Pebbles, specs, keys, shoon

All four of these have been somewhat interchangeable symbolically.

First, I wanted to post these two stills from Twin Peaks, shared by WanderingGondola in a comment on "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key." (That's "TIBET" written on the map in the background, Debbie.)

That's the character Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, wearing specs with a red right lens and a blue left lens, just as in the post "Red and blue spectacles." He holds a pair of golf balls that look like white pebbles and then says he is "planning a pilgrimage to Pebble Beach." White pebbles specifically being from a beach was part of the syncs in "What quartz pebbles (now with added syncs!)."

I looked up Jacoby to see if his mismatched specs had any particular significance. Under "Personality," the Twin Peaks Wiki has only this to say:

Jacoby was known for keeping cocktail umbrellas marked with dates of influential events that affected him. He is also a keen surfer. A recognizable trait of the Doc's were his glasses - one lens of which was blue, the other red.

"The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key," the post on which WG left links to the above photos of Jacoby, mentions how Lewis Carroll did with white stones what Jacoby did with umbrellas: "Carroll liked to celebrate notable days by marking them with 'a white stone.'" That post also includes a photo of white stones juxtaposed with white eggs. Some umbrellas are also in the photo, which prompted Debbie to leave a long comment (before WG's) mentioning umbrellas no fewer than 16 times.

This afternoon I saw on YouTube a new video from Uncorrelated Mormonism, called "Mormonism is Christian Magic." I didn't finish the whole thing, since he didn't seem to be covering much that I didn't already know, but two slides caught my eye. First, this one focusing on the importance of the color of Joseph Smith's seer stones (with white stones being associated with "water or seeing"):

Then there was this slide about "keys":

The illustration is a white stone statue of St. Peter holding the Keys of the Kingdom -- so the keys are themselves also made of white stone. This syncs with "The pebble key," where the same objects can be described either as white pebbles or as keys. Just to the right of this picture of two keys is a bullet point that says "D&C 129: 'three grand keys.'" This syncs with my recent post "Two keys or three?"

Coming back to the red and blue specs, this symbol quickly came to be associated with that of red and blue shoes, for example in "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill." That post mentions, in connection with colored shoes, a "sequence of colors [that] goes from silver to red to blue."

I successfully stayed off 4chan for the entirety of Lent, but now it's Easter and I'm back to my old ways -- meaning that every time I visit archive.org, I click for a random /x/ thread en route. The one I got today is called "Wizard of Oz Symbols." The original post has a photo of Dorothy in her ruby slippers and says:

Let's have a comfy thread about the occult symbolism behind the Wizard of Oz. I'll start with a question: What was the significance of the ruby red shoes in the movie? Supposedly, they were silver in the book.

That obviously syncs with "from silver to red." The post even says "ruby red shoes" instead of the more usual "ruby slippers." Although the thread was supposed to be about The Wizard of Oz, the first reply brought in Alice as well:

things like wizard of oz, alice in wonderland, etc have always struck me as psychic propaganda.

This led to lots of follow-up posts about Alice, including one that brought in Humpty Dumpty:

Lots of these "going to a magical fantasy world" stories are about sick cult activities. Many fairytales are ancient luciferian programming scripts. Notice also Peter pan "never grow up" - this is referring to the child alter personality splits that are created by the extreme abuse; they never grow up. Relevant quote from textbin link below: "HUMPTY DUMPTY'S evil speech to ALICE about how she can remain at her age - just under 8 years old forever...'two can'...this is TOUCAN programming which ANTONY RADCLIFFE speciallised in - the creation of 'child alters' frozen in time, through extreme torture. "One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty; 'but two can. With the proper assistance you might have left off (growing up) at seven.'")

The king is an Enoch

While I was on the road this afternoon, my meditations took me to the prayer offered by the father of Lamoni (who we can infer was named Laman but who is called only "the king" in the text). I recited it to myself, finding that I could do so easily despite never having intentionally memorized it, and began mentally tinkering out a tentative Latin translation.

When I arrived at my destination, I had some free time and so took out one of the books I am reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley. The very first thing I read was this (brackets and ellipses in the original, boldface added):

As stated by Egyptologist J. Zandee, "Not only in Israel, but it all the ancient Near East, every king is a Messiah. . . . There is no difference in principle between the eschatological Messiah and the ruling King as the bearer of salvation. . . . The King is a god, . . . the King is the son of God. . . . The King is as the image of God on earth. . . . The King brings justice to earth. . . . [The King is] the Good Shepherd, . . . [The King is the man of Wisdom]. . . . The King is the [High] Priest [endowed with power]. . . . The King is a cosmic deity." In short, the king is an Enoch, to whom God has promised his own throne.

Moses 7:59. . . . Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . thou hast made me, and given me a right to thy throne, and not of myself, but through thine own grace.

