From snowy crown to frizzen feet

In "Many are cold, but few are frozen" (July 25), I quote a reference in Elias: An Epic of the Ages to one of the mountains of Utah (Mt. Nebo?) as a "hermit of the hills" with important knowledge stored in his "frozen snow-crown." Then, in "Cold but not frozen" (July 26), I quote from a loose translation of Balzac the line "My feet are frizzen," with the context making it clear that the last word is a humorous alteration of frozen.

Today I read in the final canto of Elias this personification of "Zion's land," understood by the poet to include the entirety of the Americas:

She sits, a sovereign queen, ice-crowned, to lave

Her glowing hands in tropic tides, while brave

Her snowy feet in faith the southern sea.

Again it is specific the crown and the feet that are frozen. The two crown references are from the same poem, making them less of a coincidence, but the context is still quite different -- the peak of a mountain vs. the Arctic "crown" of a continent. The Balzac novel, though, is very far removed from Elias, and my reason for looking up that passage (its use of the "libfix' -rama) had nothin to do with that poem or with icy imagery.

A rabbit that is seen and loved by Jesus

I dreamt the title phrase at approximately 2:40 this morning, with no context and no visual aspect.. Perhaps it means something to someone.

A prophet "points out" a land he himself will not enter

Last night I read in Elias: An Epic of the Ages a passage in which Joseph Smith is imagined as foreseeing the later Mormon migration to Utah, in the far west:

While ye, my people -- yonder setting sun

Points out your path.

The phrasal verb point out usually means to draw attention to some fact, not to point in a particular direction.

Also last night, I read the last few chapters of the Book of Numbers. Chapter 34 contains the only instances of point out in the King James Bible:

And this shall be your north border: from the great sea ye shall point out for you mount Hor:

From mount Hor ye shall point out your border unto the entrance of Hamath; and the goings forth of the border shall be to Zedad: . . .

And ye shall point out your east border from Hazarenan to Shepham (Num. 34:7-8, 10).

The context is broadly similar. In each case a founding prophet is indicating the location of a land his people will settle in after his death.

Three random mentions of Tony Robbins

In the past 24 hours, I've run into three random references to Tony Robbins in three completely unrelated YouTube videos.

Here's Mormon cult leader Shane Baldwin: "If I had to pick anybody out there right now who I thought was Enoch incarnate, I'd pick Tony Robbins" (20:00):

Here's political commentator Mark Dice, replaying with approval a 40-year-old clip of Tony Robbins using the nigger word (8:21):

And here's, uh, the "Hyperborean Knowledge" guy, randomly interrupting a discussion of ADHD and the GATE program to say "Where my Tony Robbins fans at?" (21:40):

Tears, sighs, and hermits

I read this today in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

Where perfect love casts forth the jealous fear,

A diamond in thy diadem each tear;

And every sigh that rent thy suffering breast,

A wave of rapture on the shores of rest.

These lines, identifying each tear and sigh with something quite different (a diamond, a wave of rapture), reminded me of a quatrain found in Blake's "The Grey Monk" and "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne":

For a Tear is an intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

("For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is such a perfect line! Blake was a genius of the highest order.)

The idea of a Grey Monk already had me thinking about the Hermit card, and when I looked up and reread those Blake poems, I found that each also includes this stanza:

But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The Hermit's prayer and the Widow's tear

Alone can free the World from fear.

(In "The Grey Monk," this is immediately followed by the first stanza I cited above, which I think is poetically correct. In "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne," the line about the Almighty's bow is the final line of the poem, which is also poetically correct. Thus I link both versions, being unable to give my unqualified endorsement to either.)

Blake's reference to what "can free the World from fear" syncs with Whitney's "perfect love casts forth the jealous fear."

In "A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves," I dreamt of a Tarot card depicting a gray-robed angel with straight blond hair, holding a scythe. In the commentary on this in the post, I included images of two Rider-Waite cards: the Hermit, who wears a gray robe; and Justice, to whom straight blond hair is unique in that deck.

Justice is crowned and holds a sword. Combining this with the reaper angel on the dream-card, we get "a Scythe is the sword of an Angel King" -- differing from Blake's line by but a single phoneme.

We could also respell Blake's line as "a sai is the sword of an Angel King" -- meaning, presumably, the archangel Raphael.

A big shark and a long-ago memory

Brave gave me an interesting background image, so I clicked to see what it was. It's called "white and black shark in water."

That's about the biggest shark I've ever seen!

A few minutes later, I went to my Google Photos account. Apparently Google is trying to jog distant past-life memories now.

Those were the days! Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.

Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?

As I was waking up, a rapid-fire series of voices said things like "Kill John Wayne!" "John Wayne shot!" "Shoot John Wayne!" and finally "Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?"

Not many people, I would guess, since John Wayne has been dead for 47 years. I document the dream anyway in case it should turn out to be precognitive in some unanticipated way.

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Update: I published the original version of this post (above) at 8:29 a.m. As I was thinking about how it might somehow be precognitive even though John Wayne is long dead, I thought it might refer to another person called John Wayne -- like, for example, the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Gacy is long dead, too, of course, but he's an example of the fact that "John Wayne" can refer to more than one individual.

At 10:17 a.m. Taiwan time, someone posted on /pol/ "BREAKING: MASS SHOOTING AT THE SPACE NEEDLE IN SEATTLE." The second reply shows someone in clown makeup, and the third reply says "More like the gayce needle."

John Wayne Gacy performed as a clown and is known as the Killer Clown. I'm sure gayce is just supposed to be an alteration of space to include the word gay, but by analogy with Edgar Cayce's name, it should be pronounced as Gacy. A search of the /pol/ archive for other instances of gayce shows that most of them are misspelled (or perhaps intentionally gayified) references to "John Wayne Gayce."

In one of J. W. Dunne's precognitive dreams, he dreamt details of a disaster not as they actually happened but as they were reported in the newspaper he would read the next day -- so it makes sense that my own dream would be retroactively influenced not by the facts of the shooting but by the way it was reported on /pol/.