Friday, July 18, 2025

Always be the best dreamers

Spotted on a T-shirt this morning (reconstructed, since I couldn't photograph it without being creepy).


By this standard, I do think my dreaming technique is improving.


Note added: If I can't photograph a T-shirt, Plan B is usually to try to find a photo of it online by searching for the text. This time I couldn't find anything, hence the use of Plan C: MS Paint. Just now I decided to try the search one more time, but all I got was further proof of how messed up Google is these days:


Those are the only two results it gave me. So Google knows that phrase appears on my blog, but instead of giving me this post or, failing that, the blog's homepage, it returns two completely random posts, from 2019 and 2021. Why those two posts in particular? It makes no sense at all. Neither of them even contains any of the key words, other than be and the.

If I add site:narrowdesert.blogspot.com to the search prompt, I still get the same two irrelevant posts. This despite the fact that putting "always be the best dreamers" in the search bar on the blog itself -- which is hosted by Google! -- brings this post right up.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

I been Art Garfunkeled

My last post, "Sly St(all)one" was about a dream in which First Blood, the first Rambo movie, was mentioned. The Rambo character was named after Arthur Rimbaud, the idea being that Rambo's time in Vietnam had been "a season in hell," which is the title of one of Rimbaud's major works. Knowing I had posted about Rimbaud multiple times before, I searched the blog for his name. The first result was, somewhat surprisingly, last June's "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," which, though it does include my verse translation of a few lines from A Season in Hell, is primarily about the 1973 Art Garfunkel song from which the post takes its name.

In a comment on the "Sly St(all)one" post, Debbie brought up the Earth, Wind & Fire song "In the Stone," which I then looked up. Seeing that it was released in my birth year of 1979, I had the random thought, "Hey, maybe it was released on the exact same day I was born!" I checked, and it wasn't, but the hunch was specific enough that I proceeded to google albums released on 15 march 1979. The first result was Fate for Breakfast by none other than Art Garfunkel. (Some additional digging turned up two more albums that were released on the day I was born: Half Machine Lip Moves by Chrome and There's Always Me by Ray Price.)

The "Sly St(all)one" post, which has now led me to Art Garfunkel by two different routes, also discusses Bill Wright's "Rose Stone . . . a 30-pound red stone." Not sure why I thought it necessary to mention its weight and color, since the only thing that was relevant to the post was the name Rose Stone itself. Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the word carbuncle, which it characterizes as "an archaic term for a number of red gemstones."

Fate for Breakfast includes the track "Sail on a Rainbow." In "What shall we do with the drinking salesman late in the morning?" -- which, before "Sly St(all)one" was my only post to mention the name Rambo -- I mention both that Rambo is named after Rimbaud and that Rimbaud sounds like rainbow. That post also prominently features sailors, so we have both elements of "Sail on a Rainbow."

Incidentally, the title of the present post as an allusion to "A Simple Desultory Philippic" from the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Rose Stone -- Sly Stone's sister and bandmate, whose name is what occasioned my mention of Bill's red stone -- was born Rosemary Stewart.


Note added: To the meaning of carbuncle mentioned above, etymonline adds that it was "also the name of a semi-mythical gem from the East Indies formerly believed to be capable of shining in the dark." Sounds like Gazelem.

Sly St(all)one

In a brief dream just before waking this morning, I was sitting at a computer searching IMDb for the name Sly Stone because I wanted to find the first movie he had been in, but nothing was coming up. I expressed my frustration, and a person standing behind me -- who seemed to be a White woman but was not otherwise clearly defined -- said, "Well, why don't you just look up the name of the movie? It was First Blood. Everyone knows that." With that, I woke up.

First Blood (1982) of course features Sylvester "Sly" Stallone, not the psychedelic funk-soul musician Sly Stone. It's not Stallone's first movie, either, though it's the one that introduces his iconic character John Rambo. (Rocky would have been more relevant, I would have thought, if we're going to be conflating the actor with someone named Stone.)

I know essentially nothing about Sly and the Family Stone. My mother has mentioned a few times that she used to listen to them back in the day, but I believe it was her brother Eli who was the big fan and owned all the records. There were no Family Stone albums in the house when I was growing up, and prior to doing the preliminary research occasioned by this dream I wouldn't have been able to name a single one of their albums or songs or to have recognized Sly in a police lineup.

