I thought I had nothing to say about the recent assassination, but I can't resist pointing out improbable coincidences.
George Floyd, an American with a Scottish surname whose neck-related death was caught on camera and caused an improbably extreme emotional reaction among the general public, was born on October 14, 1973.
Charlie Kirk, an American with a Scottish surname whose neck-related death was caught on camera and caused an improbably extreme emotional reaction among the general public, was born on October 14, 1993.
Some on /pol/ are saying that the alleged killers of the two men also share a birthday, but I haven't been able to confirm that.
As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I had a sort of hypnagogic dream or fantasy in which I heard Johnny Cash doing a dramatic recitation of the Sheb Wooley novelty song "The Purple People Eater." Halfway through the second verse, though, it changed to a different song:
Well he came down to earth and he hid in a tree
I said, Mr. Purple People Eater, don't eat me
He called my name, and my heart stood still
When he said, John, go do my will!
With that line, the voice changed to Marilyn Manson's, and the song was now "God's Gonna Cut You Down." I'm not sure how much of the song he sang, but I know it included these lines:
As sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light
That last line was repeated -- or, rather, sounded as if it was echoing -- several times as I entered the fully sleeping state.
This was a conflation of two different things I had heard in the past. In January 2024 I watched the Jordan Peele film NOPE, which includes a dramatic recitation of part of "The Purple People Eater" in a gravelly voice somewhat suggestive of Cash's.
Searching my blog to find out when I had watched that movie, I found that I had actually posted about that very scene, in "I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough." That post's title is a line from the original version of the song -- what the People Eater says in response to the request not to be eaten. In last night's version, it instead says, "John, go do my will!"
Back in February of 2020, I discovered and posted about Marilyn Manson's version of "God's Gonna Cut You Down." The post, "Go tell that long-tongued liar," included both the Manson and Cash versions, as well as one by Elvis Presley. Sometime later, I found a version that was a mashup of the Man in Black and the Man in Black Lipstick. Just as in last night's fantasy, it begins in Cash's voice and switches to Manson's with the line "When he said, John, go do my will!"
The combination in the fantasy was a strange one, seeming to put the Purple People Eater in the role of God himself. I think it ties in with "June, July, 19th, 21st," though. (Note: NOPE was released on July 22, one day after one of those dates, which also happens to be Bill Wright's birthday.) In that dream, I ran a long distance down a straight path in the desert and then walked down a corridor, but I knew that in the end I would have to face Rosie, a giant dog who I was afraid would eat me. Dog as a cipher for God is obvious, almost a cliche. (See "God and dog at the Panama canal.") In my published post, I described Rosie as a "spotted mastiff," but my own notes were more specific about the nature of the spots: "tri-color merle." Merle dogs are usually classified as "red merle" if they have brown spots and "blue merle" if they have black spots. Rosie had both, making her conceptually "purple."
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down
In the dream, I ran on for a long time, on a perfectly straight path in the desert. After waking, I connected this with Isaiah's line "make straight in the desert a highway for our God" (Isa. 40:3) -- which could just as easily be a highway leading to God as a highway for God to use. I have made Bob Dylan's line "The highway is for gamblers" a sort of personal motto, so this is another link to the Cash/Manson song:
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down
Does all this imply that God's gonna cut me down? Well, it is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good. Perfect love casteth out all fear. There are hints of another interpretation, though. In last night's fantasy, the People Eater unexpectedly sends the person on a mission instead of eating him. Bill has also suggested that the warning about Rosie may have been misinterpreted:
It does make you wonder though, if Rosie is as bad as the warning seemed to indicate. You could interpret the remark that a black, brown, or white person wouldn't be that color anymore after Rosie was done with them as their mortal bodies and the associated various skin color as not being relevant anymore, as in via resurrection or restoration to new bodies.
