A golden fist raised to heaven

On May 9, I posted "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," in which I described the montage with which every UltraMormonChan video ends. I specifically mentioned this image:

This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church studiously ignored), as if a fist raised to heaven.

Here are the two Moroni images shown in the montage:

Today, May 12, I discovered (via a couple of Babylon Bee articles making fun of it) that a golden statue of Donald Trump was unveiled on May 6, as reported in The Daily Beast. Here is the lead photo from that article:

The resemblance to Moroni -- without, ironically, his trump -- is obvious.

Even more interestingly, Debbie has often commented here about what she calls her "Where's My Horn?" dream, which she interpreted as foretelling the Trump presidency due to the trump/horn connection. An angel who has lost his horn is an even more direct link to that dream.

A further coincidence is that I fairly recently (thought I don't know the exact date) added to my sidebar images of golden statues of Joan of Arc and Moroni, together with an image of the Judgement Tarot card (which has a trump like Moroni and a flag like Joan). Back in 2021 I called that card "The Trumpiest trump" and wrote extensively about how it singles him out: "Name, birthdate, hair color -- it might as well be his damn driver’s license!" ("Who is Joe Biden?") I haven't had political syncs for some years now, but perhaps they're about to start again.

Voyage d'ark

This morning I woke up with a line from "Joan of Arc" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in my mind:

Now she's on her way to another land

During my lunch break today, I started reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad, a novel I picked up at a used bookstore some months ago for no other reason than that it had my name on it. (Tychonievich means "son of Fortune.")

When I set it on the table in the café, the waitress said (in Chinese), "Excuse me, is that the Bible?"

"No, it's just a novel."

"Really? It looks just like a Bible!"

This is the book she was talking about. If your Bible looks anything like this, you're much cooler than I am.

On the second page (p. x of an Introduction that begins with p. ix), I read this:

In the Second Starfaring Age we call that journey, as in another era deep in the past, the wanderjahr, though for some it is measured in weeks and for others in lifetimes. By whatever name that passage has been called -- wanderjahr, summer of love, grailquest, voyage d'ark . . .

That "voyage d'ark" obviously syncs with the song, by a band with Dark in its name, about Jeanne d'Arc being "on her way to another land."

I have some thoughts about this voyage but will have to think for a bit about how best to express them without being indiscreet.

Help, help, I'm being wholesomely repressed!

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

An obituary of Carroll in the Saturday Review pointed out that she [Alice] 'moves through her wonder-world with much of the modern spirit, which has now and then to be wholesomely repressed'. The notion that repression of any kind could be wholesome might sound surprising, although it was a standard idea at the time, bound up with a wider celebration of self-sacrifice in public service; hence Tennyson's dedication of Idylls of the King to the recently deceased Prince Albert, in which he praised the 'sublime repression of himself' that had distinguished a life 'modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise' (p. 441).

The same day, I found this written on the side of a cake box:

It reads "Tea does our fancy aid, Repress those vapours which the head invade, And keeps that palace of the soul serene." It's apparently part of "the first English poem which included the word tea," written by Edmund Waller "as a birthday ode to Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II and the first British queen to drink tea c. 1662." How it ended up on a cake box in Taiwan in 2026 is anyone's guess, but it shows that the idea of "wholesome repression" is much older than the Victorian era.

Then today on Synlogos I found a link to a First Things article called "Kinder, Gentler Repression" -- obviously meant sarcastically, but in keeping with our theme if taken literally. It's a review by Helen Roy (whose name will be sadly incomplete if her middle initial isn't T) of Mark B. Smith's Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953–1991.

Soviet repression also figures in The Story of Alice. The Russian translation of Alice was done by none other than Vladimir Nabokov, and Douglas-Fairhurst notes that the courtroom scene in the final chapter -- with "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards!" changed by Nabokov to "Execution first -- sentence afterwards!" -- would be very dark humor for émigrés like Nabokov, since

Alice has become the victim of a show trial -- the sort of nightmare from which many of Nabokov's fellow Russians were unable to wake up.

I somehow never knew that Nabokov had translated Alice, but it is of course perfectly in character for him to have done so. I wonder how much my personal favorite Nabokov novel, Invitation to a Beheading, which was published 11 years after his Alice, owes to Carroll's topsy-turvy courtroom -- which is, it now seems obvious, a much apter comparison than the usual go-to adjective Kafkaesque.

