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.

Reading glasses

Though almost everyone else in my family wears glasses, I have enjoyed excellent visual acuity all my life. Every time I've had it tested, for routine physicals and such, it's been 20/10, placing me in the top 1% of the population. Until recently, my close-range vision has been excellent, too. Back when I was a poor student, I would routinely download books from Project Gutenberg and print them off in 6-point Arial Narrow to save on paper, and my Bible of choice was a New Testament printed on pages the size of a business card.

Middle age is finally catching up with me, though, and I'm beginning to develop a mild case of presbyopia. (As my brother is fond of pointing out, the etymological meaning of that word is "cowboy eyes." Didn't Pete Townshend say all the best cowboy actors look like they're always squinting?) A couple of days ago I made an appointment to be tested for a pair of reading glasses.

Today I started reading Words of Them Liberated, having read only the opening epigraph yesterday. It begins with a brief introduction in which the author reflects on how his life has changed since he wrote the first two Words books, one of these changes being that he now has to "read behind glasses." It looks as if I, too, will be reading most of this third book through glasses.

Given the steady stream of synchronicities related to spectacles, this little coincidence may be significant.

Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs

I've finally finished The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered. Two new themes are introduced near the end of this 169-page book: breadcrumbs and an iron pen.

On p. 133, we read that "a trail came they upon, as of bread crumb's lighted upon a dark forest lain," and some were "carried by those crumbs to a course directing to Eru-place." I understand from what Bill and others have said that these crumbs will become an important motif in the third book.

Then on p. 157, we read of an iron pen created from a shard of a broken sword made of meteoric iron:

so may iron of a star's fall cut, and of its material, be forged a sword, for cutting, and if broken, in time, of shards may be written, upon plates of brass, by that same iron's instrumentation, now in pen held to cut by strokes a tale

In the few pages between that reference and the end of the book, this iron pen is mentioned eight more times.

I then began the third book in the series, Words of Them Liberated, of which I have so far read only the table of contents and the page after, which has a short poem about birds as an epigraph:

and them not alone,

the birds might chatter, and sing,

of all the beauty, peace, resolute Abiding,

and make of that Void, chirp.

Another book I have just begun is When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, which perhaps less surprisingly also begins -- just before the table of contents in this case -- with a short epigraph about birds (ellipses in the original):

Birds, birds...Behold them armed for action like daughters of the spirit...

    On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation.

--ST.-JOHN PERSE

Last night I happened to check YouTube and ended up listening to the Right Wing Coalition's latest, in which it is said that "Tucker [Carlson] wants to try and get everyone to follow his breadcrumbs."

I also finished rereading the Book of Isaiah yesterday -- I'm taking a little break from the Book of Mormon, which I have already gone through four times this year (some reading, some listening) -- and after a bit of hesitation as to what book of scripture to tackle next, I thought, well, why not just continue right on with Jeremiah? Maybe do all the prophetic books. I started last night and got as far as Chapter 17 today. That chapter begins, "The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron" -- which was enough of a sync to make me stop reading and write this post. This is one of only two references to an iron pen in all of scripture. (The other is in Job. I'm actually noticing quite a lot of Job-like language so far in my present rereading of Jeremiah, which I hadn't really picked up on before.)

The three themes listed in this post's title may not be entirely separate. The iron pen is introduced in Slumbered as a weapon, cutting like a sword. So are the birds in the St.-John Perse epigraph "armed for action . . . On the white page." The expression about following breadcrumbs comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where the children are unable to follow the breadcrumb trail they lay down because the crumbs are eaten by birds -- leaving, I suppose, an unmarked landscape like a "white page with infinite margins."