Anyway, after that pre-sleep fantasy, I don't remember much of last night's dreams proper. Just as I was waking up, though, I heard a woman's voice sing a single line:
She's afraid of the light in the dark
I recognized this as coming from the Tori Amos song "Spark," which I hadn't listened to in a very long time. I only knew the first few lines:
She's addicted to nicotine patches
She's addicted to nicotine patches
She's afraid of a light in the dark
This past winter, I experimented with wearing nicotine patches while sleeping in order to induce vivid dreams. In one of these, described in "Nicotime, Mars, and the Secret Dojo," "I ran for hours and hours, never stopping or slowing or hesitating. . . . I ran along a desert road under a bright tan sky." This is clearly similar to the Rosie dream, so that's what may have put a song about nicotine patches in my head.
Making a mental note to look up "Spark" later, I checked my blog comments and found this one from Bill:
Just thinking more on Iris' issue with your sofas in the fifth floor classroom.
The fact that you actually have a sofa in that fifth floor room, even if it is your chapel and not a classroom, seems like it could be relevant. As does the fact that that sofa is where you conduct your experiments.
One possibility is that her meaning was actually expressing concern with the experiments you were conducting conducting on the sofa. She referenced the sofas specifically, but it was what was being done on it that she didn't like or was making the students uncomfortable.
This might make sense given her suggestion on what to do with the sofa. Your current experiment relies on you lying down on the couch with the card under the pillow. If you were to rotate the sofa 90 degrees so the the back was on the ground and legs in the air, it would be impossible to lie on the sofa with the card under the pillow (let alone use the sofa really at all, experiment or not). Thus, you wouldn't be able to carry out the experiment, at least in the same way you had been doing it.
Even if that is a reasonable interpretation - not sure it is - it does leave the question open as to whether you should listen to Iris or not on the matter.
I was already operating under the assumption that "Iris" in my dream -- who takes her name from the deceptive goddess who leads the too-trusting Turnus to his doom in the Aeneid -- was not too be trusted, so I immediately connected this comment of Bill's with "She's afraid of the light in the dark." Iris doesn't like me to experiment with extrasensory perception because she's afraid I might shine a light on things that she would prefer to remain in the dark. Well, tough beans, Iris. One way or another, "What's done in the dark will be brought to the light."
Later, when I got around to looking up "Spark," what got my attention was not so much the lyrics as this little sidebar on the search page:
Last night I dreamt that I was running along a straight path through a desert. I was loping on all fours like a gorilla, and gravity seemed to be slightly weaker than normal, which resulted in my going extremely fast. Sometimes I would pass people walking on the path. They all seemed impressed by how fast I was going but didn't seem to perceive me as a gorilla or anything.
In the final stretch of my journey I was no longer running through a desert but was walking down a long corridor. When I reached the end of the corridor, I knew I would somehow have to get past Rosie, a gigantic spotted mastiff. I had been warned by someone in advance, "I don't care if you're black, brown, or white. You won't be any of those colors by the time Rosie gets done with you!"
My plan for getting past Rosie was to gross her out with vomit so that she wouldn't want to eat me. I was carrying a large bucket of vomit for this purpose. (Whose vomit? I don't know. You can't really dust for vomit.) I was splashing vomit all over the corridor as I went. When I saw someone else coming down the corridor, I realized that throwing vomit out of a bucket would look strange and that I'd better start vomiting for real. Fortunately I was able to produce enormous quantities of vomit at will. I decided my cover story would be that I was disgusted by the aesthetics of the modern world. "Modern art -- yechhhh! Buildings -- yechhhh!" The bloke in the corridor seemed to find this convincing.
Whether I succeeded in getting past Rosie I'll never know, because at this point the scene shifted.