Red rum, sir, is murder

This past Saturday, May 9, one of the reading comprehension exercises in the English textbook I'm using for one of my classes was a paragraph about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The first comprehension question after the article had four pictures of Egyptian deities (easily recognizable as Sekhmet, Bastet, Isis, and Thoth), and the students had to identify which one was Sekhmet based on the description in the paragraph.

At the time, something about the whole thing struck me as synchy, but I couldn't put my finger on anything in particular. At first I thought it was just that it showed four Egyptian gods. The UltraMormonChan montage I had posted earlier that same day in "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" had included a painting of Abraham on an altar, about to be sacrificed to the Four Sons of Horus, but when I rewatched the montage I saw that that photo had actually been cropped so that the four Egyptian gods were not visible.

Today, though, the expected sync appeared, in the form of a comment by Bill on yesterday's post "Under." He writes, in part:

Nephi wrote that the secret combinations were synonymous with Murder - it was the specific work of darkness he called out - something you just alluded to again with your "Is Abel" play on words, in referencing the first murder of the Bible. I referenced Jack Nicholson's role in The Shining (Luciano means Shining as well). Murder was a central theme of that movie, but for most of it the word was said and spelled backwards: "Redrum", like something Mr. Mxyzptlk would do.

I dislike Stephen King and have never read or watched The Shining, but apparently redrum -- or, as in the well-known palindrome, red rum -- is a stand-in for murder.

Here is an excerpt from the Sekhmet paragraph:

Ra would send Sekhmet out to punish his enemies. In one famous story, she almost destroys the whole human race. However, she is tricked into drinking a lot of red beer, which she thinks is blood, and ends up too drunk to do her job.

Red beer is obviously a close conceptual cousin to red rum, and it, too, is linked to murder. Sekhmet intends mass murder and only drinks the red beer because she thinks it is human blood.

Bill brought in redrum in connection with Cain and Abel. Why were we talking about Cain and Abel in the first place? Because Debbie mentioned prophets being in caves and quoted (in a modern translation) the Lord's question, "What doest thou here, Elijah?", leading me to quote the beginning of "The Ghost of Abel," where Blake addresses that question to Lord Byron. In the climax of that play, Satan, defying Jehovah, refuses to accept any substitute for human blood:

I will have Human blood, and not the blood of bulls or goats,

And no Atonement, O Jehovah!

The Elohim live on Sacrifice Of Men: hence I am God of Men!

Thou human, O Jehovah!

By the rock and oak of the Druid, creeping mistletoe, and thorn,

Cain's city built with human blood, not blood of bulls and goats,

Thou shalt Thyself be sacrificed to Me, thy God! on Calvary.

In that same comments thread, I brought up my old semi-fictional reggae band Tycho and the Drifters. This is another link to red alcoholic beverages (though without a murder angle that I know of), since the most famous White reggae band is UB40, and their most famous track is their cover of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine."

Under

I just wanted to note the recurrence of Under, as a capitalized name for a particular place or condition.

First, the Men at Work song "Down Under" came up in "Tim knows" (February 17) and "To the Faithful Departed" (March 6). The original song of course refers to Australia, but these posts refer to how it has recently been appropriated for meme purposes and made to refer to Agartha, the underground home of the King of the World, as described in Ossendowski's Beasts, Men, and Gods. This of course relates to "Ar-Pharazon the King," who lies "buried under falling hills . . . in the Caves of the Forgotten." In "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica" (March 12), I note that "Antarctica is also the ultimate 'Down Under,' even more so than Australia."

Near the end of The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik (spoiler!), we learn that during most of the story Noah has been living in a Matrix-style virtual reality which he thinks is real, while at the same time his friend Alan has been in a coma. Both of these conditions are referred to by Noah as "Under." Plato's Allegory of the Cave is also repeatedly referenced, for a further link to the Caves of the Forgotten. After returning to the real world, Noah visits the still comatose Alan in the ICU and tells him where he's been:

I give Alan the Concise History of my time Under, and when I'm done, I kiss his motionless hand . . . for as long as I'd been Under, he'd been Under too.

To find that quote, I word-searched my digital copy of Noah Hypnotik (I read it in hard copy but also downloaded an epub for searchability) for the word under and scrolled down to the end of the long list of hits. I found what I was looking for near the end, but here's the very last occurrence of under in the book:

I let the snow land where it may and wonder at the longevity of its history: its lakes, oceans, and pools; its cave rivers; its underground civilizations.

The sentence is about snow, linking it to some degree to the Antarctic, but it refers to both caves and for some reason to "underground civilizations," suggesting Agartha.

