Wonderful Mountain Apes

My post "A feast for the god of war" made me think of the fact that in childhood I was the president of two "societies": the War Society and the Wonderful Mountain Apes Society. The latter (which was a cliff-climbing group) got me wondering whether there might be any real mountain called Wonderful Mountain, and that led me to a poem I'd never read before, "Blaavin" by Alexander Smith. It twice addresses Blaavin (Blà Bheinn on the Isle of Skye) as "wonderful mountain." These are the closing lines:

At a clear open turn of the roadway

My passion went up in a cry,

For the wonderful mountain of Blaavin

Was bearing his huge bulk on high,

Each precipice keen and purple

Against the yellow sky.

The yellow sky of the Golden Age has been a major theme recently, so this got my attention. This photo, from here, where it is captioned "Blaven at sunset, from Loch Hourn," suggests the sort of image the poet had in mind:

Since I'm giving up 4chan for Lent, I decided to give https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ one last twirl for Mardi Gras. I got "Occultism & Magick General: Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength edition" (April 11, 2018), with this image:

There's lots going here synchronistically, of course, with the Sun and Moon as the two eyes of Horus and so on, but what caught my eye in the present context was the purple-and-yellow coloration of the god. The purple parts of his body form a rough triangle, like a purple mountain against a yellow sky. There is water in the foreground, just as the image of Blà Bheinn I found was taken "from Loch Hourn." Even the name of the lake suggest Horus (Horon in Hebrew).

The post itself was something that is often reposted: a link to a massive (but sadly now defunct) online document dump known as Ape's Library because it was curated by someone using the Crowleyan moniker Ape of Thoth.

So, purple and yellow, with an Ape connection. I decided to click "Random" once more just to see what would come up. I got "/LoA/ - Law of Attraction & Manifesting General" (November 2, 2021), with this image:

A purple mountain against a partly-yellow sky, with a lake in the foreground.

Tim knows

I dreamt that I was at some sort of breakfast buffet, possibly at a college dining hall. There were very few dishes to choose from.

I commented to a woman standing near me, "They've got all kinds of things here: eggs and egg sandwiches."

"Well, we were just talking about wanting to eat more raw food," she said. I understood that she meant not uncooked food but rather extremely simple fare with few ingredients.

"Oh, look, someone found bacon," I said, noticing that food on another patron's tray. I looked around for a bit but couldn't find any bacon myself. I gave up and found a table at which to eat my eggs over easy and my eggs over easy sandwich.

The woman I had spoken to earlier came over to my table, followed by a man. This man, whose name was apparently Rick, had a lot of five-by-seven stickers printed with something like "Rick is pleased to have made your acquaintance," with the name in a much larger font than the rest of the text. When he met someone, instead of offering a business card, he would stick one of these stickers on the other person's clothing, and he had just done that to the woman.

The woman, apparently replying to an invitation from Rick, said, "Well, if you want to have dinner, we should probably do it in the morning."

"That would be pretty hard to do," I said, understanding that dinner in the morning was impossible (it would be breakfast, not dinner) and that she was snubbing Rick. The woman looked at me a little quizzically and then sat down next to me, and Rick wandered off.

I tried to pour myself a cup of coffee, but the coffee pot was a strange complicated contraption that I didn't know how to use properly, and I ended up spilling it all over the chairs and the floor. The woman and I mopped up some of the coffee with paper napkins, and then someone came over and offered to use a real mop, which I thought was impressively professional.

We moved to a new table, and the woman showed me how to use the unnecessarily complex coffee pot properly, adding that timknows.com was a great resource for that sort of thing. I understood this to be a website operated by Tim Hortons that dispensed all sorts of coffee-related know-how.

Our new table didn't have normal chairs. It was close to a wall, and the seats had no legs but had to be stuck to the wall using very strong tape, and the customers had to do this themselves. I taped my seat to the wall, guesstimating how high it should be, and sat down.

The woman said, "Let me check you so I can see how high mine should be." I held out of my arms and she started sort of frisking me.

"Wow, you're really fit."

"Uh, not really."

"And I'm so gross."

"Oh, come on!"

I keep myself in peak physical condition -- meaning the peak of the bell curve -- and she was very conventionally attractive, so it was transparently obvious that she was flattering me and fishing for compliments. I thought, What kind of amateur-hour honeypot operation is this?

As I woke up, I heard, in "Agartha" style, the lines "where women glow and men blunder" from the song "Down Under." (The original is actually "plunder" rather than "blunder.") In the context of the dream, I understood this to mean "Where the women are conspicuous undercover government agents (glowies) but the men are duped by them."

Then I realized that other lyrics from that song also connected to the dream. It begins with lines that have been discussed here before (see "Choom smoke and zombies"):

Traveling in a fried-out Kombi

On a hippie trail, head full of zombie

As mentioned in that post, Bill has associated the "zombie" in the song with Saruman, whom he also identifies with the "Tim" character from another of my dreams (see "Tim and The Key") -- so a potential link to timknows.com.