Since I obviously should have been searching the Internet for Sly Stone's first album, not his first movie, I went ahead and did that. The band's debut album, released in 1967, was A Whole New Thing. I thought I might get a picture of the album cover and one of the First Blood poster and put them together as an illustration for this post. Looking up A Whole New Thing on Wikipedia, though, I found that there were two different covers to choose from. The caption accompanying the second of these caught my eye:


Rose Stone, for those who have been -- or rather, for those who haven't been living under that particular Rock -- is the name of the central MacGuffin in the story being developed by Bill Wright, a 30-pound red stone which is a palantir-like object and has lots of important information and stories stored on it. (I suppose the title of this post suggests that "all" is contained within the Stone.) Bill has also been insisting lately that adjectives like cunning and wily can have a positive meaning, so sly fits right in.

Another interesting coincidence is that Sly Stone (who died just last month, it turns out) happens to share my birthday, the Ides of March.


Note added: After posting this, I had a vague memory of having seen a T-shirt in Taiwan that said something like "I would never try to stab you. If he'd stop being so shady, he could find a nice young lady. You don't have to die before you live."  I had googled the text and found that most of it (minus the stabbing bit) was from a Sly and the Family Stone song. I don’t think I photographed the shirt, or if I did I can’t find the photo, but repeating the search confirms that the source is indeed Sly Stone, the song "Life."


"You don't have to die before you live" is directly relevant to my last post, in which I wrote, "You can't really reincarnate without dying first, but people somehow tend to overlook that."

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Reincarnation, or something else?

As most regular readers will be aware, the proximate reason for my last post, "Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation," was questions raised by Bill Wright's theory -- to which he adduces considerable synchromystical evidence -- that I am the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of Númenor, a character who appears in Tolkien's Silmarillion and whose story is elaborated upon in Daymon Smith's channeled material.


People have proposed past lives for me before -- Lord Byron, Herman Melville, and Hyrum Smith, among many others -- but Pharazon (we usually dispense with the prefix and the circumflex around here) presents unique problems. First and most obvious -- so obvious that we tend to gloss over it -- is the fact that he is a fictional character. Accepting that I or anyone else is his literal reincarnation means accepting Tolkien's novels as historically true -- not just in some broad or figurative sense, but in sufficient detail for individual characters in his works to correspond to real people who lived somewhere or other in the distant past. Even if we swallow that camel, as Bill and Leo do, there remains this gnat to strain at: According to those same fictional-but-maybe-not works, Pharazon never died. Rather, he and his men "lie imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten, until the Last Battle and the Day of Doom." You can't really reincarnate without dying first, but people somehow tend to overlook that. My Uncle Bill, the first and most prolific of those who have proposed past lives for me, believes that Jesus Christ has reincarnated several times (most recently as a notorious criminal), with no explanation given as to how that squares with the Resurrection; and most Christian believers in reincarnation will point to John the Baptist as Elijah reincarnated, even though Elijah reportedly ascended bodily to heaven in a chariot of fire.

Maybe literal reincarnation is actually the wrong way to conceptualize whatever is going on here. That a new approach may be called for is suggested by the fact that Bill identifies me not only with Pharazon but with Humpty Dumpty -- yes, the nursery-rhyme character, as expanded by Lewis Carroll. Obviously, no one is going to make the case that Humpty Dumpty really existed and that I am his literal reincarnation. I mean, there's crazy, and then there's crazy, and we're not that crazy. And yet it seems to me that the sync evidence tying me to Humpty is of exactly the same character as that tying me (and Humpty) to Pharazon. I think Bill's understanding of this is that the symbol of Humpty is being used (by the sync fairies or whoever) as another way of tying me to Pharazon. For example, Daymon's version of Pharazon had a very special belt of which he was very proud, whereas I once took up the hobby of climbing brick walls and walking around on top of them, a pastime I abandoned after spraining my ankle in a fall. Once Humpty Dumpty is added to the mix -- he of course fell from a wall, and in Carroll's version had a special belt or cravat of which he was very proud -- this counts as another link between me and the Númenórean king,

Another interpretation that suggests itself is that I "am" Pharazon only in the same sense that I "am" Humpty Dumpty.

But in what sense could that be?

