The secret rules of Wonderland

Tonight I read some more in The Story of Alice. Carroll has already died at this point, and the book is exploring how the idea of "Wonderland" continued to develop after its creator was gone. Here are a few of the things I read, taken from three successive pages:

Wonderland – a place that gave the impression of being chaotically lawless, while secretly working according to its own rules (p. 433)

cartoon strips that ranged from the whimsical (‘The Doings of those Darling Ducks’) to the jarringly racist (‘That Naughty Nigger and his Bunny Bimbo’) (p. 434)

Playfully reversing the tourist cliché ‘See Naples and die’, a magazine advertisement in 1903 offered ‘See BLACKPOOL and Live’ (p. 435)

That first excerpt, about Wonderland "secretly working according to its own rules," made me think of "The world is bound with secret knots," which came up in the sync-saturated comments on "Just-ice and Al-ice."

After reading, I checked YouTube. The first video in my feed, published just minutes before I saw it, was Ragtime Rev performing the minstrel song "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die." (Our algorithms, ourselves, right?) This obviously syncs with the Nigger reference quoted above, and also with the idea that one should not see Naples and die but rather see BLACKPOOL and live.

The second video in the feed, published several hours before, was a discussion of Carroll's Wonderland by The Resurrectionists, including this reference to wonderlands working by their own secret rules:

That is the hidden logic of upside-down worlds. They look chaotic on the surface, but underneath they are doing something very precise.

This very closely parallels the first excerpt from The Story of Alice above. It is perhaps not a terribly original thought, but the time factor still makes it a noteworthy sync.

Just-ice and Al-ice

Late last night, an image of the Justice card of the Tarot impressed itself on my mind, and I started thinking about it. It occurred to me that the word justice can be divided into the two words just ice. Fire and ice? No, just ice. Though I would ultimately dismiss that thought as meaningless, I did entertain it long enough to mentally compose for Frost's famous poem a sequel in which pretty much everyone agrees that the world will come to a cold end rather than a hot one. ("From all the vegetables I've lost / I hold with those who favor frost"; I won't inflict any more of it on you.)

This morning I read in The Story of Alice how

in 1901, copies of both books [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass] would be included in the small library on board Captain Scott's ship the Discovery, allowing his crew to while away the long Antarctic winters with adventures that replaced confinement with escapism, ice with Alice.

Alice, like justice, ends with the letters -ice,  though in neither case are they pronounced like the word ice, making the pun less likely to suggest itself. Also, there would normally be no connection at all between Alice in Wonderland and ice; the pun is only rendered usable by the highly unusual context of explorers taking Lewis Carroll's books with them to the Antarctic.

The just ice pun would also require a highly unusual context. As it happens, such a context suggested itself last July, when I wrote in a comment on "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man," "The frozen man wants mercy, but what has he got? Just ice." I found that by searching the blog. In last night's musings, I had completely forgotten that I had used that pun before.

In a closely related pun, some years ago I wrote a poem featuring a quibble on just as an adjective meaning "characterized by justice" and as an adverb meaning "merely."

With this my guilt how shall I live

Unless, my darling, you forgive

Me? Can you? Yes, I know you said

That God forgives, but God is just

A word that you can say instead

Of I and which means no one. Must

I turn to him and not to you?

I guess that he will have to serve.

God only knows what I shall do.

I guess I'll get what I deserve.

This was just an experiment in technique. The idea is that, the first two lines having (deceitfully) established rhyming couplets as the form of the poem, the reader will expect the fourth line to end with dead to rhyme with said. When it unexpectedly ends with just instead, the reader will naturally first understand it to mean just as opposed to merciful, only for the next line to reveal that it was actually an adverb. Each of these subverted expectations is returned to and resolved later in the poem, as subsequent lines do say in effect that God is dead ("just a word . . . which means no one," reinforced later by the use of "God only knows" to mean "no one knows") and that the speaker will receive justice rather than mercy ("I'll get what I deserve"). In theory, the reader might also expect the eighth line to end with do rather the contextually synonymous serve, but I'm not sure rhyme-scheme expectations are still strong enough at that point to have any real effect.

Speaking of Lewis Carroll and technically "clever" poems, yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he lines that opened Sylvie and Bruno were closely modelled on those that ended Through the Looking-Glass:

Is all our Life, then, but a dream

Seen faintly in the golden gleam

Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

(Sylvie and Bruno)

Ever drifting down the stream --

Lingering in the golden gleam --

Life, what is it but a dream?

