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.

Lazy lions in suits

I recently connected the Lazy Lions with Leonard Cohen’s description of himself as “a lazy bastard living in a suit,” making the suit a symbol of laziness.

Then a couple of days ago, I found this meme at Barnhardt’s:

Koko the monkey with no tail

This morning I read the 1985 book Koko's Kitten to some preschoolers. Koko was a gorilla who had been taught sign language, and the kitten of the title was her pet, a tailless tabby she named All Ball. Later, after All Ball's death, Koko specifically asked for another cat with no tail. In the text, author Penny Patterson speculates that perhaps this preference was because "a gorilla has no tail."

This emphasis on taillessness is synchronistically interesting in connection with last week's post "Indian Jones Without His Tail." In that post I connected Leo's post "WJT -- More George Than Jones?" with Curious George (whose tail or lack thereof is supposed to be an instance of the Mandela Effect) and a yarn man named Indian Jones Without His Tail.

Koko was, like Curious George, a tailless primate that lived with people. The Koko-George link is closer than that, though. In a well-known episode of Seinfeld (which I could have sworn I'd posted here before, but apparently not), George Costanza tries to get people to call him by the nickname T-Bone but instead ends up being called Koko after "that monkey that could read sign language."

When George first proposes the nickname T-Bone, Jerry protests, "But there's no T in your name! What about G-Bone?" My own case is just the opposite. My name does begin with T, but as I mentioned in last year's post "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," at one point I was known by the nickname G. Bill brings up that post, and my G nickname, in a comment on Leo's "More George Than Jones?" post:

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.

The "fighting Israel" bit is about Bill's recent decision to recast me as a bad guy in his story (though it could just as easily be interpreted the opposite way, since in the Bible it is God or an angel that wrestles with Jacob). Anyway, the funny thing is that this morning I read Koko's Kitten to a preschool class whose usual English teacher is a man named Diego -- so in this case I was actually helping Israel rather than fighting him.

The monkey gardener

One of the features of the original Arma Artis, which didn't make it into Laurie Lipton's version and thus does not appear in the Reality Temple meme, is a decorative border showing a garden with various flowers, birds, and -- somewhat unexpected in a garden scene -- two monkeys. One of the monkeys is feeding a fish to a heron, and the other is playing a lute.

This garden with monkeys playing human-like roles dredged up an old memory from when I was perhaps 10 years old. I had seen in some book a photograph of an old painting that showed a monkey taking care of a garden, with the caption describing it as "kindhearted." This picture had inspired me to write a bit of doggerel which I no longer have on paper all these decades later but find I can mostly remember. Words in brackets below are those I'm not sure about; the rest I'm pretty confident I have verbatim. (Judge me not too harshly, reader. I was young.)

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 entwines

With 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 free

Of 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.

A few things stuck out to me as I called that little composition back to mind. First, I'm not sure why a scrub brush came to mind as something a gardener would need, but the bucket that accompanies it is a link back to "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)." One of the hoopoes in that post is the one that appears in the Arma Artis. The post connects buckets, bathtubs, and seas. If the monkey in the poem uses a bucket, one of the monkeys in the Arma Artis seems to have taken a fish from the sea.

From the sea of stories? I checked Wikipedia's summary of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to see what sort of fish plied that sea, but it was the next bullet point down that really got my attention. The last two entries in the list of characters are:

• 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.

"Giant sharks" is a link to Jason Statham's giant shark movie The Meg 2: The Trench (recently discussed in "Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry"). Statham is also the title character in A Working Man, which ties in with out "hardworking" monkey. In the Rushdie character Mali we have a "gardener" (the monkey's trade) composed of "interwoven flowering vines." The monkey tends "blossoms and vines" and "entwines" them as if he were "weaving."

Haroun was published when I was 11, so it would have been around the same time I wrote the monkey poem (the age of 10 being only a very rough estimate). I never read anything by Rushdie until 12 years later, though, and I'm sure I was not even aware of the book's existence at the time it came out.

(I had heard about the Satanic Verses affair, but my information was indirect and somewhat bowdlerized, leading to a very distorted understanding. I didn't know the name of the author or the book, only that there was a group of people called the Azure-by-Johnnies who wanted to kill someone because of a book he had written. I vaguely imagined that it was called something like A Field Guide to the Azure-by-Johnnies. Why I thought of it as an Azerbaijani issue, I have no idea. I'm sure that, as Muslims, they were against Rushdie, but surely the news was more focused on India and Iran. Azerbaijan wasn't even an independent country at the time of the Rushdie affair.)

