-looking people imprisoned in what looked like a glass diving bell. At the top of the cover it said, "Who Can Say Who's Abducting You?" At the bottom, it said, "Jay Leno." I thought in the dream that this was a quadruple-entendre: (1) a book by Jay Leno called Who Can Say Who's Abducting You? (I imagined in the dream that "Who can say?" must be a Leno catchphrase), (2) Jay Leno can say who's abducting you, (3) Jay Leno is abducting you, (4) a question addressed to Leno: "Who can say who's abducting you, Jay Leno?" As soon as I had processed these four readings, I woke up.

I know nothing about Jay Leno. I know what he looks like, and that he is or was a comedian on American TV, and that's about all I've got. After the two dreams, I looked him up to find out if "Who can say?" was a catchphrase of his (apparently not) and whether he had ever been the subject of a two minutes' hate. All I could find on Wikipedia was some hooha in 2010 over whether he or Conan O'Brien was going to host a particular talk show. Apparently the public overwhelmingly sided with O'Brien:

Artist Mike Mitchell designed a poster similar of the Obama "Hope" poster, showing O'Brien superimposed with an American flag in the background and the caption "I'm With Coco". The poster was widely circulated and displayed online and at various rallies. The color orange also became the choice of color for O'Brien fans, referencing his light orange hair.

Haha, orange hair had a different meaning back then! And is Conan O'Brien called Coco? I'd never heard of that before, but then I'm pretty much a rube when it comes to all things teevee.

In the evening, I went out to buy a few things. My wife had recommended that I get some kumquat tea, for my sore throat, from a particular shop I've never been to, so I was on a road I don't take very often. On the way to the tea shop, I passed another tea shop with a very interesting name and logo:

There's the name Coco, almost precisely the same shade of orange, and a white face with no features other than a pair of eyes and two ear-like projections. This face meant nothing when I saw it, but then on my way home I stopped at a red light behind a motorcyclist with this on her backpack:

A white face with eyes, ears, and no other features. Unlike the Coco mascot, this one is pretty clearly a white rabbit. Ever since Alice in Wonderland (would Alizio be the Italian masculine form of Alice?), white rabbits and rabbit holes have been a metonym for pursuing crazy ideas. The text reads, "I don't mind who u are" -- but the font makes the penultimate letter ambiguous, so it could also read, "I don't mind who u ate."

This ties in with my "Narrative Reasoning" dream, which referenced a scene in the Aeneid where Turnus says to what turns out to be a malevolent heavenly messenger, "I'll obey . . . no matter who you are who call me." That are could also be read as ate makes this look an awful lot like a warning. One is also reminded of "The Statue Got Me High": "And now it is your turn / Your turn to hear the stone / And then your turn to burn."

Who warned Arthur and his knights of a dangerous white rabbit? None other than Tim the Enchanter:

"Narrative Reasoning" also possibly ties in with the "Who's Abducting You?" dream. Though in modern use it primarily refers to kidnapping (particularly by aliens like Tim and Patrick), abduction literally means "leading away." It also refers to a particular type of reasoning -- a sense which featured prominently in a book I read a few months ago, The Methods of Contemporary Thought by Józef Maria Bocheński.

After coming home, I checked my email and found that I had a new message in my Proton account. I haven't read it yet, but the subject line is: "Entering the ultimate rabbit hole."

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Little Skinny Planet

I've posted quite a bit recently about an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about William Alizio. An excerpt is posted in "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name." It was a deliberately silly story, deliberately badly written, and not consciously intended to mean anything. Attempts at nonsense and randomness are, of course, openings for material to come in from elsewhere.

The excerpt I posted ended with Alizio being taken away in Tim and Patrick's spaceship. Here's what comes next:

"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours.

"Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick.

"What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?"

"It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore."

"Oh? What do you speak now?"

"English."

"English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?"

"It's a long story," said Patrick.

"Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?"

"Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?"

"I don't know," admitted William Alizio.

"When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg."

"What does that mean?"

"It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'"

"Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio.

"They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty."

"Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?"

"Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."

Little Skinny Planet was not a name I coined for this story. I used to talk about the Little Skinny Planet when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this, but I know it from the journal entries I used to dictate to my mother before I was able to write. This was a name comparable to "Black Africa" -- not a description of the place itself, but a reference to its inhabitants. It was where I imagined the Little Skinnies must come from.

Rereading this now, remembering that prika-vlein apparently means "little and skinny," and that the planet got this name on account of giraffes which were raised as livestock, I made a connection I hadn't before.