I was reading a new book that had just been published by Bruce Charlton. It was quite thick, but I found that I was able to read it very quickly (I attributed this to the very wide margins and to my familiarity with Bruce's ideas), and before I knew it I was on page 415. This page said "Afterword: Changing YOU!" After the "YOU!" was a little arrow that curved around counterclockwise until it came almost full circle. I understood that Bruce had wanted the arrow to point straight out of the page at the reader but couldn't figure out how to make that work. Thus he kept changing the direction of the arrow but of course never found the direction he wanted because he was drawing on a two-dimensional surface. Lower down on the page was a much larger attempt at the same thing, with the arrow curving all over the page but never succeeding in pointing at the reader. The rest of the afterword consisted of a bulleted list of things you could do to change YOU, such as "Don't be afraid to take photos of the homeland" and "Re-educate yourself about Mormon history." (Obviously Bruce's real books are nothing like this.) Even though this was a paper book, it somehow ended with a video clip, a graphically violent one that I thought must have come from a war movie by Quentin Tarantino. It began with a voice saying something like, "You've been told that these people want to kill you. Think about what it really means to kill another human being," and then there was a series of closeups of people being shot, with blood splattering everywhere.
In a final dream scene, my wife shouted to me from another room, "Can you check these dates? June, July, 19th, 21st!" What did she mean? June 19th and July 21st? The entire months of June and July plus the 19th and 21st of some other month? I kept asking for clarification, but she just kept repeating, "June, July, 19th, 21st!" This became a sort of chant that got louder and louder until I woke up.
I don't know if this dream sequence will turn out to have any meaning or if it's just noise. Anyway, I'm posting it here just because it's so strange. Some elements of it seem to reprise "Nicotine, Mars, and the Secret Dojo."
Note added: I decided to run an image search for "june july 19 21" because why not, right? This result made me think of Bill.
I dreamt that I had returned to Earth after a long absence and was weaving through the crowds at a busy spaceport. As I had not had Internet access while away, I was scrolling through some kind of social media feed as I walked, trying to catch up. (In real life, this is something I have not done in many years.)
I found a message someone had posted for me. The bottom half of the image was black, and the top half was a dark-yellow sky with the shape of a large opossum silhouetted against it. Written in white Times New Roman letters against the black background was the message: “Remember, Peter was not told that he could be all animals, only that he could be any animal.”
And he chose to be a pig, I thought. And, apparently, an opossum. My dreaming mind connected these: Choosing to live as a pig, when one’s inner nature is quite different, is a form of “playing possum.”
Note added: Here's a quick MS Paint approximation of what the image looked like. The main difference was that the background was more of a naturalistic-looking sky (except for the color) rather than a flat field of color.
In a recent comment, Bill relates a dream in which he heard this said:
That the weak things of the world shall go forth and thrash the mighty and strong.
One of the meanings of thrash is "beat (someone) with (or as if with) a flail." This made me think of these lines from "The more, the merrier" (an expansion of "With?" using names not in Ulysses but following the same pattern):
Flinbad the Flailer was a sort
Of Gnoll, quite strong but rather short.
(That couplet was the only choice.
Old Gary Gygax knew his Joyce.)
Frinbad the Frailer isn't stronger
Than the others any longer.
The first two couplets quoted refer to a D&D monster called a flind. It uses a special weapon called a flindbar, which is essentially an iron threshing flail.
The combination of Flin(d) and Flail is what made me say that the D&D reference "was the only choice" for this particular Inbad.
It's not Flindbad, though, but Flinbad -- with the first syllable pronounced as Flynn. I realized that a Flynn-bar could be a close cousin to something that featured in a recent dream: the Three Musketeers bar.
The one word that I would associate with both Errol Flynn and the Three Musketeers -- the center of the Venn diagram -- is swashbuckler. This syncs with one of the D&C passages to which Bill's dream apparently alludes:
Wherefore, I call upon the weak things of the world, those who are unlearned and despised, to thresh the nations by the power of my Spirit; and their arm shall be my arm, and I will be their shield and their buckler (D&C 35:13-14).
A swashbuckler is, etymologically, not one who buckles swashes, but one who "swashes" (noisily strikes with a sword) his opponent's buckler. This makes the word, appropriately enough, a morphological scofflaw.
