Pain. Paradise. Repeat.

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about what shape the next stanza in my series would take. It is to be about the Agony in the Garden, but beyond that I didn't have any very clear concept of it. (The basic framework and precise poetical form of the stanza series was given to me in a "download" during prayer, but it is left to me to flesh out those bones.) In a hypnopompic reverie, I thought of the Garden as a symbol of Paradise (my vivid mental image of the Garden is one of Eden-like beauty), but Jesus' experience there was marked by intense suffering rather than idyllic happiness. I tried out a tentative couplet on that theme but rejected it because it rhymed pain with again, an unacceptable kludge.

When I went out in the morning, I almost immediately encountered this T-shirt, on the back of the motorcyclist in front of me on the road:

I noted that 22/7 is an approximation of pi, with pain the circumference and paradise the diameter, but I think that's just noise, or at least I have not yet found in it any coherent symbolic meaning.

The stanza remains unwritten. I had hoped to get as far as the Crucifixion today, Good Friday, and do the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, but I don't think that's going to work out. Well, inspiration is not exactly known for conforming to liturgical calendars.

Campbell sync

At 2:28 this morning I received an email, addressed to a group of which I am part, which included this:

In the early 2000s I was very keen on Joseph Campbell, who occupied what was probably a similar cultural space [to Wayne Dyer]; and got most of his books. The basis was mixture of Jung and comparative mythology, with a spiritual basis in Buddhism and Hinduism - and an American self-help spin. 

At 7:07 this evening (as indicated by a timestamped screenshot), I read this in The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

One model for the powerful but scattered impact of the Alice books is suggested by Joseph Campbell's influential 1949 work of comparative mythology The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I dislike The Hero With a Thousand Faces and rarely think of Joseph Campbell; when I do mention him, it's usually by accident because, in a strangely persistent slip of the tongue, I am forever referring to the linguist Joseph Greenberg by that name. The sync made me think of my recent dream "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica" (March 12), the post title being the motto of a dream character called Campbell.

Speaking of a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica, last night I read the long and engaging comment thread on Kristor's Orthosphere post "Anselm & Job," consisting mostly of an argument between /ourguy/ J. M. Smith and more conventional Supergod Christians like Kristor. Smith writes that "Jesus was present to men in the flesh; YHWH and El were what we today call theoretical constructs or representations" -- like, I might add, that blasted thousand-faced hero! -- to which Kristor responds:

When I suggested that, to the 1st Century Judeans and Galileans, YHWH was real, and not just a theoretical construct, I meant that he was not real to them the way that quarks are to us, or that the luminiferous ether once was, but rather that he was real to them in at least the way that to us Antarctica is real, even though almost none of us have ever seen it.

There is also talk of fighting for its own sake, as promoted by dream-Campbell. Smith writes of "mere controversialists who cross swords to keep their mind off of death" and states that "Controversy is the soul of blogging."

Sued by a roofing company

Last night I dreamt -- almost entirely in Chinese, which is unusual for me -- that I received a phone call from a roofing company informing me that they were suing my school. The grounds for the lawsuit were as follows.

My family had owned a cat that was extremely aggressive and used to scratch and bite people viciously. (This cat was called Tri, the name of one of my past cats who in waking life was never aggressive.) We kept her for years, but in the end my mother got tired of our getting "torn to shreds" all the time, so we advertised to find a new home for her, making her behavioral issues clear in the ad. A woman who worked for the roofing company had responded to the ad, adopted the cat, and, predictably, ended up getting severely scratched. The scratch became infected and, by some freak chance, the woman died. She had been pregnant at the time, doubling the tragedy. This woman proved to be irreplaceable in her role at the roofing company, and without her the company was failing. The boss believed this had all been an intentional plot on the part of my school to sabotage his roofing company, which was why it was the company that was suing my school rather than the woman's family suing mine.

I said that I was very sorry to hear about their employee but that the lawsuit was ridiculous and would be thrown out of court. We had lived with the cat for years without any of us suffering anything worse than some nasty lacerations, so it was absurd to suggest that letting someone else adopt her amounted to a premeditated attempt on the new owner's life. Nor did we have the ability to somehow cause a particular intended victim to respond to our ad. Furthermore, a roofing company was in no way in competition with a language school, so there could be no conceivable corporate motive for the alleged sabotage.

After I hung up, I felt bad about having spent the whole call inveighing against a lawsuit that had zero chance of success anyway and having been so perfunctory in my expression of sympathy for what was after all a terrible human tragedy for which I was to some degree responsible.

Kind of a horrible dream, though not a nightmare in the conventional sense.

