From the Narrow Desert

On Holy Saturday night, March 30, 2024, as recorded in "Chips, clips, and the eclipse," I dreamed that I was again in "an indoor area full of dead leaves" on Annunciation Day and that I found there "a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter . . . made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and . . . covered with engravings."

At the time of the dreams, I connected this place full of dead leaves with the abandoned restaurant I began exploring in July 2022 ("Owl time and cold noodles"), since that was the only such place I knew in waking life. In neither case did I say the place was that restaurant, though, only that it suggested or resembled it. Nevertheless, the dreams did leave me with a vague sense that I should keep going back to the restaurant and that I might find something of value there. Since January 22 of this year, the restaurant has been locked up ("The Green Door finally closes"), and I haven't been back inside. Such is the influence of the dreams, though, that I keep having a nagging feeling that I should go back in, even if it means picking the lock or climbing the wall.

I've been there many times, though, and explored it pretty thoroughly. The only "plates" there are ceramic and melamine dishware, and the only "discs" are some scratched-up CDs of run-of-the-mill pop music and for some reason a lot of blank CDs as well. (I brought them home and confirmed that they're all blank.) The chance of finding anything new there -- let alone some kind of ancient engravings -- is obviously exceedingly remote.

When I acquired some new Tarot cards this past May 30, I received a strong impression from Claire that I needed to get an "ark" -- her word -- to keep them in. (Readers may have noticed a passing reference to this in "More on Joan and Claire.") I know some Tarotists are finicky about where they store their cards -- they have to be wrapped in back silk or whatever -- but I've never really cared about that and generally just keep them in the box they came in. With this deck, though, Claire insisted on an "ark" and flashed me a helpful illustration, somewhat reminiscent of IKEA-style assembly instructions, showing how the cards should be placed on a bed of dried rosemary leaves in a small stone box with a lid. (This was before Simon and Garfunkel had entered the chat; now I wonder if I should add some parsley, sage, and thyme!) When I wondered where on earth I was going to get a stone box of the appropriate size, my first thought, however ridiculous, was to look for one in the abandoned restaurant! In the end I settled on a stainless steel "ark" instead (paper and plastic were definitely out of the question, and I couldn't find anything suitable in ceramic), on the understanding that this was only a temporary home for the cards until I could get something in stone.

Not until I started writing this post did it occur to me that I now had, symbolically, some "plates" in a "room" full of dead leaves.

The Golden Plates used by Joseph Smith were found in a stone box, which Don Bradley and others have compared to the Ark of the Covenant -- instead of Moses' stone scripture in a gold box, gold scripture in a stone box.

Today it finally clicked that maybe the "dead leaves" in my dreams have nothing to do with the restaurant but may be yet another "plates" reference. "Leaves of gold" -- both tree leaves and leaves of a book -- have been very much in the sync-stream recently. This started with my January 4 post "Leaves of gold unnumbered," in which golden tree-leaves in two different Tolkien poems were connected with the leaves of the Golden Plates. In the second of these poems, "Namárië," the golden leaves are also dead leaves, falling from the trees in autumn. I also included this imagery of "gold" autumnal leaves in my May 15 poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited"; this was just some whimsical punning on Humpty's "great fall," with no conscious reference to my earlier "leaves of gold" post. Then on June 10, as recorded the next day in "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," I tried to translate a passage from Rimbaud for myself because I was unhappy with Louise Varèse's failure to translate feuilles d'or literally as leaves of gold. Rimbaud's "leaves" are closer to the Golden Plates, something to write on. Then that very night, I happened to read in Richard Cavendish's The Tarot about Etteilla's claim that the original Book of Thoth had been written "on leaves of gold" near Memphis. William Wright picked up on this theme in "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," proposing that my "leaves of gold" syncs have to do with the Brass Plates and that these are currently in France. (If anyone wants to follow up that lead, the first place I'd look is behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse; let me know if you find anything.) He also brings up the idea of an "ark" (and connects it with Joan of Arc, which I had somehow failed to do!), though for him it is the plates themselves that constitute the ark.

The place to which all roads proverbially lead is of course not France but Rome, and that makes me think of Book VI of the Aeneid. There our hero visits the cave of the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess whose usual practice is to write the word of bright Phoebus on literal leaves -- oak leaves -- and leave them at the mouth of her cave, where they soon blow away in the wind. Aeneas specifically asks her not to do this with the oracle he has requested: "Only do not write your verses on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds: chant them from your own mouth." The seeress obliges -- and goes on to speak of leaves of gold!

