Cello dream

I had a dream with no visual component, just music: a single cello playing, with great intensity and virtuosity, the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends." It's been in my head all day -- the cello version from my dream, that is, which appears not yet to exist in the waking world, though I did check YouTube just in case.

Although there were no visuals or vocals, I understood that the cellist was someone who hasn't crossed my mind in many a year: Ester Bloom, whose name sounds like it should be some sort of phenomenon in organic chemistry and who was a blogging collaborator of mine more than a quarter of a century ago. One of her poems from back then was specifically about how she couldn't play the cello and how God had given her "a cello to be instead of to play."

The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence

A lot of poetry sites now append an "AI analysis" to the end of each poem -- as if anyone who loves poetry ever asked them to smear its sacred pages with that filth!

Today, wanting to read Emily Dickinson's "From Blank to Blank" while away from my library, I turned to one of these sites. When I reached the end of the poem -- two stanzas of five unrhymed lines each -- I was confronted with this brilliant "analysis":

The poem consists of two quatrains with an irregular rhyme scheme (ABCB DEFE), typical of Dickinson’s later work . . .

I had no very high opinion of these algorithms' competence at simulating intelligence, but even I assumed they would at least be able to count the number of lines in a poem and identity rhymes or the absence thereof!

If this is "intelligence," truly 'tis lighter to be blind.

Meditations

Free time! -- but how am I supposed 

To write a half-so-weighty tome

As Marcus in his head composed

While waging war and ruling Rome?

In which one of Laeth's posts becomes unexpectedly meta

Earthquake sync

During a break between classes, I was working on my very long (and still unfinished) post trying to reconstruct the hypothetical 1 Zenos document from quotations and allusions in various parts of the Book of Mormon and Bible. When I stopped to teach my evening class (7:50-9:20), I had just been writing about Samuel the Lamanite's Zenos-influenced prediction of an earthquake and other phenomena at the death of Jesus:

Yea, at the time that he shall yield up the ghost there shall be thunderings and lightnings for the space of many hours, and the earth shall shake and tremble; and the rocks which are upon the face of this earth, which are both above the earth and beneath, which ye know at this time are solid, or the more part of it is one solid mass, shall be broken up; yea, they shall be rent in twain, and shall ever after be found in seams and in cracks, and in broken fragments upon the face of the whole earth, yea, both above the earth and beneath. And behold, there shall be great tempests, and there shall be many mountains laid low, like unto a valley, and there shall be many places which are now called valleys which shall become mountains, whose height is great. And many highways shall be broken up, and many cities shall become desolate (Hel. 14:21-24).

I then went to the classroom and opened up the textbook to today's grammar lesson, where I saw this:

Grammatical rules are illustrated using examples about an earthquake, including "The road cracked open" -- with an illustration of a road doing just that -- and "the ground was shaking," so I thought that was a bit of a coincidence.

A further coincidence came several minutes later, at 8:14, when -- while everyone had their books open to that page -- a magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck Taiwan. That's a moderate quake, the kind we experience once a month or so, so no highways were cracking open, but the timing was still rather uncanny.

We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica

I dreamt that there were two colonies in Antarctica. I had first visited the one run by a man named Campbell whose motto was "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica." He talked about this a lot, and about the need for "a war of all against all" in his colony. Members of the colony would compete to be "ministers" in his government by fighting each other with their bare hands. This was done on an iced-over lake, the thick ice of which had been cut into squares like an oversized chessboard. As they fought, some of the squares would come loose and sink down into the icy water, and in general everyone in this colony seemed to spend a lot of time in the freezing water. In the waking world, of course, you would die of hypothermia within minutes, but these guys -- including me when I was with them -- were tough.

Later, I went to a different colony, which was peaceful and was run by a woman. I was explaining to her how things worked in Campbell's colony and how potential ministers would "fight -- I mean really try to kill each other." She looked at me uncomprehending and said, "That's insane."

"Well," I said, "Campbell says we must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica. He says if we wanted to be soft, we would have stayed in Ohio."

⁂

Violence in the Antarctic has come up before -- see "Black Men and Old Ones" and subsequent posts -- but my thoughts upon waking went in a different direction, thinking of the other meaning of "ministers" and of Alexander Campbell the religious reformer. Very early in the history of Mormonism, a large number of Campbellites converted to the movement, changing its character and turning it to a considerable degree into a "Restorationist" sect bent on recreating first-century Christianity. Early Mormonism was based in Kirtland, Ohio, and it was after leaving Ohio that a more militant Mormonism began to develop -- the Mormonism of the Nauvoo Legion and Zion's Camp, of Porter Rockwell and the Danites, of blood oaths and blood atonement, of Brigham's Destroying Angel and unsheathed bowie knife. Perhaps "Campbell" was a broad personification of all this -- of a corrupted Mormonism that had become Joseph Smith's original vision plus a lot of other baggage.

Of course there's Bill's "Numenor on ice" angle, too. Antarctica is also the ultimate "Down Under," even more so than Australia, so Agartha and "To the Faithful Departed" may also be relevant.

Campbell is an interesting name, too. I had assumed it was from the English words it looks to be made up of, but in fact it's Gaelic (of course!) and means "crooked mouth" -- someone who doesn't talk straight, maybe the fat lion (a gorged Mars?) of Sometimes We Fight as opposed to "straight shooter" Herman Melville. (See "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" and "A feast for the god of war" for those references.)

Note added: That "Black Men and Old Ones" post may be more relevant than I initially thought. It features "dem elders in dat ice," just as the dream had "ministers."

A prayer

The players bow; the watchers rise.

The program printed on the page

Has reached its end, and now no eyes

But God's alone are on the stage.

    The curtain falls; they file away.

    I have not yet begun to play.

Now comes a dark both thick and deep,

And misty paths before me lie.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

And let me wake before I die,

    That I, a-fasting through this night,

    May taste again thy golden Light.