From the Narrow Desert
Tam multa, ut puta genera linguarum sunt in hoc mundo: et nihil sine voce est.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Meme supplies cut off
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Lazy lions in suits
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Koko the monkey with no tail
This would also seem to tie back to a dream he shared from much earlier in which a voice that he associated with himself (by the letter G) had an underground “dojo” of sorts in which he and a man named Diego would fight. Diego, I had noted at the time, is another form of the name Jacob, who is Israel. William was dreaming of fighting Israel.
Monday, April 14, 2025
The monkey gardener
The kindhearted monkey that [nurtures] the blossoms and vines,His scrub brush and sponge in a bucket of solvent and soap,With infinite care all the tenuous tendrils entwinesWith all the finesse of a rope-maker weaving his rope.A monkey [mysterious], a monkey [of learning] is he.He knows of the rose, [of the quince] and the blackberry dark.With all that he knows, it's a wonder he chose to be freeOf charge for the work that he does in his plot at the park.Our simian cousin a hardworking gardener is,And payment in full for the labor he does shall be his.
- Plentimaw Fish: Angelfish the size of giant sharks. The name is derived from their multiplicity of mouths, through which they constantly ingest the stories conveyed by the waters. Inside their bodies, the stories combine to form new stories.
- Mali: A "Floating Gardener" composed of interwoven flowering vines and water plants that behave as a single organism. He is one of many, whose task is to prevent stories from becoming irretrievably convoluted and to cut away weeds on the Ocean's surface. Floating Gardeners are divided into a hierarchy of classes, of which Mali belongs to the First Class, presumably the highest. Mali, and presumably other Floating Gardeners, is virtually invulnerable, being able to withstand any and all attacks made against him by the Chupwalas.
Choom smoke and zombies
In the early hours of Palm Sunday (April 13), I had a very brief dream in which I was preparing to pass through a particular town and was warned to "watch out for the choom smoke." I understood this to mean that cannabis was burned in large censers in public places throughout the town, so you could get high just by walking through the town and breathing the air. It wasn't clear how I was supposed to "watch out" for it. I was traveling on foot, so it wasn't like I could roll up the car windows or anything. There didn't seem to be any way for me to pass through without getting stoned. I figured the purpose of the warning was just so I would know in advance, which might help me to keep my wits about me.
Upon waking, I thought about something I had read a decade or more ago: "Obama and His Pot-Smoking 'Choom Gang'." Apparently when Barack Obama was a teenager in Hawaii, his circle of friends was called that, choom being, according to the article "slang for smoking marijuana." I'm not really up to speed on cannabis culture, but I don't think I've ever heard this term choom except in stories about Obama's ill-spent youth. Maybe it was local Hawaiian slang or something.
This bit from the article seemed relevant to my dream:
Another Obama innovation: "Roof Hits."
"When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling."
As in the dream, the idea is that you can get high just by breathing the smoke-filled air in a place. The article also mentions rolling up the car windows to keep the smoke in. In the dream, I was concerned that, being on foot, I wouldn't be able to roll up the car windows to keep the smoke out.
The article mentions that the Choom Gang's preferred mode of transportation was "a Volkswagen microbus known as 'the Choomwagon.'"
Another term for a Volkswagen bus is Kombi. That made me think of the Men at Work song "Down Under," which begins with these lines:
Traveling in a fried-out Kombi
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
"Head full of zombie" means being high on marijuana. In some of Bill's old posts (no longer available), he takes zombie as a reference to "Saruman" (the Tolkien character, understood by Bill to be a real being who essentially plays the role of the devil), who can get "in your head" and put thoughts there, corrupting what would otherwise be true ideas. The song Bill referenced was not "Down Under" but the Cranberries song with the refrain "In your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie."
The afternoon after the dream, I was in the mood for some Kill_mR_DJ, so I put him on on YouTube. After the song I had chosen to start with, the next one was cued up automatically by the algorithm: "Zombie" by the Cranberries mashed up with "One More Light" by Linkin Park:
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)
It's worth listening to at least part of it just to hear Cardon Ellis pulling one Biden after another. First it's "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of story" (a smaller-scale version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories?), and then he actually calls him Thomas B. Bucket, which I think was one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The sources behind the Reality Temple meme
Unless you're very new to this blog, you'll be very familiar with this meme by now. We're not through with it yet.
Although the opening pages of hand-illuminated manuscripts typically bear the heraldry of their commissioners, in this case the family coat of arms was supplanted by an imaginary emblem dedicating the codex to the sun. Indeed, as has been noted, the coat of arms is a meticulous copy of the opening miniature contained in the alchemical manuscript Aurora Consurgens. However, the motif was expanded for the Splendor Solis to take in the architectural surrounds as well. Here, the painter turned to a copper engraving by Hans Sebald Beham for inspiration.
Aurora Consurgens is attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. This descripton of figures from the Aurora Consurgens confirms the connection:
1. A coat of arms is shown against a reddish purple background. A crowned metallic grey helmet with blue wreaths of stylised leaves, is set above a blue shield bearing the image of a yellow solar face. Above the helmet another sun is seen shining its beams upon the scene below.
This is a description of the Glasgow manuscript. The only one I have been able to find online is the Zürich manuscript, which doesn't include the coat of arms. It does have another potentially relevant illustration, though (I've included a modern redrawing, too, since the details are easier to see):
The griffin rider has a blue shield charged with a yellow sun with a face, like the shield in the Arma Artis. The lion rider has a shield charged with three crescents, like the three crescents above the crowned helmet in the Arma Artis. Why they have these shields is unclear. The lion is a solar symbol, and the rider has a sun for a head, but he has a lunar shield. The other rider is female and seems to have a moon for a head, and yet she is the one with the solar shield. I suppose it is just an example of the "unification of opposites" concept which is a major theme of that work.
As for Völlnagel's statement that the architectural elements in Arma Artis were inspired by Sebald Beham, no particular engraving of Beham's looks particularly similar to what we see in Arma Artis, so the inspiration must have been of a general sort. The arches on the left side of this picture of Mercury might be the sort of thing Völlnagel has in mind.
Meme supplies cut off
4chan is down. DS is down. The sync fairies are going to have to make do with, like, books and stuff. That’s probably not a bad thing.
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Following up on the idea that the pecked are no longer alone in their bodies , reader Ben Pratt has brought to my attention these remarks by...
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Disclaimer: My terms are borrowed (by way of Terry Boardman and Bruce Charlton) from Rudolf Steiner, but I cannot claim to be using them in ...
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I’ve been sailing all my life now Never harbor or port have I known The wide universe is the ocean I travel And the earth is my blue boat ho...