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.)

⁂

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.

Why we reject the proposition that "time is unreal"

Suppose I have two dollars in my wallet. I've checked very carefully and am certain that that's all I have in there: two dollars. Later, someone gives me two more dollars, and I put them in my wallet, too -- only to find that I now have five dollars in my wallet!

What happened? (The question is not entirely hypothetical.) Most likely I miscounted the money. I must have actually had three dollar bills in my wallet at the outset but mistakenly counted them as two; perhaps two of them had been stuck together or something. Or maybe when I and the other person both thought he was giving me two more dollars, he was actually giving me three. Or maybe someone else surreptitiously put an extra dollar into my wallet when I wasn't looking. Or, if you're willing to entertain  more fantastic hypotheses, perhaps a miracle occurred and the extra dollar materialized in my wallet by supernatural means.

One hypothesis you will not entertain is that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5.

No conceivable extraordinary experience, no matter how well corroborated, will ever make you entertain that hypothesis. People will say, speaking loosely, that its falsity is "self-evident" (which would be news to young children who are learning their sums), but we might more accurately say that it is metaphysically unacceptable -- or, as I have termed such things elsewhere, "philosophically dysfunctional." As Aquinas is quoted as saying in the linked post, such hypotheses "destroy the foundations of a branch of philosophy" and must therefore be rejected. If we admit 2 + 2 = 5 to our system of thought, the system crashes. We may, superficially, have gained the ability to explain that one weird experience with the five dollars. but only at the expense of our ability to really make sense of anything at all. No experience or anecdote, no matter how otherwise compelling it may be, can override that.

One of the philosophically dysfunctional hypotheses (positiones extraneae) Aquinas gives as an example is "the opinion that nothing changes" -- which brings us to Bruce's recent post "The Time Trap," in which he rejects as a nihilism-inducing "pseudo-explanation" the opinion that

All Time is Now - Time is unreal -- Past, Present, and Future are simultaneous - Everything is always happening...

VIP commenter Debbie sent me an email expressing her exasperation with Bruce's position, correctly assuming that if she had left a comment on Bruce's blog directly it would be unlikely to get past his "pretty severe" moderation. How, she asks, can Bruce maintain such a position in the face of her many unambiguously precognitive experiences, experiences which imply that "linear time is an illusion" and yet have made her life more meaningful rather than less so? She writes:

I personally believe that if someone has never experienced the paranormal themselves, which it appears, at least to me, that Bruce has not, then I get somewhat irritated if a person writes or says something that they really don't have personal knowledge of especially if they express their belief as being fact.

But personal experience or lack thereof is actually not germane to Bruce's position. Bruce is certainly aware of the compelling evidence that precognition does occur -- in fact, he was the one who introduced me to the seminal work of J. W. Dunne on that topic -- but his position is that, whatever paranormal or miraculous explanation such experiences may have, the explanation cannot be that "time is unreal" because that is metaphysically unacceptable, a positio extranea, a proposition that will crash any system of thought in which it is included.

Briefly, if there is no time, there is no change. Time and change are conceptually inseparable, and neither can be defined except in terms of the other. And if there is no such thing as change of any kind, then all the unacceptable consequences Bruce delineates follow:

The implication is that nothing matters. 

Nothing makes a difference - because nothing can make a difference. 

There is no possible freedom, no possibility of learning; no possibility of betterment of any kind. 

Indeed there is no-thing At All - except what is, was, always, and evermore... An unchanging situation, that might equally well be nothing as anything. 

Making a difference, freedom, learning, betterment -- these are all subsets of change, and if time is not real, neither is change.

If your life is a book, are you writing it as you go along, or are you merely reading a book that has already been written, a story that can never be anything other than what it already is? If the latter, your "life" is an illusion. You aren't doing anything; nothing is happening; nothing means anything. We reject that possibility as, if not provably false, definitely philosophically dysfunctional. As I wrote in my 2018 post "Richard Taylor's fatalism" (from which I pinched the book metaphor):

If I reject fatalism, my stance is either (a) correct or (b) completely inevitable. Therefore, so far as it lies in my power to reject fatalism, I should do so. I find that I can reject it, and so I do. Perhaps I am right in so doing, or perhaps it is my inescapable fate to adopt incorrect philosophical positions — but I won’t waste any time considering the latter  possibility, because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, there’s no point.

Incidentally, here's a completely insane synchronicity: When I revisited that old post on Richard Taylor, I found that in making my argument I had used as an example the tenseless proposition "There is/was/will be a full cup of coffee on William’s desk at 4:30 pm on May 1, 2018." I guess that was the date and time that I wrote that particular sentence, though the post wasn't finished and published until May 6. I first noticed the coincidence of the date -- today is also May 1 -- and then I glanced at the clock on my computer and saw that it was precisely 4:30 p.m. (I had a half-full cup of green tea on my desk, a near miss.) As a further coincidence, just a couple of days ago, in "Into the mouth of the whale," I posted a synchronicity involving reading the phrase "at 4:30 PM" in a years-old blog post.

Does that synchronicity mean that I was fated to write that sentence at 4:30 p.m. on May 1 and then read it again exactly eight years later, at 4:30 p.m. on May 1? No. For the reasons given above, I reject that explanation and take it as axiomatic that, whatever the sync may mean, it doesn't mean that.

Coming back to the apparent conflict between Bruce's views and Debbie's, Debbie's position isn't really what Bruce is arguing against. She believes in freedom, she believes in choice, she believes that "To see the future means that we can CHANGE IT." In other words, though she likes to say that "linear time is an illusion," she is speaking loosely and doesn't mean it in a strictly literal sense. What she means (or what she would realize she means if she thought it out rigorously) is that linear time is not the whole story -- a position with which I agree and assume Bruce does, too.

Debbie has immense psychic and spiritual gifts, but she is not a philosophically rigorous thinker -- which is fine. Most people aren't, and most people don't need to be. If "linear time is an illusion" is a good-enough shorthand for her to make sense of her experiences, then, well, that's good enough. All of us most of the time, and most of us all of the time, use such imprecise concepts to make sense of the world, because that's how the human brain is designed to work. ("There are no coincidences" is another example.) I respect both Bruce and Debbie and benefit greatly from their very different modes of thinking.

My own understanding of time is essentially that of Dunne. His model accounts for precognition -- including, crucially, the ability to see the future and then change it -- and, far from dismissing linear time as an illusion, it takes as its starting point the axiom that time is real and really elapses, a fact which is impossible to explain or even to express using linear time alone. I believe Bruce currently doesn't have much use for Dunne, since the latter's system is highly abstract, involves complex mathematics, and is fiendishly difficult to wrap one's head around. I agree but do not find that an insuperable objection; after all, the same can be said of Einstein's theory of time (which Dunne partly anticipated in his first book and incorporated in his later work). It's all a question of how rigorous one feels the need to be, and different souls have different needs.