Finally, I have been reading Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice, a biography of Lewis Carroll, his muse, and his books. The first manuscript version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Douglas-Fairhurst notes the non-standard spelling -- "the word Underground having been tunnelled into to become Under Ground" -- which serves to make Under a stand-alone capitalized word, in keeping with our theme. The author also quotes some pre-Alice uses of the word wonderland, one of which ties wonder to under:

Down into wonderland --

Down to the under-land --

Go, oh go!

Down into wonderland go!

Yesterday's post "Just-ice and Al-ice" ties Wonderland to the Antarctic, noting that the Alice books were taken there by Captain Scott, so there's a tie to that other "Down Under." It's also worth noting that the broad narrative structure of Noah Hypnotik matches that of Alice, with the main character not realizing until he "wakes up" near the end that the whole story has taken place in an unreal dream-world.

"The secret rules of Wonderland," also posted yesterday, includes three quotes from The Story of Alice. In the first of these, I quoted only part of the sentence. Here is the complete sentence, coming just after a mention of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

The unconscious turned out to be another version of Wonderland -- a place that gave the impression of being chaotically lawless, while secretly working according to its own rules.

Here is the reason Freud gives, in The Question of Lay Analysis, for abandoning his earlier term "subconscious" (Unterbewusstsein) in favor of "unconscious" (Unbewusstsein):

If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.

So again we have the idea of an underground world.

This next bit is not directly related to the Under theme, but I'm including it here because it doesn't quite merit a post of its own. This afternoon I read in The Story of Alice of how the Alice books had influenced the work of Evelyn Waugh. Describing the plot of Waugh's Decline and Fall, Douglas-Fairhurt writes:

Sent to the red-light district of Marseilles, he arrives at a brothel called Chez Alice, and when he ends up in prison a former teacher from the school working there as a chaplain meets a grisly death by being decapitated by a religious maniac.

What is synchronistically notable here is the juxtaposition of prostitution, the name Alice, and a former teacher. In the comments on "Book of Mormon names and Pi Days" (May 8), Laeth mentions the novel he is currently writing, saying that it "shares characters with Sketches of Alice" and that "adolescent prostitution is mentioned in two of the chapters." The title character in Sketches of Alice is the main character's former history teacher.

⁂

Note added: I published this post at 4:13 p.m. It discusses The Story of Alice and The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik, and mentions the title character in the latter book visiting his friend Alan in the hospital. At 8:10, just under four hours later, I read in The Story of Alice about how Alice Liddell Hargreaves's son Alan was wounded in World War I and "died next day in hospital."

At first I just noticed the sync of someone named Alan being in the hospital, but then I went back and checked the dates. Alan Hargreaves died on Monday, May 10, 1915, at about 4 a.m. I am writing this on Monday, May 11, 2026, just one day after the anniversary of Alan's death, and on the same day of the week.

The secret rules of Wonderland

Tonight I read some more in The Story of Alice. Carroll has already died at this point, and the book is exploring how the idea of "Wonderland" continued to develop after its creator was gone. Here are a few of the things I read, taken from three successive pages:

Wonderland – a place that gave the impression of being chaotically lawless, while secretly working according to its own rules (p. 433)

cartoon strips that ranged from the whimsical (‘The Doings of those Darling Ducks’) to the jarringly racist (‘That Naughty Nigger and his Bunny Bimbo’) (p. 434)

Playfully reversing the tourist cliché ‘See Naples and die’, a magazine advertisement in 1903 offered ‘See BLACKPOOL and Live’ (p. 435)

That first excerpt, about Wonderland "secretly working according to its own rules," made me think of "The world is bound with secret knots," which came up in the sync-saturated comments on "Just-ice and Al-ice."

After reading, I checked YouTube. The first video in my feed, published just minutes before I saw it, was Ragtime Rev performing the minstrel song "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die." (Our algorithms, ourselves, right?) This obviously syncs with the Nigger reference quoted above, and also with the idea that one should not see Naples and die but rather see BLACKPOOL and live.

The second video in the feed, published several hours before, was a discussion of Carroll's Wonderland by The Resurrectionists, including this reference to wonderlands working by their own secret rules:

That is the hidden logic of upside-down worlds. They look chaotic on the surface, but underneath they are doing something very precise.

This very closely parallels the first excerpt from The Story of Alice above. It is perhaps not a terribly original thought, but the time factor still makes it a noteworthy sync.