Aeneas finds this fabled golden bough hidden among the leaves of an otherwise ordinary oak tree:

(I'm away from my study at the moment and don't have access to any of my preferred translations of Virgil. The above are A. S. Kline's, taken from this site.)

With this context -- and the Aeneid, which I have read more times and in more translations than any other book outside the Bible, is very much a part of the furniture of my subconscious, likely to influence my dreams -- the dream image of golden plates hidden in an enclosed space full of dead leaves takes on another possible meaning. It's as if some devotee of far-darting Phoebus, anxious that nothing be lost, had assiduously gathered as many of the wind-scattered leaves as could be recovered and shut them up in a room lest they blow away again. Alas, leaves are but leaves, and it is not the wind that keeps them from lasting forever. They may be bright when they fall from the oak, but nothing gold can stay. Hidden among those brittle husks of desiccated prophecy, though, may be found, like mistletoe in the shadows, a few leaves from the genuine Golden Bough, enabling passage to other worlds. These at least are not ephemeral: "these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time."

So maybe the Sybil's way of doing things was right all along: Let blow away whatever can blow away; true gold will remain.

Working out what that means is going to take some time, but at least it's nice to have found a different interpretive angle and to get away from the stupid literalness of focusing on that restaurant!

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One little postscript: In "What shall we do with the drunken Railer?" I mention the very unsatisfactory nature of the French translation of the Sinbad bit in Ulysses, where Joyce's tailor and jailer and whaler become the meaningless tarin and jarin and wharin. Couldn't they have found some actual French words that rhyme with marin as the English words rhyme with sailor? Well, I've been on a DIY translation kick recently, so if no one else is going to do it . . . .

I found a French rhyming dictionary online and looked up words that rhyme with marin. Pretty slim pickings, it turns out:

Pinbad le Parrain, the godfather? Not too many other possibilities here. But the very first result, after marin itself, is romarin. I looked it up, and it's the French word for rosemary, the herb. Weird coincidence.

Dr. Bruce

Holds strong views:

Big on Mormons,

Not on Normans.

William James,

Briefly, claims:

"It will do"

Means "It's true."

Publius Vergilius Maro

Would have reacted with sorrow

To learn the price of fame:

A persistently misspelt name.

E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler

Both are noble, but who the nobler?

It was the one who got the grants

To fund the research for The Ants.

Francis E. Dec,

What in the heck

Were you smoking?

Were you joking?

Yesterday's post "Narrative Reasoning" recounts another dream. In the dream, I was in my study and heard a line from the Aeneid in which Turnus addresses the goddess Iris (who is the rainbow) and asks who brought her down to him. In the dream, I thought this referred to the Iris Murdoch book and, looking up at where it had been on my shelf, I found that its place had been taken by a green leather book that said Narrative Reasoning in gold lettering on its spine. Later I went through all the books in my house (which is a lot of books) and found only one that in any way resembled the one in my dream: a big green (though not leather) book with gold lettering, containing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Chamber Music in a single volume. The poem which had called me to "sleep now" while I was reading Iris Murdoch is from Chamber Music.

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In this story I was sent, Joseph, his wife Asenath, and their son -- who is a merman! -- are living on the shore, waiting and not really doing anything. The couple finds themselves "unable-unwilling entire, to do much of anything, consequential, at all," being in a state of "lassitude, loss, desuetude." It is upon this scene that "there came to these shores, two cunning wise ones 'wizards,' Blue gowned . . . who first arrived, from shores no longer evident." They enter the couple's house and make themselves at home: "these blue-dressed Ones . . . came stumbling . . . into the reedhouse" of Joseph and Asenath. They stay there for years, trying to extract a secret from Asenath: "seeing here a secret kept," they "desired to look into her mystery, but were by her . . . confounded." For ages, "these four (and a fish-boy) encamped, time being passed without enduring its passage." Finally, the secret -- a prophecy of Jesus -- is revealed to them. After this long visit, Joseph and Asenath depart, led by a rainbow: "An arching bow color-resplendent, shown away these espoused ones . . . that rainbow perceptive led them." Later we are told that Joseph, being "sickly" is carried (by the rainbow, I think; the writing isn't the clearest!) "to lands still green . . . Returned, rainbow whim, treasure following, now to rest."

Compare this to the William Alizio story: Alizio, like Joseph, is stuck in a holding pattern, unwilling to do anything consequential; he spends his time pretending to work, pretending to do yard work, and reading the TV Guide. One day he comes home to find that Tim and Patrick have made themselves at home in his house. Although they are apparently aliens ("little bald men" who arrive in a "spaceship"), Tim and Patrick are dressed as blue-gowned wizards: "blue robes and dunce caps." Just as the blue wizards in the Joseph story are there to extract a valuable secret, Tim and Patrick eat up all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" (the name of a breakfast cereal). Finally, Alizio eats a can of chicken noodle soup while the visitors are there, this being a food stereotypically consumed by "sickly" people.