⁂

After I woke, the combination of a roofing company and my school made me think of my October 2025 dream "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," in which a roofer shows up at my school. Before looking up the dream, I had forgotten that it involved my being addressed as Danny John Malkovich. In the very long comment thread on yesterday's post "Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)," I mentioned that in the dream documented there I had gone by the pseudonym Marvin Fenlingstone Starsky, and I had then tied this to my October 2021 dream "Gene Hackman," in which a boy named Danny changed into a boy named Marvin. I also note in "Clinkscales" that the Starsky character in the TV series "Starsky and Hutch" (of which I know nothing but the name) has a brother named Nicholas Marvin Starsky. In the "Gene Hackman" post, I note that John Malkovich had a brother called Danny.

The Danny John Malkovich dream, like the Total Racism Indicator dream, features Black people and has a "racist" element (including a use of the n-word). As Debbie has pointed out, this does seem to be a recurring theme in my dreams, which is odd given that I live in a country with essentially no Black people and rarely have occasion to think about that race in waking life.

Chester Bennington and King Hamlet

Last night, I watched Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of the Linkin Park songs "The Emptiness Machine" and "Guilty All the Same." Yes, watched, and not listened only. I don't usually watch music videos, but I watched this one.

The video begins with the new, Emily Armstrong-fronted Linkin Park performing. When, around the 45-second mark, the late lamented Chester Bennington runs onto the stage, as if returned from the sunless house of Hades, it caused an unexpected emotional reaction: goosebumps, tears, and the sudden thought of a line from Hamlet: "In the same figure, like the King that's dead."

He and Emily are great together. As the top comment on the video puts it, "I love how Linkin Park sounds together with Linkin Park."

Today I noticed in my blogroll a new post, "Far Over Misty Mountains Cold," by The Saxon Cross, a blog I haven't visited in a good long time. It turned out to be a video, and I was no longer in a video mood, so I just read the Tolkien poem of the title, reprinted below the video. At the bottom of the page were a few links to older posts. One called "Black Hole Sun" caught my eye because that phrase has been in the sync stream from time to time, so I clicked. It's about Chris Cornell but also includes an unexpected reference to Chester Bennington:

If you do a quick google search on the issue, you will quickly find claims that Cornell was working with DJ Avicii (Tim Bergling), Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain on a documentary film about child trafficking before all four were suicided by the elites they were going to expose. The rings they were going to expose apparently involved Jeffery Epstein.

If Chester was indeed "suicided" (i.e., murdered), that adds potential meaning to last night's spontaneous thought connecting him with the ghost of the murdered King Hamlet, returned to earth to seek revenge.

HAMLET.

Speak, I am bound to hear.

GHOST.

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

Here's another excerpt from the "Black Hole Sun" post:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers.

That sounds like "The Emptiness Machine." Bill has connected me with the character Cypher before. Cypher, spelt like that and capitalized, is Shakespeare's word for "zero" in the Prologue to Henry V, and "The Emptiness Machine" is from the album From Zero.

At the bottom of the "Black Hole Sun" post was, again, a handful of links to earlier posts, including "Idylls of the King." Tennyson has been in the sync stream -- most recently earlier today, in "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key" -- so again I clicked. Unsurprisingly, the post begins with a quotation from the poem from which it takes its name:

Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,

The King is King, and ever wills the highest.

Hamlet's mission, too, is to "strike for the King," and in the end he dies.

⁂

Note added: The Linkin Park video even includes a bald bearded guy with a headset, more than a little reminiscent of Cypher in his betrayal scene:

The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key

In "The pebble key" (March 26), I discuss how Joseph Smith's seer stones and specs were described both as white pebbles and as a "key." I connect this with Johnny English's comparing his "small key" to the "pebble" with which David brought down Goliath, and I also mention Joseph Smith's identification of "the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17" with both a seer stone and a "key word." In "White quartz pebbles (now with added syncs!)" (March 27), I add to the mix the "tiny white pebbles" and "white polished quartz pebbles" of Wendy Berg's Gwenevere and the Round Table.

Today I started reading The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Once again I was greeted by white pebbles and Revelation 2:17.

In his diary, Carroll liked to celebrate notable days by marking them with 'a white stone', a mental paperweight that separated out important memories and prevented them from being lost in the general drift of past events.  For example, a day in June 1856 that he had spent photographing Alice . . . was marked 'most specially with a white stone,' and three months later he did the same to commemorate his first meeting with Tennyson. The usual explanation for this practice points out similar formulas in classical authors: Pliny, for example, describes the Thracians' habit of putting a white pebble in one urn on happy days, and a black one in a different urn on unhappy ones, which allowed them to calculate [literally!] their overall levels of satisfaction. . . .

Yet almost nothing in Carroll's life is capable of being interpreted in just a single way . . . . Even his 'white stone' is ambiguous. In addition to being a classical commonplace, the same phrase is found in the Bible, which Carroll knew with the intimacy he tended to reserve for books rather than people, where it indicates absolution from sin: 'To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written' (Revelation 2:17).

