Stones as seeds

Today I read in Words of Them Liberated a reference to a Silmaril as a "gem-pip sprouting" into a yellow flower, a stone become a seed.

Hours later, I read in Joseph Smith's Seer Stones that

Joseph Smith planted his seer stone like a seed, which grew to become the immovable oak of Mormonism.

Three syncs from When Women Were Birds

I've just finished reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams -- a good read overall, though perhaps a bit too Creative Writing for some tastes.

I started reading it at about the same time that I started Words of Them Liberated, and in "Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs" I noted the coincidence that both books begin with a short epigraph invoking birds and emptiness. A further sync between the two books is that Words has this image at the beginning, written in a strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read (Rúmilian, as rendered by Polish artist Karolina Stopa):

Birds contains a section about Nüshu, a secret writing system once used by women in a single county of China. The book includes an image of this strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read:

Besides the general conceptual similarity, both scripts incorporate groups of dots, and both were written by women.

In "Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition" (January 22), I noted a sync having to do with "fire kasina" -- the practice of staring into a candle flame for a period of time and then closing your eyes and focusing on the afterimage of the flame. This is supposed to be able to produce intense visions comparable to a psychedelic experience.

Terry Tempest Williams describes doing something very similar in a church:

I lit a tall, thin taper and placed it in a cast-iron clip molded in the shape of a scallop. The Virgin glowed. The gold pattern on her gown was meant to illuminate light, not to impress. The church became darker as the flame intensified. I stared at the flame. I closed my eyes, but the flame remained, still and numinous, and I recalled a poet's line after just such a gesture: "Now, you have seen eternity."

Shortly after I had started reading When Women Were Birds, I published "A prayer," which begins with these lines:

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 central image of Birds is the author's mother's journals, which she left to her, and which all turned out to be entirely blank. Throughout the book, a meditation on X will be punctuated with the sentence "My Mother's Journals are X." There are nearly a hundred such sentences in all, most of them scattered throughout the book and interspersed with narrative vignettes, but in Chapter LI -- which I read two days after publishing the above poem -- we are treated to a long list of them, one after another, from which I quote this extract:

My Mother's Journals are a stage.

My Mother's Journals are scenes painted white.

My Mother's Journals are programs never printed.

Cello dream

I had a dream with no visual component, just music: a single cello playing, with great intensity and virtuosity, the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends." It's been in my head all day -- the cello version from my dream, that is, which appears not yet to exist in the waking world, though I did check YouTube just in case.

Although there were no visuals or vocals, I understood that the cellist was someone who hasn't crossed my mind in many a year: Ester Bloom, whose name sounds like it should be some sort of phenomenon in organic chemistry and who was a blogging collaborator of mine more than a quarter of a century ago. One of her poems from back then was specifically about how she couldn't play the cello and how God had given her "a cello to be instead of to play."

The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence

A lot of poetry sites now append an "AI analysis" to the end of each poem -- as if anyone who loves poetry ever asked them to smear its sacred pages with that filth!

Today, wanting to read Emily Dickinson's "From Blank to Blank" while away from my library, I turned to one of these sites. When I reached the end of the poem -- two stanzas of five unrhymed lines each -- I was confronted with this brilliant "analysis":

The poem consists of two quatrains with an irregular rhyme scheme (ABCB DEFE), typical of Dickinson’s later work . . .

I had no very high opinion of these algorithms' competence at simulating intelligence, but even I assumed they would at least be able to count the number of lines in a poem and identity rhymes or the absence thereof!

If this is "intelligence," truly 'tis lighter to be blind.

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.