Carry that weight

On June 11, I posted "The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams," followed the next day by "Cary Yale." In a comment on the latter post, Debbie connected this sequence of posts with "Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight" medley from the Beatles album Abbey Road.

The next day, June 13, I received an email from a reader who had noticed and photographed some graffiti on a wall on August 30, 2022:

Later, on February 21, 2023, this reader again photographed the same wall. The "carry that weight" tag had been painted over with this much larger piece:

The reader identified the figure in the bottom left, who is pointing his finger and saying "bang," as Spike Spiegel, a character from the anime Cowboy Bebop. Researching that anime led the reader to a review -- published exactly one year earlier, June 13, 2024 --"See you later, space cowboy," by Christian Yeung. Here's the final paragraph of the review:

It’s an emotional rollercoaster, which ends with the final words ‘You will carry that weight’. What is that weight, you ask? Well, there’s only one way to find out! So buckle up and please, you don’t need to love anime, but just appreciate a good story to enjoy the masterpiece that is Cowboy Bebop.

The email ends with, "That makes a probable link between Spike and the tag... and I had no idea for, what, almost three years?"

Very early this morning, June 17, I published "Caroline, times never had the effect you'd expect," which discusses two different "Caroline" songs and notes that, since Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, there may be a link to the "Cary Yale" post. In a comment there, Debbie again brought up the Abbey Road medley:

Also the word/name Carrie as a nickname or diminutive

of Caroline as in "Carry" that Weight,

which has been in the sync stream of late along with

Golden Slumbers. Which, weren't you 'slumbering' when

you had the Carrie dream?

When I read the above comment, I was in a coffee shop, and the music playing in the background was "Calling Out For You" by L. M. Styles. Here's the chorus:

Restless heart

Please find your home

Back to the start

Where I’m calling out for you

You don’t have to

Carry that weight

My every part is

Is calling out for you

This last one isn't directly about "carry that weight," but in the "Caroline" post I noted that both the "Caroline" songs included references to hand-holding -- "hands touching hands" and "hand in hand." At 4:00 p.m. today, I noticed a Junior Ganymede post in my blogroll called "Handholds." It's a poem about the hands of his father, his mother, and Jesus Christ. Posts on that blog don't have specific timestamps, just dates, but my blogroll said it was posted "14 hours ago" -- so around 2:00 this morning Taiwan time. My own "Caroline" post was published at 2:38. Assuming that my blogroll would have rounded anything after 2:30 to "13 hours ago," the JG post must have been published just before my own post.

The "Handholds" poem ends with these lines:

My Savior’s hands are run right through.

Times are when reaches down and grabs mine, pulling me

from the rough chaos of the water

into light and air.

Reaching down and pulling someone up out of the water would involve carrying their weight, at least for a moment.

Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect

During a brief catnap on the sofa, I dreamed that I was sitting in a movie theater watching the credits roll. Most people had left the theater already, but I wanted to stay to the end and see if there was a post-credits scene.

During the credits, the screen showed vintage (1950s-looking) black-and-white footage of flying saucers flying around, and the 1969 Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline” was playing. This seemed to go on for a very long time, and by the time I woke up, with the credits still unfinished, the song had imperceptibly morphed into “Caroline” (2008) by Old Crow Medicine Show.

I’d never noticed how much those two songs have in common. Where one has “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good,” the other has “Oh, Caroline, heartbroken hard times never got us down.” One has “hands touching hands,” and the other has “hand in hand.”

I’m not too familiar with the lyrics of the OCMS song, and looking them up later, I was surprised to discover the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith.” The reference is apparently to a baseball player, but as it happens one of the main characters in Last Call by Tim Powers, which I am currently reading, is a poker player who is also called Ozzie Smith.

When I woke up from the dream, my wife was watching a movie on TV. The Hurt Locker, I think. The first thing I saw when I woke up was Jeremy Renner in a supermarket, with the camera focused on a shelf of Lucky Charms cereal boxes. The scene then cut to dead leaves falling. Not the first time sugary cereals have been juxtaposed with autumn leaves around these parts. See for example “Humpty Dumpty: After the Fall.”