Tennyson is also a sync. In preparation for writing the next stanza in the series I have been posting here, which will be about the Agony in the Garden, I had been thinking of what Jesus says to Peter there: "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matt. 26:41) and connecting it with a line of Tennyson's Ulysses recently quoted in "Filling Peter's shoes" (March 22): "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will." Peter was mentioned in "The pebble key" due to his association with both stones and keys, and the same post quotes a description of Joseph Smith's seer stone as "a white, glossy pebble, resembling a human foot in shape." Since the name Peter means "rock," a human foot made of stone is precisely what would "fill Peter's shoes."

On the next page after the white stone references quoted above, Douglas-Fairhurst quotes the end of Humpty Dumpty's final poem:

a poem recited by Humpty Dumpty that manages to end simultaneously on a perfect rhyme and a narrative cliffhanger: '"And when I found the door was shut, | I tried to turn the handle, but --".'

Carroll's Humpty Dumpty has himself been associated with Peter (via Pharazon) in past syncs; and more generally, eggs are called "magic stones" in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" (November 2023). I had recently been thinking of that connection again when, on March 31, I snapped this photo in a breakfast shop of white stones (sitting more-or-less "on a wall") juxtaposed with white eggs (and, I notice now, with an open door).

Given the key theme, Humpty's reference to a shut door piqued my curiosity. I googled the lines to find the context and ended up on this page. The poem does in fact reference the door being locked as well as shut:

And when I found the door was locked,

I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

And when I found the door was shut,

I tried to turn the handle, but --'

I had been prompted to take up a biography of Lewis Carroll by a train of thought that began with Mormon's claim, "all children are alike unto me; wherefore, I love little children with a perfect love; and they are all alike" (Moro. 8:17), on which I will be posting later on my Book of Mormon blog. I had been contemplating the contrast between Mormon's professed love for the Platonic Idea of Children with Carroll's love for a particular child. It was therefore interesting to read what Humpty says to Alice shortly after reciting the poem just quoted:

'I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,' Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; 'you're so exactly like other people.'

And at the bottom of the page, not far from those lines, what else but a key!

Note added: The white stone references are on pp. 25-26. On pp. 50-51, we find this:

Even an ordinary word such as 'little' could occupy a disproportionate amount of space on the page: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland alone contains more than a hundred repetitions of the word -- in one paragraph Alice finds a 'little golden key' on a 'little three-legged table' and uses it to unlock a 'little door about fifteen inches high'; Carroll deploys the word as if casting a spell.

That's almost exactly the same as The Small Golden Key, the title of Thinley Norbu's book. Douglas-Fairhurst emphasizes its smallness, or rather the author's description of it as "little," bringing us yet again to Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Debbie's email about they key she received also emphasizes its small size:

She also included in a separate poly bag a very small skeleton key . . . . What really got my attention however is there are 3 small rings on the top of the small brass key. . . . I also found the 3 rings on the very small key interesting as they remind me of your three pentacles post.

Supper

When first on Heaven's bread they'd dined,

They slept and woke again to find

New hunger. Day by day they fed

Again on manna, and are dead,

For Moses never found a way

To make the life he gave them stay.

    But Jesus' bread and Jesus' cup

    Will never fade into the past.

    No, Jesus Christ will make his supper last.

Clinkscales (and I ace the Total Racism Indicator)

Today I learned that Duke Ellington's piano teacher was called Marietta Clinkscales -- a clear instance of onomastic determinism. Just as Wordsworth had to become a poet, Bolt a sprinter, and Colón a colonizer, Miss Clinkscales obviously had no choice but to become a piano teacher.

⁂

I was looking up the Duke because he appeared in last night's dreams. I dreamt that I was visiting an old friend from college, a very dark-skinned Black man. Since our college days he had had some sort of racial awakening, for which he was somewhat apologetic: "You came all this way to see me, and all I want to talk about is Black people stuff!"

"That's okay," I said. "You can still be friends with a racist, right?"

"Of course. That reminds me, would you be willing to help me out with my research by taking this racism test I designed? It's called the Total Racism Indicator."

"'Total Racism'? I'm sure I'll ace it."

The first question asked whether I preferred white sand or black sand. I told my friend I wasn't sure how to answer.

"Well, you came to this black-sand beach to visit me, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I got here by crawling across a white-sand desert, when I could have just flown."

"Okay, maybe just skip that question."

Another question had a photo of Duke Ellington and said, "This is a photo of Duke Ellington. Could he be Greek? (A) Yes. (B) Maybe part Greek. (C) No, because he's Black. (D) No, because he's American."

I went with the last option. I hesitated at first because I was afraid it wasn't racist enough and would hurt my score, but in the end I decided it was a trick question and all the answers were racist.

In the end I "passed" -- i.e., was indicated to be a Total Racist. I was unreasonably excited about this, shouting, "I passed! I passed!" and high-fiving my friend and other random people of various races who happened to be in the vicinity.