There's also a reference to an impressive phsyique -- "six foot four and full of muscles" -- and my "not really" reply even syncs with this annotation on the Genius lyrics page:

In the music video for this song, this particular guy is the band’s drummer, Jerry Speiser. Only he wasn’t really "6 foot 4 and full of muscles," which meant that he had to stand on something to get extra height and also wore a wig.

but the clearest link to the dream is these lines:

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous

She took me in and gave me breakfast

In the dream, I'm having breakfast with a strange lady whom I suspect of being a fed.

A feast for the god of war

Chinese New Year, beginning the Year of the Fire Horse, coincides with Mardi Gras this year. I'm thinking this is not a good omen.

Mardi -- ruby Tuesday, stupid bloody Tuesday -- is the day of Mars. In the Chinese system, both Fire and the Horse are associated with Mars as well. Fat Tuesday suggests the feeding fat of an ancient grudge.

Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great god, that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them!

After Mardi Gras, Lent. After the red horse bringing war, the black horse bringing famine.

Anyway, happy New Year!

Clavis avis

This morning I was, for complex psychological reasons, listening to a vaporwave remix of "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry.

At the same time, I was browsing /x/, and just as I heard the line "like a bird without a cage," I clicked on a thread with this as the main image:

It's a bird holding in its bill a bit key, such as it might use for getting out of its cage. Just two days ago, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," I had posted this image, which also includes a bird holding a bit key.

I got that image from the Duckstack, hence this post's Duckstack-style two-word rhyming title. The artist's name is, appropriately, Davis.

Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free -- 

The herds are shut in byre and hut, 

  For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power, 

  Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting all 

  That keep the Jungle Law!

 I was reciting what I could remember of this to myself as I rode my motorcycle, and when I arrived home I sat down to read the nigh-unreadable Words of the Faithful. I turned a page and thought I saw the italicized word garuda in the text, but it turned out to be instead the somewhat visually similar gunwudu. (What I quote below is, believe it or not, a single sentence!) [Note added: actually two sentences.]

Well, in that day the wandering dead spirits oft were captured, ensnared, or mislead [sic] into the deep places, Lower Airs of confusing orientation; whereby light itself may be held in awe, fear, reverence, for the faces it brings to memory, or the searing recall of one's deeds to those trusting; or beyond our knowledge, as strangers needless brought to grieve. So death by the sinister gunwudu, the fearful dread of a dark dragon form, disbanding and scattering its fumes across the town-settlement: Death indeed for all folk in those lands a terror beheld; and elves were little spoken of, and often in disregard; weak things, incapable of delivering even themselves  from Sauron's thralling reach.

Gunwudu appears only one other time in the text, in the grapholalia section in the back, where the author translates it as "Hell-dragon," apparently from gunn "dragon" and Udûn "Hell." The fact that I had initially misread the word as garuda struck me as a minor sync, because in "All the pebbles I have seen" I quoted the Donovan line "Dragon kite in the sky" and said it "got my attention because Garuda is a kite."

Now the really weird part. When I searched for the text of the Kipling poem so that I could include it in this post, I found it on the Kipling Society website, but my Yiddish-corrupted mind thought tush must surely be a misprint for tusk, so I decided to check another website for a second opinion. I clicked on the second link in my search results, Poetry Nook, and experienced a very bizarre glitch.

Although the address bar clearly said "https://poetrynook.com/poem/now-chil-kite-brings-home-night," the text the page displayed was not that poem but something entirely different I'd never heard of, a short poem numbered 66 and attributed to someone with the fake-sounding name Michael Wigglesworth:

Thus he doth find of all Mankind,
  that stand at his left hand,
No mother’s son but hath misdone,
  and broken God’s command.
All have transgress’d, even the best,
  and merited God’s wrath,
Unto their own perditi-on
  and everlasting scath.

This turns out to be the 66th stanza of a very long poem called The Day of Doom Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement, by the totally real New England Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth.

I hit Ctrl-R, and the page loaded properly, displaying the Kipling poem. I didn't think to screenshot the glitched version, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I solemnly affirm that this really happened. I checked my browser history and verified that I had visited no other Poetry Nook page than the Chil the Kite one. Even more bizarrely, I have not been able to find the Wigglesworth stanza on the Poetry Nook site at all. I went through all 14 pages of search results for Wigglesworth, and it's not there.

Getting some other random poem instead of Chil the Kite would have been weird enough, but look again at the Kipling poem and the Wigglesworth stanza. They are each eight lines with precisely the same meter and rhyme scheme -- iambic tetrameter lines consisting of two rhyming parts, alternating with trimeters -- and they are even formatted in exactly the same way, with even-numbered lines indented by two spaces. (The only difference is that Kipling capitalizes the indented lines, while Wigglesworth does not.) As Debbie likes to say, What are the odds? Furthermore, the gunwudu sentence is, like the Wigglesworth stanza, about the spirits of the dead coming to a bad end.

I have absolutely no idea how to explain what happened.