In the Joseph story, the wizards' robes change from blue to white -- possibly relevant, as William Wright has connected Tim with Saruman the White.

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Today I noticed a link to "these four (and a fish-boy)" on the cover of The Philosopher's Pupil. Here's the cover art on my copy (purchased by its original owner on October 30, 1984, within a stone's throw of the Empire State Building):

Starting from the foreground, we have a man, then a woman, and then a figure in shoulder-deep water who could, for all we know, be a merman. Although pretty much everything in the picture is blue, none of these three foreground figures is wearing blue clothing; only the woman has any visible clothing at all, and her bathing suit is black. Only the two figures in the background -- "these blue-dressed ones" -- appear to be fully clothed. In the story, Joseph and Asenath are on the shore -- with their merman son presumably in the water nearby -- and the two blue wizards come to them from another shore. Here, too, the couple and the blue-dressed strangers are on opposite sides of a body of water. There is also a potted plant on the couple's side, and the story mentions Asenath having "a garden."

Although William Alizio is unmarried, Tim and Patrick send him on a mission with a female partner, and the two of them have to escape danger by swimming across a small body of water.

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Later today, the rainbow in the Joseph story made me wonder again about my dream, which began with Turnus's address to the rainbow goddess and ended with The Philosopher's Pupil being replaced with a mysterious green book called Narrative Reasoning.

Thinking about the green book, I wondered if there were any books titled simply Green. Well, yes, it turns out:

Remember that I'd already identified Tim with the character in this book:

From what I can gather from the Amazon page, Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns -- "snatched from her front porch and deposited with much ceremony into the world of little green men" -- just as William Alizio is kidnapped by "little men" and taken away to their planet. Leprechauns are of course closely associated with rainbows and with the name Patrick.

The first sentence of the first review on the Amazon page is:

Lucky Charms is a sugary breakfast cereal for children, made by General Mills, just like Hidden Treasures in the William Alizio story. Looking back at the story, I see that it is only Patrick -- the one with a leprechaun-adjacent name -- who eats the Hidden Treasures.

Clearly, finding The Key was just the beginning of this web of syncs.

Both Iris Murdoch and James Joyce were Irish, by the way.

I dreamed I was in my study and heard a voice declaiming — “like an old-fashioned actor,” I thought — “Glory of the sky, who brought you down to me, cloudborne to earth?”

It’s a line I know well, from Book IX of the Aeneid, the words of Turnus addressing the goddess Iris. Too awestruck at the sight of this heavenly messenger to wait for an answer to his very important question, Turnus rashly vows, “I’ll obey this great presage, no matter who you are who call me.” In fact, Iris has been sent by an enemy, and the presage leads Turnus to his death.

My dreaming mind understood the voice to be asking who had brought Iris Murdoch’s book down from my shelf and, symbolically, down from the Empire State Building. (The original owner of the book, which I think I bought in Virginia Beach, purchased it at Penn Station, which is like a nine-minute walk from the ESB. I like to imagine the book has been inside the building itself.)

I looked up at the empty space on my shelf where The Philosopher’s Pupil had been, only to find that it was empty no longer. In its place was a very thick book bound in green leather with gold lettering on the spine. My first impression was that it looked like a Quran, but when I read the title, it was Narrative Reasoning.

As soon as I had read the title, I woke up.

I recently posted on how the Jon and Vangelis song "I'll Find My Way Home" is about Dante in the wood, as recounted in the first canto of his Comedy.

This song is about Virgil in the wood -- how he emerges, a shade, from the dark to guide Dante and to share his road. Reading Dante, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Virgil is damned -- a fact that, if we did keep it in mind, would color every aspect of the Comedy. Not that he's burning in a lake of fire or anything, he hastens to clarify; he and his fellow poets are "punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing." It seems punishment enough!

Incidentally, I agree with this self-assessment put in Virgil's mouth by Dante. The Aeneid -- a book second only to the Bible in my heart -- is so unrelentingly dark, so deeply and knowingly without hope, that it sometimes feels almost "modern." Virgil was paganism taken to its logical conclusion, paganism pushed to its breaking point, on the cusp of graduating into Christianity. In choosing that particular poet as the guide to take him to the threshold of paradise, Dante shows his penetrating insight and his genius.

Content warning: Teh gay.