Nibley quotes that verse from Moses because it mentions Enoch being given a right to God's throne. He juxtaposes it with an apocryphal Enoch document in which Enoch says, "God made for me a throne modeled after the Throne of Glory." His only reason for quoting the part I have bolded is to establish that God is the "thou" Enoch is addressing.

Here is the prayer of Lamoni's father, which I had been reciting to myself just minutes before reading the above passage in Nibley:

O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day. And now when the king had said these words, he was struck as if he were dead (Alma 22:18).

The parallel is quite exact. These are the only two verses in all scripture to include both "thou art God" and "know thee." More specifically, each has the words "thou art God . . . and I . . . know thee," in that order. In Moses 7:59, the speaker is Enoch; in Alma 22:18, it is "the king." Immediately before quoting the Moses verse, Nibley states that "the king is an Enoch."

If we look beyond the fragment quoted by Nibley, there is a further sync with the king's hope that he will be saved "at the last day."

And Enoch . . . called unto the Lord, saying: Wilt thou not come again upon the earth? Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . I ask thee if thou wilt not come again on the earth. And the Lord said unto Enoch: As I live, even so will I come in the last days (Moses 7:59-60).

This theme of God coming again upon the earth also syncs with something I read earlier today in Words of Them That Have Slumbered (in which the name Eru is applied to Jesus):

They (some) set into writings conversings with Arda’s Wild Voices, and careful to preserve as told, some others saw into those records, What was forbidden them to tell: Eru’s Return. Ever was that command, both to watch for and yet never reveal what sought all out to find, and yet was a gap read in records by those men knowing also their own enchanting promises. So surmised one silent to another, and then less silent, by gesture contriving, or crypted words, pieced as from some Oak, retelling how hunters bypassing, return always. That Return was a Theme to which all their writing bent around, never saying, always showing what was commanded, obeying; yet also seeing if by Other Tales Recounting, their audience may reveal knowing of His Return, whereto, and in what fashioned matter.

I've bolded "Wild Voices" because that is a link back to Joseph Smith's Enoch:

And it came to pass that Enoch went forth in the land, among the people, standing upon the hills and the high places, and cried with a loud voice . . . . And they came forth to hear him, upon the high places, saying . . . a wild man hath come among us (Moses 6:38-39).

There is also a hint of "wild voices" in something I read today in the third book I am currently working on, The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

[Lewis Carroll's] allusion to Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', where we are reminded that 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, | And waste its sweetness on the desert air', carried a warning that not everyone was given the opportunity to make their voice heard . . . .

A phantom Humpty

I've posted many times about times when, reading, I momentarily hallucinate a word that is not there and then discover this to have been caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. This morning I had another such experience, seeing Humpty Dumpty at the end of a page of Words of Them Liberated. Unlike most such errors I have documented, this is one I was clearly primed for, as I am currently reading a biography of Lewis Carroll and had just posted about Humpty Dumpty days ago. The proximate cause, however, was still the influence of adjacent lines.

One line ends with -mpty, and the next line (and the page) ends with two capitalized words with the initials H.D.

It is, I think, only my own copy of Liberated that would give rise to such an error. I converted an epub to a Word document, set the font size and margins to my liking, and had it printed and bound. Probably none of the book's other (few!) readers has the words lined up on the page like that.

That last line, continued on the next page, speaks of something being "hastily recorded by Heaven's Dead Men Scribes." This syncs with another book I am currently reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley, where the title character -- a Man ascended to Heaven, though admittedly not dead -- is "Enoch the Scribe, keeper of the records," "Enoch in his primary role of heavenly scribe," of whom Nibley writes:

But everywhere Enoch is credited with being the scribe and transmitter par excellence, "the Righteous Scribe, the Teacher of heaven and earth, the Scribe of Righteousness."

The swept tomb

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Les saintes femmes au tombeau (1890)

In "A feast for the god of war," I noted that Mardi Gras coincided with the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse. In another 2026 coincidence of Chinese and Christian holidays, the significance of which is much more straightforward, April 5 is both Tomb Sweeping Day and Easter Sunday this year.

Pain. Paradise. Repeat.

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about what shape the next stanza in my series would take. It is to be about the Agony in the Garden, but beyond that I didn't have any very clear concept of it. (The basic framework and precise poetical form of the stanza series was given to me in a "download" during prayer, but it is left to me to flesh out those bones.) In a hypnopompic reverie, I thought of the Garden as a symbol of Paradise (my vivid mental image of the Garden is one of Eden-like beauty), but Jesus' experience there was marked by intense suffering rather than idyllic happiness. I tried out a tentative couplet on that theme but rejected it because it rhymed pain with again, an unacceptable kludge.

When I went out in the morning, I almost immediately encountered this T-shirt, on the back of the motorcyclist in front of me on the road:

I noted that 22/7 is an approximation of pi, with pain the circumference and paradise the diameter, but I think that's just noise, or at least I have not yet found in it any coherent symbolic meaning.