I have already mentioned Elijah and the problems inherent in supposing this translated being to have reincarnated as John the Baptist. A different model is perhaps suggested by the Mormon take on the relationship between Elijah and John -- the distinctive and rather confusing "doctrine of Elias." In Mormonism Elias, besides being the Greek form of the name Elijah, is a sort of title or role, usually explained as being that of a "forerunner" or a "restorer." Why that name should have that meaning is not exactly clear, as Elijah the Tishbite of the Old Testament did not himself play either of those roles in any obvious way. The idea seems to have developed out of the closing verses of the Old Testament (Mal. 4:5-6), where it is prophesied that "Elijah the prophet" will be sent "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (i.e. as a forerunner) and will turn "the heart of the children to their fathers" (perhaps implying some sort of restoration). Apparently what was originally a prophecy that Elijah himself would do those things somehow evolved into the use of his name as a title for whoever would do those things -- mainly, as it turned out, John the Baptist.

Even though this "Elias, which was for to come" (Matt. 11:14), identified with John, would seem to be a wholly prophetic construct with no real connection to the historical Elijah, the historical Elijah nevertheless does seem to be involved, since Matthew goes out of his way to mention that John dressed in the same distinctive way as Elijah (Matt. 3:4, 1 Kgs. 1:8). (Funnily, this distinctive costume involves a special belt, just as with Pharazon and Humpty; perhaps a bit of synchronistic encouragement for this line of thought?) It seems that the Tishbite himself was "an Elias" even though he wasn't a forerunner or restorer. And plenty of people who were forerunners or restorers are never called Elias. This suggests that Elias is not something as simple enough to have a definition but has more the quality of a personality, a dynamic and ever-developing archetype which can be instantiated in individuals as if by something along the lines of Sheldrakean resonance. "We can make new archetypes," Laeth recently wrote, and perhaps we are in the process of doing just that?

(Added to my to-read list: Elias: An Epic of the Ages by Orson F. Whitney.)

This conception of "Elias," as vague as it is at this point, is recognizably similar to the way supernatural roles like that of the Fisher King are treated in Last Call by Tim Powers. Bugsy Siegel is succeeded in this role first by the evil Georges Leon and then by the protagonist Scott Crane, but not in a way that involves anything like reincarnation. Becoming the Fisher King is partly a destiny you are born with and partly something you have to actively embrace and fight for, and the role itself is nothing that could be encapsulated in a definition but is flexible enough that it can be played for good or for evil. Still, it is a distinct thing with some sort of ontological reality -- not just a figurative way of describing people -- and it can only be filled by one person at a time.


Still just thinking aloud here and trying out different perspectives.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation

Today we're doing rambling theological speculations instead of sync. A change is as good as a rest.


In Joseph Smith's 1842 summary of Mormon beliefs, the second thing he mentioned -- second only to belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- was this:

We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression (AoF 1:2).

To modern people, this just seems like common sense. Obviously, each person is morally responsible only for his own actions. Obviously, no just God would punish one person for another person's actions, especially not for the actions of a distant ancestor on whom the descendant could have exerted no possible influence. We may have inherited a predisposition to sin from Adam but cannot possibly have inherited his actual sins themselves. Whatever "original sin" might be, it can't be that.

The problem with the above understanding is that elsewhere in Mormon scripture it is implied that the reason we are not punished for Adam's misdeeds is not that we are inherently incapable of being guilty of them but rather that Christ has atoned for them. It seems that we are forgiven for Adam's transgression in much the same way that we may be forgiven for our own, but that without Christ's intervention it would be just to punish us for what Adam did.

I say "it is implied" and "it seems" because the scriptures on this topic are not exactly crystal clear, but it seems to me that that is what they are saying.

Here is Mormon, channeling Christ, explaining why children should not be baptized:

Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God:

Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me.

And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me; wherefore, my beloved son, I know that it is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptize little children (Moro. 8:8-9).

Immediately before the passage I have bolded, Mormon seems to be saying that little children are inherently innocent, but then he goes on to say that "the curse of Adam is taken from them in me." In Genesis, the curse pronounced on Adam is that the ground will bring forth thorns and thistles, that he will need to work to survive, and that he will eventually die. Children don't work for a living, but that's because they are provided for by their parents or others, not because Christ removed the power of that curse over them. The other aspects of the curse -- most notably mortality -- affect children as much as anyone else. In fact, for most of human history, most human deaths occurred in infancy. Given that fact, together with the context of explaining why children need not repent or be baptized, I think we have to understand "the curse of Adam" as Adam's guilt, as original sin.