Since the coincidences are already well into impossible territory anyway, I thought I might as well push my luck and see if the phrase "Day of Doom" appeared in any of Kipling's poetry. A search turned up "La Nuit Blanche," which begins thus:

I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?

What follows is apparently an account of fever-dreams or delirium, with the poet's hallucinations including a "Blood Red Mouse" (cf. "Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice"). Curious about the story behind it, I checked the Kipling Society's Readers' Guide, which has this to say:

This is an account of delirium, reminiscent of Kipling’s later “The Mother’s Son” which follows “Fairy-Kist” in Limits and Renewals. It also has an echo of “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898, author of Alice in Wonderland) and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Seriously? The first thing they say about it is that it's reminiscent of "The Mother's Son"? As you can see above, the phrase "mother's son" appears in the 66th stanza of The Day of Doom and nowhere else in that very long poem.

La Nuit Blanche means "the sleepless night" in French. The Chil the Kite poem is about nocturnal animals spending the night hunting rather than sleeping.

Note added: I've looked up "The Mad Gardener's Song." I'm sure that I've never read the entire poem but that I have seen these lines quoted:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.

I can't think where, though. Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins for some reason come to mind as likely suspects, but I don't think it was actually either of them. I remember the key point was the repeated formula "He thought he saw . . . He looked again, and found it was . . . ," and that this was being used to make some point about cognition or perception. Can anyone help me out here?

The Sun in my hand, and in a barn

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the outside world through a window and "watches the Sun, which she always refers to as 'he' and treats as a living entity."

From Josie's bedroom Klara has a good view of the Sun's progress across the sky, and comes to believe that he goes to his nightly rest within a farmer's barn that stands on the horizon.

The idea that an "AI" would not have access to basic information about the Sun is just a bit hard to swallow, but it certainly made for a striking sync.

In yesterday's post "Not in the well," I discuss the children's book Wake Up, Sun!, in which a dog and pig look for the Sun in a well. After that, the next place they think to look is behind a barn.

In the Ishiguro novel, Klara's reason for thinking the Sun sleeps in the barn is presumably that the barn "stands on the horizon," so that the Sun appears either to set behind it or rise from behind it (depending on whether the barn is in the east or the west). In Wake Up, Sun! the Sun also appears to rise from behind the barn.

Earlier, the animals had attempted to wake up the Sun by "yelling" (i.e. making their respective animal sounds) in the night:

In the same bookstore where I found the Ishiguro novel, I also found a children's book called The Moon Dropped, a translation by Mei-hwa Li of a Chinese story by Jin-Lin Jang. In the story, some frogs find a yellow balloon and believe that the Moon has fallen to earth. They try to get the Moon back into the sky by croaking loudly at night.

It's the Moon, not the Sun, but it still seems closely related.

Yellow balloons have been in the sync stream before. Most recently, in the music video for "Grapes of Wrath" (see "Rock my Audible"), Brian Bell has a yellow balloon stand in for him in a group Zoom call.

Earlier, the yellow balloon appeared as a sync symbol associated with Dee, Kelley, and Dee Kelley in "Another link between John Dee and DeForest Kelley" (2022) and "Caster and the yellow balloon" (2025).

Brown and black, cheek and jaw

My post "All the pebbles I have seen" takes its title from a song by Donovan. Bill pointed out that the singer's name means "dark" or "black." More specifically, according to Wiktionary:

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh (“black”).

It's not a very common name, Donovan, and so when I happened to glance up from my book to the TV screen playing the Winter Olympics in the café where I lunched today, the name Donovan Carrillo caught my eye. It's the name of a Mexican figure skater.

In keeping with his name ("brown and black"), Carrillo is dressed in black and is racially "brown." Figure skating is, unsurprisingly, dominated by what Leonard Jeffries called "ice people" (Whites and East Asians), and Carrillo is reportedly "the only Latino on the ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics."

Curious about this Donovan's surname, I looked it up and found that Carrillo is a "nickname for a person with some peculiarity of the cheek or jaw, Spanish carillo." Lowercase carillo is defined as "parte carnosa de la cara, desde los pómulos hasta lo bajo de la quijada" ("the fleshy part of the face, from the cheekbones to the lower jaw").

As I mentioned, I saw Donovan Carrillo on TV when I happened to glance up from the book I was reading. That book was Lehi in the Desert by Hugh Nibley. Nibley has this to say about the meaning of the title character's name:

There is a remarkable association between the names of Lehi and Ishmael which ties them both to the southern desert, where the legendary birthplace and central shrine of Ishmael was at a place called Be'er Lehai-ro'i. Wellhausen rendered the name "spring of the wild-ox jawbone," but Paul Haupt showed that Lehi (for so he reads the name) does not mean "jaw" but "cheek," which leaves the meaning of the strange compound still unclear.

So I saw Carrillo, whose name means "cheek or jaw," while reading a book about Lehi, whose name means, depending on which scholar you trust, either "cheek" or "jaw."