Update (May 12): I see that Ragtime Rev, a.k.a. Foundring, apparently violated the secret rules of YouTubeland and has been banned -- an appropriate fate for the composer of the classic tune "Oy Vey, Shut It Down" -- so I was very lucky to have seized the opportunity to listen to "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die" before it was everlastingly too late.

Just-ice and Al-ice

Late last night, an image of the Justice card of the Tarot impressed itself on my mind, and I started thinking about it. It occurred to me that the word justice can be divided into the two words just ice. Fire and ice? No, just ice. Though I would ultimately dismiss that thought as meaningless, I did entertain it long enough to mentally compose for Frost's famous poem a sequel in which pretty much everyone agrees that the world will come to a cold end rather than a hot one. ("From all the vegetables I've lost / I hold with those who favor frost"; I won't inflict any more of it on you.)

This morning I read in The Story of Alice how

in 1901, copies of both books [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass] would be included in the small library on board Captain Scott's ship the Discovery, allowing his crew to while away the long Antarctic winters with adventures that replaced confinement with escapism, ice with Alice.

Alice, like justice, ends with the letters -ice,  though in neither case are they pronounced like the word ice, making the pun less likely to suggest itself. Also, there would normally be no connection at all between Alice in Wonderland and ice; the pun is only rendered usable by the highly unusual context of explorers taking Lewis Carroll's books with them to the Antarctic.

The just ice pun would also require a highly unusual context. As it happens, such a context suggested itself last July, when I wrote in a comment on "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man," "The frozen man wants mercy, but what has he got? Just ice." I found that by searching the blog. In last night's musings, I had completely forgotten that I had used that pun before.

In a closely related pun, some years ago I wrote a poem featuring a quibble on just as an adjective meaning "characterized by justice" and as an adverb meaning "merely."

With this my guilt how shall I live

Unless, my darling, you forgive

Me? Can you? Yes, I know you said

That God forgives, but God is just

A word that you can say instead

Of I and which means no one. Must

I turn to him and not to you?

I guess that he will have to serve.

God only knows what I shall do.

I guess I'll get what I deserve.

This was just an experiment in technique. The idea is that, the first two lines having (deceitfully) established rhyming couplets as the form of the poem, the reader will expect the fourth line to end with dead to rhyme with said. When it unexpectedly ends with just instead, the reader will naturally first understand it to mean just as opposed to merciful, only for the next line to reveal that it was actually an adverb. Each of these subverted expectations is returned to and resolved later in the poem, as subsequent lines do say in effect that God is dead ("just a word . . . which means no one," reinforced later by the use of "God only knows" to mean "no one knows") and that the speaker will receive justice rather than mercy ("I'll get what I deserve"). In theory, the reader might also expect the eighth line to end with do rather the contextually synonymous serve, but I'm not sure rhyme-scheme expectations are still strong enough at that point to have any real effect.

Speaking of Lewis Carroll and technically "clever" poems, yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he lines that opened Sylvie and Bruno were closely modelled on those that ended Through the Looking-Glass:

Is all our Life, then, but a dream

Seen faintly in the golden gleam

Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

(Sylvie and Bruno)

Ever drifting down the stream --

Lingering in the golden gleam --

Life, what is it but a dream?

(Through the Looking-Glass)

In Carroll's new acrostic, ISA Bowman had supplanted Alice LidELL as his official muse, but nothing else had changed

The two partial acrostics thus juxtaposed come very close to spelling out ISABEL, and would do so if only Bruno had received top billing rather than Sylvie, or if one more line of the first acrostic ("Bowed to the earth with bitter woe") had been included in the excerpt. (Or we might note that the fourth line actually begins with a bracket, which begins with b.) This is synchronistically significant because my recent post "Book of Mormon names and Pi Days" finds in a dream of Isabel and link to The Story of Alice. In a comment on that post, I wrote that "there are a few coincidences about the beginnings and ends of phrases." This syncs with the parts of the acrostics quoted, corresponding to the beginning of one muse's name and the end of the other's.

Coming back to the beginning of this post, I discuss a pun involving the word just, talk about rewriting Frost's poem that begins "Some say the world will end in fire," and then quote a reference to "Captain Scott," the Antarctic explorer. Last July, I published a post called "Some say the world will end in fire," which quotes a Moody Blues song referencing "Captain Scott" in the Antarctic and immediately follows it with a picture of a T-shirt that says "GOAL IS JUST." This was published just three days after the frozen man "just ice" pun.