The other relevant, but highly confusing, passage is from the Pearl of Great Price. The passage I've bolded isn't exactly straight from the horse's mouth -- it's Joseph Smith receiving revelation about what Moses wrote about what Enoch taught about how a conversation between Adam and God was understood by the people -- but it's what we've got.

And our father Adam spake unto the Lord, and said:

Why is it that men must repent and be baptized in water?

And the Lord said unto Adam:

Behold I have forgiven thee thy transgression in the Garden of Eden.

Hence came the saying abroad among the people, that the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents cannot be answered upon the heads of the children, for they are whole from the foundation of the world.

And the Lord spake unto Adam, saying:

Inasmuch as thy children are conceived in sin, even so when they begin to grow up, sin conceiveth in their hearts, and they taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good. And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves, and I have given unto you another law and commandment. Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence . . . (Moses 6:53-57).

This is as close as the scriptures ever come to using the phrase "original sin" and -- despite the popular understanding that "Mormons don't believe in original sin" -- it doesn't say there is no such thing; it says that Christ has atoned for it.

That "wherein" (literally "in which") is a bit confusing, but I think the only coherent reading is to take it as meaning something like "wherefore" or "for which reason." It is saying that children are not guilty of the sins of the parents because Christ has atoned for original guilt -- but otherwise, they would be. The other possible reading is take it as a parenthetical explanation -- "but, by the way, when we say 'original guilt' we don't mean children being punished for their parents' sins" -- but then what exactly is Christ atoning for?

Adding to the confusion is the assertion that children are "whole from the foundation of the world"; Mormon uses the very same phrase in his own discussion of infant baptism (Moro. 8:12). This would seem to imply that they have always been whole and were thus never in need of any atonement, but I don't think it means that. Elsewhere in scripture, the atonement is spoken of as having been "prepared from the foundation of the world" (Mosiah 4:6-7), and Jesus, even though he was killed at a particular point in history and not before, is called "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Moses reports Enoch himself using such language:

And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced, saying: 

The Righteous is lifted up, and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world . . . (Moses 7:47).

Enoch is seeing a vision of a particular time in the future, when Jesus will be executed on the cross, and yet he still describes it as something happening "from the foundation of the world." Whatever that expression means, it seems clear that it doesn't necessarily mean that something has always been true and thus never needed to happen.

It's also important to note that the passage I've bolded above is not something that was revealed but just something that people were saying -- and the basis for that saying was apparently God's telling Adam that he, Adam, had been forgiven. The logic seems to be that we would have inherited Adam's guilt, but Adam was forgiven, and thus we inherit that forgiveness as well.


That's what these scriptures seem to be saying. Nevertheless, I must insist -- there's no arguing with bedrock moral intuitions -- that no one can be guilty of a sin they had no hand in committing, and that this is inherently and necessarily true, not something that was made-true by anything Jesus did or suffered.

So, where does that leave us?


"In Adam's fall / We sinnèd all." The only way that could be true would be if each of us was in some sense Adam. "You must consider yourselves as if you were, respectively, Adam and Eve," participants in the Mormon temple ceremony are (or used to be) told. But surely that is only because the ceremony uses Adam and Eve as symbolic "everyman" figures. I mean, we can't each of us be reincarnations of Adam or Eve, can we?

This brings us to two more cryptic statements from Joseph Smith's Book of Moses:

And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many (Moses 1:34).

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living; for thus have I, the Lord God, called the first of all women, which are many (Moses 4:26).

The explanations I heard growing up Mormon was that the first passage is saying that the name Adam means "many" (perhaps a scribal error, as it in fact means "man"), and the second is simply saying that there are many women, of which Eve is the first of all. But the two passages are too obviously parallel for them to mean two completely different things, using similar wording only by coincidence. I think we have to understand them to be saying that there are somehow many Adams and many Eves.

The immediate context of the many-Adams verse is that God has created "worlds without number" (v. 33), and that "there are many worlds . . . innumerable are they unto man" (v. 35). One fairly natural interpretation, then, is that each "world" (whether that means "planet" or "parallel universe") has its own first man, and that first man is always called, at least by God, Adam. I explored this possibility back in 2021 in "Lives, the universes, and everything," but here I want to explore a different possibility. The text doesn't say "the first man of each world"; it says "the first man of all men." As it reads, that seems like it should be a single unique figure, many worlds or not. But, making allowances for Joseph Smith's frontier grammar, I want to read it as "the first man of each man."