Possibly relevant: Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, and there is a historical figure named Caroline Yale, known for her work in the field of deaf education and famous enough to have a crater on Venus named after her.

The Slough

I wrote this in 1994, at the age of 15, as pure nonsense driven more by sound than by sense. In the part of the US where I lived at the time, slough rhymes with through (not with bough as in some other dialects) and refers to a backwater swamp.

The Slough

As shades of shadow shroud the slough,

I stumble, sink in stinking goo,

Retrieve my foot and tie my shoe,

Then stumble onward through the slime.

A booming sound, resounding boom,

To smithereens breaks silent gloom.

I fight off time's impending doom,

But scalene flashes shatter time.

As Aster casts her silver sheet

In memory of time's defeat,

The slough is slain by sudden sleet.

Three-cornered demons mar the scene.

Ellipsis eyes patrol the plain.

They see with glee the slough is slain.

The freezing sleet melts into rain.

Insane's the reign of King Scalene.

But wait: A wristwatch starts to chime.

All hark! It marks returning time.

The sleet, now rain, melts snow to slime

And resurrects the slaughtered slough.

Tea-colored ice cubes turn to glop,

And sphagnum moss floats to the top.

The slough renews its former slop:

A stinking, black, organic stew.

The plot, if such there be, seems to be that a swamp is attacked by demonic beings in the form of scalene triangles who, despite the narrator's resistance, successfully "shatter time." Whatever this means, it does not mean that time itself ceases to elapse, since actions continue to happen which require the passage of time. The swamp is "killed," apparently by being frozen, though it is not clear how this relates to the shattering of time. Then a thaw occurs, time returns to normal, and the swamp is once again a swamp.

I'm posting this now because it seems to relate to several recent sync themes: a swamp or marsh, a reference to a single foot and shoe, and a place being destroyed by ice.

The randomness is working well today

It's been a while since I clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread. I tried it today just in the spirit of "Is this thing on?" and got this:

Yeah, it's on.

It doesn't get much more random than a March 19 post wishing a happy birthday to anyone whose birthday is March 15. (For those who came in late, that's my own birthday.)

The penultimate line is an acrostic for HELLO and must have been designed as such, but Orange-tip is a pretty unusual choice of words if all you want is something that begins with O. It's a kind of butterfly, naturally -- one with gray-and-amber coloration:

I'm not sure what the significance of ARIA might be.

Abyssal refers to the deepest parts of the ocean.

Note added (June 16): This morning, one of my employees found a box of A4 printer paper behind some other things in a storage room (not the one where we normally store paper) and asked me what to do with it. It must have been in there for years, as it was a brand we haven't used in a long time:

Still not sure what ARIA means, synchronistically, but it sure seems like it means something.

Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus

I dreamed that I was sitting in what I felt was a spaceship, facing an enormous screen or window in which I could see, against the black background of space, a huge many-petaled flower, mainly white with just a touch of pink, slowly opening and expanding. My first thought was that it was the Rose seen by Dante, as described in Canto 30 of the Paradiso, but then a chant began -- Om mani padme hum, endlessly repeated -- which made me think it might instead (or also) be the sacred Lotus of Buddhism. (The mantra refers to "the jewel in the lotus.")

Standing behind me was a woman I could not see, but whose name I knew was Tessa. As I contemplated the Rose or Lotus and listened to the chanted mantra, she shaved my head with an electric shaver. "Though your sins be red like crimson," she said, paraphrasing Isaiah, "they shall be as wool." Isaiah's point was that wool is white, but my understanding in the dream was that I was being shorn like a sheep -- "shorn and shriven" was the phrase that came to mind -- sin falling away like wool under the buzzing shears. (See also "Worm Jacob.")

I know baldness has been a negative symbol in the syncs, particularly on Bill's blogs, but it certainly seemed positive in this dream. The shaving combined with the Buddhist chant made it feel as if I were symbolically entering monastic life.

