My mention of a "Buddhist text" in my last post was probably misleading, making it sound like I was poring over Mahayana scriptures in Chinese or something. In fact, the text I was trying to decipher was an extremely short one:
The character that caught my attention because of the blue-green circle it is in (暨) is the one that means "and." The whole thing reads 三昧水懺暨超拔法會, "Samadhi Water Repentance [the name of a text they're going to recite] and soul transcendence ceremony."
My post "The Blue-Green Abelard" uses the phrase "blue-green ambiguity" several times, so it is interesting that 三昧, which is meant to be a phonetic approximation of the Sanskrit word samadhi consists of the character for "three" followed by a character meaning "ambiguity." Besides "ambiguity," it can also mean "stupid, foolish," potentially linking it to "The Gorming of Jeff."
That post also included the idea of an "assembly," so it's worth noting that 法會 in isolation means "dharma assembly" -- but the first character, although it means "dharma" in a Buddhist context, can also mean "France, French." So 法國國會 (adding the character for "country" twice in the middle) means "French parliament."
I suppose Abelard (who was French, incidentally) is connected with the idea of "and," since his most famous work is titled Yes and No, a conjunction of opposites.
I recently spoke on the phone to a very, very Buddhist former student of mine to ask about an unfamiliar archaic Chinese word in a Buddhist text. It turned out to mean nothing more interesting than “and” in context, which made me feel kind of foolish for asking her to expound on it.
During the call, I could hear recorded mantra chants being played in the background which sounded for all the world like “Bereshit bara Om” — that is, the opening words of the Hebrew Bible, only with the holy syllable Om replacing the word Elohim. But it obviously couldn’t be that! I kept trying to hear the mantra as Sanskrit rather than Hebrew, but I just couldn’t.
Finally I said, “Excuse me, but what’s that mantra you’re playing? I can’t quite make it out.”
“Oh, that? You know it. It’s the Vajrasattva mantra.”
As soon as she said that, something clicked, a perceptual shift occurred, and I could hear the chant for what it was: “Om Vajrasattva hum” endlessly repeated. In my defense, Vajrasattva is actually pretty phonetically similar to bereshit-ba.
I record this because errors like these are always potentially meaningful, what I’ve sometimes called “Jungian slips.” In the Fourth Gospel, Moses’s famous beginning is adapted as “In the beginning was the Word . . . All things were made by him,” and this Word goes on to incarnate as a Man. “Om isn’t just a sound,” I was once told. “It’s a person.”
Since I’ve just read The Silmarillion, I thought also of the Ainulindale and of the Moody Blues’ take on the music of creation:
I dreamt that I was reading a history book, and one of the sections had the heading “The Gorming of Jeff, afterwards known as the First Gorming.”
My understanding in the dream was that this was some sort of assembly or parliament convened by a person called Jeff. Upon waking, I thought gorming might come from the same root as gormless, the first morpheme of which comes from a word meaning “notice, understanding.” Gorm is also a verb with various meanings, ranging from “stare” to “smear” to “devour” to “make a mess of.”
I had to do a Google News search for something related to my job, and this article was there on the homepage. Of course I know Google owns Blogger and knows I've been interested in "amber" these days, but I suppose it's still a bit of a sync that an article about amber, with a focus on color, was published just now.
The insect they chose to highlight with a special illustration was a "cuckoo wasp," a modern insect with similar coloring to the prehistoric bugs preserved in the amber. Cuckoo wasps comprise the family Chrysididae. According to Wikipedia:
Chrysididae, the scientific name of the family, refers to their shiny bodies and is derived from Greek chrysis, chrysid-, "gold vessel, gold-embroidered dress", plus the familial suffix -idae.
There’s been a lot of discussion in comments on my last post about Moby-Dick and Ahab’s missing leg. I mentioned that Herman Melville was one of the many past lives others (in this case my Uncle Bill) have proposed for me, and Bill Wright (too many Bills!) said he considered it significant that Melville wrote in the voice of Ishmael.
Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Pequod and the only one who can tell its tale, quotes the Book of Job in reference to himself: “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (Job 1:15-19). This put a song in my head: “The Frozen Man” by James Taylor:
Last thing I remember is the freezing cold
Water reaching up just to swallow me whole
Ice in the rigging and howling wind
Shock to my body as we tumbled in
Then my brothers and the others are lost at sea
I alone am returned to tell thee
Hidden in ice for a century
To walk the world again
Lord have mercy on the frozen man
Ahab was being discussed in connection with Pharazon and the downfall of Numenor. When Tolkien’s Atlantis sank beneath the green wave, its king was not there but on a ship, which also sank. Bill Wright’s theory is that after its sinking, Numenor was frozen and is currently preserved “on ice” somewhere. The song fits this narrative uncannily well. The “Lord have mercy” refrain also makes more sense if the frozen man is not some random unfortunate but the arch-criminal Pharazon.
Like Ahab, the frozen man is missing a limb and requires a peg leg:
It took a lot of money to start my heart
To peg my leg and to buy my eye
What’s the frozen man’s name? You can’t make this stuff up:
My name is William James McPhee
I was born in 1843
Raised in Liverpool by the sea
But that ain't who I am
Lord have mercy on the frozen man
McPhee means “son of the dark fairy.” Our English word fairy and the French fée (which Phee coincidentally resembles) ultimately derive from the Latin for “goddess of fate,” of which Fortuna/Tyche would be one.
I’ve never lived in Liverpool, but my grandfather — who was also called William James Tychonievich, was known for saying “Beware the Ides of March,” and died just before I was born — lived in East Liverpool, Ohio.
My Uncle Bill, who picked up from Charlie the habit of reading himself into Beatles lyrics, made much of the fact that “Yellow Submarine” was about a man who lived “in the town where I was born.” The Beatles were born in Liverpool, so clearly they were talking about him. I always thought my father was a better fit, though, since he once worked “in the land of submarines,” programming unmanned subs for Martin Marietta.
That strange phrase, “land of submarines,” makes even more sense as a reference to the now-submarine land of Atlantis, and yellow/gold was Pharazon’s trademark color. That story helps make sense of these lines, too:
So we sailed up to the Sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine
Sailing up to the Sun fits with Pharazon’s sailing to the land of the gods, which was later removed from Earth and became a heavenly body. As I have mentioned before, Tolkien consistently emphasized the greenness of the wave that overwhelmed Numenor.
Amber is the resin of long-dead trees, preserved in the form of a stone.
The Silmarils were stones preserving some of the light of the Two Trees of Valinor long after the trees themselves had been destroyed.
The word amber originally referred to ambergris, a substance produced by sperm whales. In a comment on my post “Blue-Green Abelard and gray and yellow amber,” Bill connected ambergris with Captain Ahab’s leg which was bitten off and swallowed by the white sperm whale Moby Dick:
This is potentially where the ambergris comes into play. Ahab wanted revenge for the loss of his leg to Moby Dick, which the whale had eaten. Ambergris is from the whale's intestines, and can, I think, not irrationally be linked to Ahab's leg passing through those intestines.
One of the Silmarils is associated with a similar story. Beren was holding one of these stones in his hand when that hand was bitten off and swallowed, Silmaril and all, by the werewolf Carcharoth — whose name strongly suggests a large white predator of the seas: Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark.
Beren and Ahab are of course very different characters, but the parallel still seems potentially significant.
I ran across these two titles today in the very small English section of a used bookstore in Taichung:
Robin Hobb, by the way is just about the most hobgobliny name ever.
I also noted the rather Numenorean imagery (Tolkien always specified a green wave) on the cover of this book by another Robin:
I used to be able to list every Robin that there was, and it used to drive my mother crazy. She used to say, “Robin Lister, if you don’t stop listin’ Robins!” . . . Robin Hood. Christopher Robin. Robin Williams. Robin the Boy Wonder. Robin Goodfellow. Robin redbreast. Natural all-natural Robin whitebreast. . . .