The first man of each man? Actually, my 2021 post also explored the idea that each Man in the fullest sense is composed of many men. I imagined God saying:

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

The idea was that there are countless parallel universes, many of which have some version of Moses, and that each of these individual Moseses is somehow part of a single, multiverse-spanning "larger Moses," the godlike being who is, if he only knew it, "our" Moses's true self. And the idea was that this was not something special about Moses but was the true nature of each and every human being.

These days, though, my thoughts are less on the idea of a Greater Self embracing many parallel lives than on one embracing many sequential ones. In other words, reincarnation. Each person is one in a series of incarnations of a greater Being, and each Being's very first incarnation (perhaps a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) -- the first man of each man -- is called Adam or, as the case may be, Eve. The story of the Fall, then, is a figurative telling of what happens when Being incarnates for the first time, leaving paradise, becoming mortal, and being clothed in a garment of skins. This process inevitably involves sin, or at least “transgression,” and this is the “original guilt” spoken of. More broadly, original guilt would include all the misdeeds of all one’s past incarnations and not only those of “Adam.”

This helps explain, in a way the conventional understanding of Adam and Eve does not, both why we would each be considered guilty of the sins of our respective “Adam” and why Christ would extend blanket amnesty for that guilt, so that each child is born clean. There is a sense in which we “are” our past incarnations and bear responsibility for their deeds, and another sense in which we are not them — no memory of their lives, no continuity of consciousness — and cannot meaningfully repent for anything they did.


Having a specific named example will make this easier to discuss this clearly. Let's suppose that George S. Patton was correct in his belief that he was the reincarnation of Hannibal and use him. But it is imprecise to say that Patton was Hannibal. Rather, both Patton and Hannibal were successive incarnations of some larger Being. It will be convenient to have a name for this Being that incarnated as both Hannibal and Patton, so let’s call him Resheph. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore any other incarnations this Resheph may have had.

The relationships among these three will bear a certain resemblance to those old Trinitarian formulas: Hannibal is Resheph, and Patton is Resheph, but Patton is not Hannibal, and yet there are not two Reshephs but one Resheph.

Patton cannot meaningfully repent for the sins of Hannibal. He doesn’t even know in any detail what those sins are, beyond what he can gather from history books and whatever inklings of memory he may imagine he has. He cannot truly feel remorse for something he reads in a history book, nor is it clear how he could “make amends” for Hannibal’s misdeeds when not only the people Hannibal harmed but the very world in which he lived is long gone. “Forsaking” some of Hannibal’s sins is easy enough — I’m sure Patton didn’t own slaves and refrained from offering child sacrifices to Baal — but the vast difference between the two men and their worlds makes this meaningless and not really redemptive. Not doing what Hannibal did turns out to be rather easy when you're not Hannibal.

So, supposing Hannibal died in his sins unrepentant, what happens? Patton cannot repent for Hannibal’s sins. Only Hannibal can do that, and Hannibal is dead. If Patton is counted guilty of the sins of Hannibal, then Patton is irrevocably damned, and it’s not clear what the point of his incarnation could be. If, on the other hand, Hannibal’s sins are unconditionally erased the moment Patton is born, then it seems that reincarnation is a morally unsatisfying get-out-of-jail-free card, rendering repentance unnecessary and irrelevant.

I think the only solution is that, while Patton cannot and must not be expected to repent for Hannibal’s sins, Resheph can and must.

For reincarnation to have any meaning, we have to assume that there is a larger Resheph consciousness who in certain conditions — between incarnations, presumably, and ultimately in the resurrection — has full access to the memory and experience of all his incarnations. Without this, the individual Being cannot really be said to live on after death. Without a unified Resheph consciousness, Patton is just a new being created from the dead Hannibal, just as the particles that once formed one body might be recycled to make another, and there is no more “life after death” than there would be under materialist assumptions.

Hannibal’s consciousness is more limited and impaired than Resheph’s and thus not identical to it, but I think it is still possible for Resheph to meaningfully repent for Hannibal’s deeds, much as a man can repent for something he did when he was drunk or otherwise impaired. Ideally, Hannibal repents for Hannibal’s sins before he dies; that is the best and easiest way. Failing that, though Resheph can attempt it, but he must do so while he has full access to his experience as Hannibal, not while he is in another incarnation and subject to the veil of forgetfulness.