In my May 2021 post "On the threshold of a dream," I described my experience of a dream taking form. A spiral of fiery letters in "para-color" slowly transforming into blobs and then . . .

Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.

Farmland with giraffes -- notably skinny giraffes with "spindle legs." And why are they described as "picking their way across the fields"? I remember that when I wrote this, it felt like "pricking on the plain" -- from the famous opening line of Spenser's Faerie Queene -- was the perfect way of describing the giraffes' movements, but I didn't know why. Spenser is referring to the knight pricking his horse with his spurs, which makes no sense when applied to riderless giraffes. I therefore went with the nearest somewhat semantically defensible phonetic approximation of the word I wanted, and pricking on the plain became picking their way. Now, though, it seems likely that some dim memory of prika-vlein in connection with skinny giraffes on a farm may have suggested those words to me.

The other thing about the giraffes in the dream is that they were "shimmering" with impossible colors.

Yesterday, as documented in "Blue Boat Home," I discovered the song "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men.

I heard it in a restaurant and didn't actually watch the music video until after posting. The beginning syncs with Swiss Family Manhattan, as we see an "airship" crash in a giant tree after being attacked by Ziz in the form of a black two-headed bird of prey -- symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. (The Swiss family crashes their airship on the Empire State Building, which they believe is a giant tree.) The synchronized insect-like way the men in the video move their spindly legs has a creepy "uncanny valley" effect that reminded me very much of trooping fairies or Little Skinnies. The floating fairy-like creature that accompanies and protects the Little Skinnies reminded me of Tim the Enchanter with the way she keeps zapping things and making them explode.

After she has zapped Ziz, Behemoth, and Leviathan, a final gigantic creature appears which she does not zap. It is full of shimmering colors and presented in such a way as to suggest that -- although I first thought of it as "Humbaba" -- it is meant to represent God:

Its rams' horns were another link to Tim the Enchanter, but its gigantic size and many eyes made me think of something else:

That's a screenshot from the Keanu Reeves film 47 Ronin, from my April 27, 2014, post "A beast with many eyes." I compared it to a qilin (a creature from Chinese myth) in the post. The night before seeing it on TV, I had dreamed of a whale "blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." The qilin-type beast "aside from the fur, horns, and nostrils, [looked] exactly like the many-eyed 'whale' I saw in my dream." Later, in 2022, I found that I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision.

The beast from "Little Talks" doesn't suggest a whale at all, but I think it does suggest the qilin-creature from 47 Ronin. Here's a traditional Chinese depiction of a qilin; the link with the 47 Ronin beast is indisputable:

The Humbaba creature at the end of the "Little Talks" video has shimmering colors like the farmyard giraffes in my dream (in a video that also features Little Skinnies, remember) -- but surely none of these fantastic creatures bears the slightest resemblance to a giraffe, right? Here's Wikipedia:

The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.

Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."

So the qilin is linked not only to the giraffe but to the whale as well! Keep in mind that my 2014 dream whale, like the qilin, "had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." A whale with such accoutrements was a novel idea to me at the time, but here it is in the 1997 William Alizio story:

"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin.

"I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese."

"I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin.

"Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."

There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.

I think I conceptualized this at the time of writing as a gigantic carp, but big fish and whales have been interchangeable since the time of Jonah.

And then, in the sort of scene familiar from the "Little Talks" video, the monster is zapped and explodes. Some intelligent extraterrestrial monkeys, minions of the villain Thomas Hosey, have stolen Tim's laser gun and are trying to shoot Alizio and Nolin:

There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.

No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat.

"Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .

A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.

When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.

Go back and watch Time the Enchanter and "Little Talks" again and tell me there's no connection. Tim the Enchanter makes a tree explode for no apparent reason -- and here Tim's laser gun (Patrick's having been destroyed) does the same thing. The fairy in "Little Talks" zaps an enormous sea monster just as it is about to eat one of the Little Skinnies. I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail no earlier than 2000, three years after writing the Alizio story, and of course the "Little Talks" video didn't even exist until 2012.

I haven't even begun to figure out what this all means, but it clearly means something.

One more thing: William Wright has hinted several times on his blog that he thinks the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages. As anyone at all familiar with the field will know, every theory of Book of Mormon geography begins with postulating the identity of the Narrow Neck of Land. Narrow Neck of Land. Little Skinny Planet. Despite its central importance for would-be BoM geographers, the exact phrase "narrow neck of land" only actually occurs once in the text. Care to guess which chapter?

Yes, it's Ether 10.