The stanza remains unwritten. I had hoped to get as far as the Crucifixion today, Good Friday, and do the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, but I don't think that's going to work out. Well, inspiration is not exactly known for conforming to liturgical calendars.

Campbell sync

At 2:28 this morning I received an email, addressed to a group of which I am part, which included this:

In the early 2000s I was very keen on Joseph Campbell, who occupied what was probably a similar cultural space [to Wayne Dyer]; and got most of his books. The basis was mixture of Jung and comparative mythology, with a spiritual basis in Buddhism and Hinduism - and an American self-help spin. 

At 7:07 this evening (as indicated by a timestamped screenshot), I read this in The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

One model for the powerful but scattered impact of the Alice books is suggested by Joseph Campbell's influential 1949 work of comparative mythology The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I dislike The Hero With a Thousand Faces and rarely think of Joseph Campbell; when I do mention him, it's usually by accident because, in a strangely persistent slip of the tongue, I am forever referring to the linguist Joseph Greenberg by that name. The sync made me think of my recent dream "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica" (March 12), the post title being the motto of a dream character called Campbell.

Speaking of a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica, last night I read the long and engaging comment thread on Kristor's Orthosphere post "Anselm & Job," consisting mostly of an argument between /ourguy/ J. M. Smith and more conventional Supergod Christians like Kristor. Smith writes that "Jesus was present to men in the flesh; YHWH and El were what we today call theoretical constructs or representations" -- like, I might add, that blasted thousand-faced hero! -- to which Kristor responds:

When I suggested that, to the 1st Century Judeans and Galileans, YHWH was real, and not just a theoretical construct, I meant that he was not real to them the way that quarks are to us, or that the luminiferous ether once was, but rather that he was real to them in at least the way that to us Antarctica is real, even though almost none of us have ever seen it.

There is also talk of fighting for its own sake, as promoted by dream-Campbell. Smith writes of "mere controversialists who cross swords to keep their mind off of death" and states that "Controversy is the soul of blogging."

Sued by a roofing company

Last night I dreamt -- almost entirely in Chinese, which is unusual for me -- that I received a phone call from a roofing company informing me that they were suing my school. The grounds for the lawsuit were as follows.

My family had owned a cat that was extremely aggressive and used to scratch and bite people viciously. (This cat was called Tri, the name of one of my past cats who in waking life was never aggressive.) We kept her for years, but in the end my mother got tired of our getting "torn to shreds" all the time, so we advertised to find a new home for her, making her behavioral issues clear in the ad. A woman who worked for the roofing company had responded to the ad, adopted the cat, and, predictably, ended up getting severely scratched. The scratch became infected and, by some freak chance, the woman died. She had been pregnant at the time, doubling the tragedy. This woman proved to be irreplaceable in her role at the roofing company, and without her the company was failing. The boss believed this had all been an intentional plot on the part of my school to sabotage his roofing company, which was why it was the company that was suing my school rather than the woman's family suing mine.

I said that I was very sorry to hear about their employee but that the lawsuit was ridiculous and would be thrown out of court. We had lived with the cat for years without any of us suffering anything worse than some nasty lacerations, so it was absurd to suggest that letting someone else adopt her amounted to a premeditated attempt on the new owner's life. Nor did we have the ability to somehow cause a particular intended victim to respond to our ad. Furthermore, a roofing company was in no way in competition with a language school, so there could be no conceivable corporate motive for the alleged sabotage.

After I hung up, I felt bad about having spent the whole call inveighing against a lawsuit that had zero chance of success anyway and having been so perfunctory in my expression of sympathy for what was after all a terrible human tragedy for which I was to some degree responsible.

Kind of a horrible dream, though not a nightmare in the conventional sense.

⁂

After I woke, the combination of a roofing company and my school made me think of my October 2025 dream "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," in which a roofer shows up at my school. Before looking up the dream, I had forgotten that it involved my being addressed as Danny John Malkovich. In the very long comment thread on yesterday's post "Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)," I mentioned that in the dream documented there I had gone by the pseudonym Marvin Fenlingstone Starsky, and I had then tied this to my October 2021 dream "Gene Hackman," in which a boy named Danny changed into a boy named Marvin. I also note in "Clinkscales" that the Starsky character in the TV series "Starsky and Hutch" (of which I know nothing but the name) has a brother named Nicholas Marvin Starsky. In the "Gene Hackman" post, I note that John Malkovich had a brother called Danny.

The Danny John Malkovich dream, like the Total Racism Indicator dream, features Black people and has a "racist" element (including a use of the n-word). As Debbie has pointed out, this does seem to be a recurring theme in my dreams, which is odd given that I live in a country with essentially no Black people and rarely have occasion to think about that race in waking life.