However, these other incarnations are likely the primary means by which Resheph can enact his repentance. What a discarnate spirit can do to make amends for deeds done in the body is limited. We could imagine our hypothetical repentant Resheph thinking of what he needs to do to make amends and then arranging an incarnation where he will have the opportunity and inclination to do those things. Of course this will always be something of a gamble, since incarnating means passing through the veil of forgetfulness. You have to somehow try to arrange things so that you'll still be able to accomplish your mission even though your memory of what that mission is will be blocked.

Perhaps the amnesia and the lack of access to the larger consciousness are not total. Perhaps some syncs and hunches and visions and such are faint communications from the larger self, nudging you in the direction of your forgotten mission. Perhaps faint hints of the Resheph consciousness shining through were what enabled Patton to figure out that he had been Hannibal (again, supposing for the sake of the example that he was right about that). In some cases at least, Wordsworth may have been right that "not in entire forgetfulness . . . do we come."

Or perhaps it is mainly other Beings who arrange the incarnation and provide the nudges, particularly if the Being being reincarnated is not actually repentant. Perhaps some incarnation are arranged in order to provide experiences that may lead the larger Being to repentance.

But I think this is about as far as I can go with this using abstractions and a generic example. To really understand if it works, I think it will be necessary to imagine a specific example and write a story. I haven't written fiction since my teens and am probably not very good at it, but it seems to be what is indicated.


I'm still not entirely convinced that reincarnation really is compatible with Christianity. The reincarnation perspective tends to treat bodies as dispensable and replaceable, which is hard to reconcile with the resurrection idea of the body being a necessary and permanent part of the immortal soul. "In the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?" asked the Sadducees of the woman who had had seven successive husbands, "for they all had her." We might ask something similar of the soul who has had seven bodies and seven mortal identities, and no obvious answer suggests itself.


Just thinking aloud here. Comments are welcome, if anyone thinks they have some light to shed on these murky questions.

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Silver in the ears

Here’s a random sync. Earlier today I needed, for something I was writing, an example of a historical figure known for his cruelty. Not wanting to draw from the hackneyed 20th-century rogues' gallery of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and company, I briefly considered Vlad the Impaler and then thought, What about Genghis Khan? Didn't he use to execute prisoners by pouring molten silver into their ears? For whatever reason, that was the first specific example of historical cruelty that came to mind.

This train of thought was interrupted by my wife asking me to take, Scipio, one of our cats, to the vet for an ear infection, so I did that. The ear drops we'd been using before hadn't been effective, so the vet recommended a different kind. "This one doesn't use antibiotics," he explained. "It uses silver particles to kill the bacteria."


The timing, together with the extremely specific parallel of putting silver, in liquid form, into someone's ears, makes this a highly improbable sync.

Later I looked up the Genghis Khan thing. It turns out only one prisoner, Inalchuq, is said to have been executed in that manner. The silver is supposed to have been poured into his eyes as well as his ears, but for some reason I had only remembered the ears. I wonder if my cruelty brainstorming could have been influenced by a subconscious precognition of what the vet was going to prescribe.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Don't go back abed

This morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm, with a simple melodic motif in my head as if left over from a dream. Wanting to jot it down before it evaporated but not being musical enough to write out a tune by ear, I tapped it out on a piano app and scribbled down the names of the notes: D G B A B E D.

I immediately recognized this as a message -- presumably from Claire, as she has used this musical spelling method before (see "More on Joan and Claire"). DGB stands for "don't go back," and the remaining notes are a word, "abed." This is clearly related to the Rumi poem in "WaGon," with its repeated line, "Don't go back to sleep."

Changing "to sleep" to "abed" was necessitated by the constraint of having an alphabet that only goes up to G, but "abed" is also a word that has come up recently. In "Turnum outknaves all three," I linked to an old post from 2013, "Poems cut short by death," because one such poem is the Aeneid, which ends abruptly with the death of Turnus. But one of the other poems in that post is the one I wrote in 2009 and reposted earlier this year, "I worry so for dear old Bill," in which Bill has us worried because he has been "so long abed."

Obviously after that I couldn't very well just go back to sleep! So far nothing out of the ordinary has resulted from my getting up an hour earlier than planned.

Always be the best dreamers

Spotted on a T-shirt this morning (reconstructed, since I couldn't photograph it without being creepy). By this standard, I do think my ...