(Through the Looking-Glass)

In Carroll's new acrostic, ISA Bowman had supplanted Alice LidELL as his official muse, but nothing else had changed

The two partial acrostics thus juxtaposed come very close to spelling out ISABEL, and would do so if only Bruno had received top billing rather than Sylvie, or if one more line of the first acrostic ("Bowed to the earth with bitter woe") had been included in the excerpt. (Or we might note that the fourth line actually begins with a bracket, which begins with b.) This is synchronistically significant because my recent post "Book of Mormon names and Pi Days" finds in a dream of Isabel and link to The Story of Alice. In a comment on that post, I wrote that "there are a few coincidences about the beginnings and ends of phrases." This syncs with the parts of the acrostics quoted, corresponding to the beginning of one muse's name and the end of the other's.

Coming back to the beginning of this post, I discuss a pun involving the word just, talk about rewriting Frost's poem that begins "Some say the world will end in fire," and then quote a reference to "Captain Scott," the Antarctic explorer. Last July, I published a post called "Some say the world will end in fire," which quotes a Moody Blues song referencing "Captain Scott" in the Antarctic and immediately follows it with a picture of a T-shirt that says "GOAL IS JUST." This was published just three days after the frozen man "just ice" pun.

Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam

Two days ago, I discovered the YouTube channel UltraMormonChan (actually I discovered it on Rumble, but it's on YouTube, too) and have since watched several of their videos. Almost every video ends the same way: There's a rapid-fire montage of images, accompanied by a drumbeat, beginning with Michelangelo's Creation of Adam painting from the Sistine Chapel, moving through scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon, the martyrdom of the Apostles, and then a condensed history of Mormonism, from the First Vision through Nauvoo and polygamy to our modern dystopia, with Pride protests at BYU, church leaders hobnobbing with the ADL and the NAACP, and a masked prophet getting his jab on camera. This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church studiously ignored), as if a fist raised to heaven. It fades to black, and the words "Behold, you have been entrusted with these things" appear on the screen. Then it's the Sistine Chapel again, just a closeup of the two fingers, while bagpipes play the music every Mormon will associate with the words "Praise to the man who communed with Jehovah." Cut to black, and the words "Hail to the Prophet." It's quite powerful, and I enjoy watching it again at the end of every video.

Since this last part of the video is clearly about Joseph Smith, it's a bit odd that the image the video returns to at that point isn't the First Vision or anything else distinctively Mormon but rather this famous piece of Roman Catholic art in Vatican City.

Last night I read Laeth's latest "diminished discords" post. Instead of ending with some jazz music as usual, it ended with a video of someone reading Joseph Smith's King Follett Discourse. The video element was a series of still images, most of which depicted Joseph Smith and some of which were also included in the UltraMormonChan montage. But right after Smith says, "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend their own character," it shows Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Again, this is very iconic Roman Catholic art and is not normally used by Mormons, who have their own iconographic vocabulary. When they do borrow art from other denominations, there is for some reason a strong preference for Danish Lutherans (most notably Carl Bloch and Bertel Thorvaldsen), never for the Catholic art of the Italian Renaissance. So running into Michelangelo's piece in two videos about Joseph Smith in the space of two days is quite a coincidence.

One ancillary coincidence is that the UltraMormonChan video actually shows a mirror image of Michelangelo's two fingers, and the title of the video Laeth linked is "King Follett Discourse (MIRROR)."

This painting of Michelangelo's was previously in the sync stream back in October 2023. See "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more" and "The 'Sixteen' Chapel." The former post also includes "mirror" themes -- Mirrormere in Tolkien, and a reflection in a window being mistaken for the Sun.

Book of Mormon names and Pi Days

I dreamt that a Taiwanese girl told me she had decided to go by the English name Isabel. I said, "Good choice. That's a good Book of Mormon name." (This was perhaps influenced by my post "The harlot Isabel," though that was more than two months ago.)

Later in the dream, I was reading the Book of Mormon and found that it now included a character whose name was sometimes spelled Alexus and sometimes Alexs. I kept insisting that I had read the Book dozens of times before and was sure there was no such character, but everyone I talked to assured me that Alexus had always been in there. (The spelling Alexs may have been influenced by Words of Them Liberated, which has a character called Axsa, with the same unusual xs combination.)