One problem with identifying Flinbad with his Flynn-bar with the thrashers in Bill's dream is that the latter were specified as "weak things," while Flinbad is "quite strong." This is not an insuperable objection, though, since the weak things must presumably be made strong in order to accomplish the thrashing. That they are "weak things of the world" may be a tie-in with Flinbad's characterization as "a sort of gnoll." That word gnoll -- a D&D invention, referring to a hyena-like humanoid -- suggests the word gnolaum, which appears in the Book of Abraham (3:18), where it is glossed "or eternal." This is almost certainly a misprint for gholaum, with would be Joseph Smith's transliteration (following the system he learned from Joshua Seixas) of the Hebrew word usually rendered olam today. (The initial ayin was historically a g-like sound, likely a voiced velar fricative, as evidenced by the transliteration Gomorrah.) The primary meaning of the word gholaum in biblical use is indeed "eternity," but in modern usage it mainly means "world." (A similar evolution can be seen in Greek aion, Latin saeculum, and our English world. The older meaning of the last survives in the phrase "world without end," meaning "forever.")
Frinbad, then, who "isn't stronger than the others any longer," would be those formerly "mighty and strong," but not so much anymore after taking their thrashing.
I don't think The Duckstack is on most of my readers' radar, but there's often some remarkably insightful material mixed in with the absurdism. This is from his latest, "Consume Consubstantial":
Under [the "normal Christian"] framework, most descriptions God uses for himself in the Bible aren’t true. God isn’t “really” a father (in the sense of siring genetic children), God doesn’t “really” get angry, Christ isn’t “really” human, etc. I know normal Christians would rebut me here, saying he’s “fully human and fully God”, but 100% + 100% = 200%, that’s not something human attainable and I think most congregants sense it. . . .
If Christ is 200% human (something unachievable by normal people) then its actually sinful to try to emulate him. Christ “taught with authority, and not as the scribes”, but you as a mortal need to restrict yourself to teaching like scribes (deferring to scripture). Christ could judge people but you can’t. Christ could keep the commandments perfectly, but its not actually reasonable to expect regular people to. (How this is usually expressed to me is “the point of the commandments is just to show you how impossible keeping commandments is.”) Christ could have people look up to him but you shouldn’t. Christ could be prideful but you can’t. Christ could forgive sins but you can’t. Christ could do miracles but you can’t. Christ can be a God but you can’t, to name a few common ones. (Christians indeed constantly say this was the sin of Adam and Eve- not disobedience, but wanting to be like God.) In this framework Christ becomes not a role model, but a mythic parable like Hercules and similar. You can see how restrictive this is, if I’m right. Instead of a theology aimed at expanding the soul of man and reaching new heights, the doctrine trends instead to “put man in his place.” There’s a time and place for putting you in your place, but I don’t think its always. I do not believe mankind is innately loathsome, only that mankind can be. Christ could be free from original guilt, but you can’t. You have to be guilty about yourself, innately.
Extrapolating, I think it is difficult for many Christians to believe such a being “actually” cares, either. Its more like he super-cares. His love is so loving it doesn’t even look like love, its the pure boundless adoration at a level we can’t even comprehend. So why bother. In my opinion you might as well not call it love at that point, it just dilutes the word. Pragmatically speaking, people are going to pair out meaningless variables. Similar with other attributes described in the creeds of Christendom, its all poetry for how incomprehensible and beyond us he is and none of these words mean anything concrete. . . .
What we’re left with is a sterile God enacting a sterile plan that we are mere cogs in. You can argue against all of this of course -- you can say, ‘but the bible says God is love!’ and so on, but I’m not sure there’s actually a way around these implications with the doctrines of noncontingence and the unmoved mover and so forth. This might be why Catholics have saints to pray to instead- more human. All of these “proofs” for God rely on calculating a sort of necessary basis for existence, and really only work if you treat God more as a variable than a sentience. Or a meta-sentience, if you prefer. So sentient the concept of sentience doesn’t even make sense.