I think these links are worth pursuing, and I may need to reread Haroun. Certainly the theme of story-creation couldn't be more timely.

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:

Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)

On the night of April 6-7, I had the dream posted in "A bathtub full of books," which was about just that: a bathtub -- which would normally be filled with water -- which was instead full of books, mostly, I thought, "Jewish novels by people like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."

Today I finally made a connection I should have seen much earlier: my February 2024 post "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" The title of that post referred to Mormon podcaster Cardon Ellis repeatedly misspeaking when he tried to say "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of cream story." I wrote:

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.

As you can see, at the time I immediately connected the "bucket of story" with the "sea of stories" in the Salman Rushdie novel, saying the only difference was one of scale. Well, intermediate in scale between those two would be a bathtub of stories. I've only read Haroun and the Sea of Stories once, way back in 2002. The most memorable aspect of the novel, all these years later, is that one of the characters is a talking Hoopoe bird which, we are constantly reminded, talks "without moving its beak." Looking it up now, I see that the Hoopoe's name is Butt -- a butt being a very large cask holding rather more water than a standard bathtub.

By chance, I just posted a painting of a Hoopoe in "The sources behind the Reality Temple meme," one of the main sources being an image called Arma Artis from the alchemical text Splendor Solis:

Compare:

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is by an author named Salman. Splendor Solis is by an author named Salomon. "In eastern lore, the hoopoe stands in a particularly close relation to Solomon."

In that bathtub dream, the only story title I saw clearly was The Three Caballeros. Somehow I failed until today to connect that with The Three Musketeers. According to Spanish Wikipedia, "Los mosqueteros luchaban en la batalla a pie (como parte de la infantería) y a caballo (formando con la caballería)." If you fight a caballo as part of la caballería, I'm pretty sure that makes you a caballero. The Musketeers recently appeared here in "Sticks united, lazy Leonard, and Eldridge Street Synagogue." Just below the Hoopoe in the Arma Artis is an Owl. One of the most iconic scenes in The Three Musketeers is, of course, the part where the owl eats the abacus.

Haroun himself looks a bit like a caballero on that book cover. Having a bird for a steed is a bit odd but not without precedent:

Spanish Wikipedia confirms that the characters in Joust are considered caballeros even though they ride birds instead of caballos. (In Disney's The Three Caballeros, of course, it is the caballeros themselves that are birds.) I had just been thinking about Joust earlier today in connection with this image from the alchemical text Aurora Consurgens:

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.

As discussed in "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs" (November 2023), the foreground image of a shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger running is taken from his 1970 film debut, Hercules in New York.

The background image, the Reality Temple itself, is (as Kevin McCall discovered) the first in a series of 22 drawings by Laurie Lipton, commissioned by the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam. These were reworkings of the original 22 illustrations in Splendor Solis, a 16th-century alchemical text attributed to Salomon Trismosin. Here is Lipton's drawing, as seen in the meme:

And here is the Splendor Solis illustration on which it is based:

The picture is called Arma Artis -- "the arms of the art." As far as I know, arma typically means "weapons," while the usual Latin for a coat of arms is insigne; but here arma is pretty clearly being used in the latter sense. While the coat of arms is clearly the central focus both of the original illustration and of Lipton's adaptation, in the meme neither the coat of arms nor the title Arma Artis is clearly visible. The focus is instead on the building in which it is housed -- the "Reality Temple" -- which is Lipton's own creation, having almost nothing in common with the Splendor Solis original.

Where did the original Splendor Solis image come from. According to art historian Jörg Völlnagel, 

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.

In any case, the architecture in the Splendor Solis illustration is not directly relevant to the Reality Temple meme, since Laurie Lipton redesigned it completely. Her version of Arma Artis shows an open, gazebo-like structure supported by pillars. Atop the pillars is a sort of balcony above which are shelves of books. There are ladders allowing  people on the balcony to reach the upper shelves, but no visible way of reaching the balcony from the ground. Lipton's most interesting addition, given recent syncs, is a sort of altar under the shield with an enormous red book open on it.

One of the pages to which the book is open has yet another sun on it, perhaps connecting this book with the "Gospel of Luke" (i.e., of Light) in the syncs.

The sun on the shield, which is the same both in the Splendor Solis and in Lipton's adaptation, has eyes and mouth each of which is a complete face. I can only guess what this meant to the alchemists who first came up with the image, but what it suggests to me is the language in 2 Nephi 3 about a "seer" (eye-person) and "spokesman" (mouth-person). Theirs is the sun-like role of bringing "out of darkness unto light," and of course it is associated with a book.