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The dream having reminded me of Axsa, I thought of another name used in Liberated: the place name Pillenor-Um. When I first encountered that name, I thought it might be from Tolkien, but a search for pillenor tolkien only turned up the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Thinking about that again today, I looked up that battle -- "the largest of the entire Third Age" according to Tolkien Gateway -- and discovered that it takes place on Pi Biduum, March 14-15 (corresponding to 3.1415). In my April 6 post "Pi Days," I noted that my birthday is part of Pi Biduum, while Bill's birthday, July 22, is another Pi Day, corresponding to 22/7 ≈ 3.14. Since Tolkien Gateway allows you to look up any calendar date, I tried July 22, but nothing really happened on that date in Tolkien's life or stories.

During my lunch break, I read a little in The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas Fairhurst, beginning where I had left off on p. 354. On the very next page, p. 355, I found a reference to the date I had just been looking up. Lewis Carroll responded to a Pall Mall Gazette exposé on child prostitution

with a letter to the St James's Gazette, signed 'Lewis Carroll' and published in the issue of 22 July under the title 'Whoso Shall Offend One of Those Little Ones', which set out the case for preventing 'impure scandal' from being reported.

(I suppose the child prostitution theme also syncs with the dream, in which a child adopts a "good Book of Mormon name" which is actually that of a "harlot.")

Three pages later, on p. 358, I read this:

In March 1886, [Carroll] tried to discover the original version of a poem he had read many years before, which 'contained 3 visions of female beauty -- child, young woman, adult woman', all of whom 'appeared in Eve's original dress'.

Following a hunch, I checked the endnote and confirmed that the letter quoted here was dated March 15, the only occurrence of that date in the book.

Golden arrow

A dream-within-a-dream consisted of a single static image: a horizontally oriented golden arrow against a plain white background. The head, shaft, fletching, and nock were all the same golden color. I believe the head was on my left and the nock on my right, though I'm not 100% confident of that.

I then "woke up" (but was still dreaming) and thought the arrow dream a happy omen. In particular, I thought Bill would probably view it positively. Black arrows, or arrows with black feathers, had been a negative symbol, so a golden arrow would surely be an improvement.

In the morning, really awake this time, I picked up some channeled material of Leo's which I have been reading. I had only been reading a few minutes when I read that "golden arrows were sent forth to prevent [the] interference" of parents who were trying to protect their children from wolves. A word search of the document confirms that this is the first and only mention of golden arrows; two prior mentions of arrows were both of the "black-feathered arrows" of the Numenoreans.

So apparently not such a great omen after all.

Shoeless Spider-Man

In a brief dream, I was teaching English to a very large group of very young children, not corresponding to any of my students in waking life. There were a few other teachers in the room as well, again not corresponding to any specific people I know. The children would come to the front of the classroom one at a time, and I would ask each two questions -- "What's your name?" and "What are you wearing?" -- to which they would have to reply in complete English sentences.

Most of them were wearing ordinary clothing, but then a boy came up who was dressed as Spider-Man.

"What's your name?"

"My name is Peter."

The teachers looked at each other, acknowledging the fitting coincidence that the actual Spider-Man's name is also Peter.

"What are you wearing?"

"I'm wearing a Spider-Man suit."

"Are you wearing shoes?"

"No, I'm not."

This reply confused me for a second. He wasn't barefoot; he was wearing a full spandex Spider-Man suit, terminating in something like boots, but I conceded that, no, you probably couldn't really call them "shoes."

And then I woke up. I think the dream is likely significant, since Spider-Man, Peter, shoes, and even Peter's shoes have all been in the sync-stream.

Guy Fawkes mask

On April 29, I watched what I assume is some kind of LARP on the alt-Mormon channel Zion Media (run by Shane Baldwin, who has some serious red-flag physiognomy but often has interesting guests), an interview with a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and claiming to have inside information about the arrival of a mysterious figure prophesied by Isaiah.

The next day, April 30, Debbie left some comments on my post "From the Jolly Switzer to Dark Spirits and savagery" bringing up V for Vendetta, the film that made the Guy Fawkes mask part of our shared cultural vocabulary. (The link to my post was rather tenuous; an image of piano keys in my post reminded her of dominoes, and dominoes feature in the film.)

And the next day, today, May 1, I withdrew some cash from an ATM and found that they had put up a sign warning people about fraud, with the fraudster portrayed as a man in a Guy Fawkes mask.

Just a few weeks earlier, on April 11, I had written a summary of the story of Guy Fawkes for use on an English test. I chose the topic somewhat randomly. I needed to include certain key words, including parliament and penalty, and the Gunpowder Plot was what happened to come to mind.