Who was "Tessa"? The mantra being chanted in the dream is associated particularly with Avalokiteśvara, and Tessa seems like a reasonable abbreviation of that name. Although Avalokiteśvara is considered to be male in India and Central Asia, in East Asia she is female and is known to the Chinese as Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy. ("Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens.")

In the morning, I checked the comments on this blog and found a new one from Bill:

I woke up around 3 am this morning after a series of dreams I don't remember all that well. However, the word "Tess" was running through my mind to such an extent that I was forced to get up and think about it for a little bit. The word just wouldn't let me go.

He goes on to write seven more paragraphs about possible meanings of the name Tess. One of the Elvish words he brings up is actually tessa, the same as the name in my dream, which means "maid, maiden."

Note added: Just after publishing the above, I was out running errands and passed a jewelry shop called Blossom Day. Since the dream had featured a chant about a jewel in a flower, that caught my eye. Blossom Day made me think of Bloomsday, the day on which the novel Ulysses takes place (so called after the main character, Leopold Bloom). Despite the frequent references on this blog, I've actually only read Ulysses once, more than 20 years ago, and so I wasn't sure exactly when Bloomsday is. I looked it up. It's tomorrow, June 16.

Cary Yale

On the night of June 10, while on the fourth floor of my school, I "saw" something on the stairs leading up to the fifth floor, which is not part of the school proper but serves as my "chapel" for prayer, meditation, divination, and such.

I "saw" this in the same sense that I saw the ptero in "A Pterodactylus and a globe of light," to which post the reader is referred for an attempt at describing this sort of experience. It was experienced as something "given" and externally imposed, but it was somewhat less sensory in nature than a vision or hallucination.

What I saw was something like a spotted bobcat (white spots on fur of a dark indeterminate color). It had a large pair of horns, which protruded out to the sides and then curved up and in, for a somewhat heart-like effect. It looked down at me from the stairs, communicated with great telepathic clarity the two words "I'm Cary," and then ran upstairs in the direction of the chapel.

I immediately thought, That's a yale. That's a heraldic beast called a yale. He's saying he's Cary Yale.

Cary-Yale is the standard way of referring to one of the three main partially extant Visconti-Sforza Tarot decks, the one housed in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale University (named after one Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Jr., founder of the Press of the Woolly Whale). I keep most of my cards in the chapel, but my Visconti-Sforza replica deck is an exception.

A yale is indeed a heraldic beast, but it has little in common with what I saw, beyond having spots and horns. It's a large ungulate, perhaps inspired by some sort of African antelope or buffalo, and its distinguishing trait is its ability to swivel its horns to point in any direction. Certainly it looks nothing like a bobcat.

Then I noticed that I was standing next to a classroom door with the Yale University coat of arms on it. Some time ago, one of my employees decided that each classroom should have a name instead of a number and that they should all be named after famous universities, so that one is the Yale classroom.

The Yale coat of arms says Urim and Thummim in Hebrew, and in a Latin translation which I have proposed (see my 2013 post "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis") influenced the design of the Mormon temple garment.

So was this just some random fantasy triggered by seeing the Yale coat of arms and influenced by my childhood interest in heraldry and my current interest in Tarot history? Maybe, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was an actual spiritual presence that chose this rather extraordinary form in which to manifest itself. And my instinct is not to be too quick to trust something that chooses to appear as a bobcat with horns. We'll see if "Cary" ever shows up again, or if it was just a one-off anomaly.

The immediate effect of Cary's appearance was to draw my attention to Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards, leading me to reread my September 2024 post "The eyeing d'Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime." Many of the details -- gangsters, a guy called Jeff, an all-gold king, and a single shoe -- fit right in with the more recent sync stream. The Visconti-Sforza deck in that post is called the Golden Tarot, so one of its cards would be the Golden Fool.

The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams

When I was 13 or 14, we used to play D&D in the Dark Sun campaign setting. This was a world, Athas, that had originally been the Standard Fantasy Setting, with Tolkienesque elves and dwarves and all that, but had suffered an environmental apocalypse caused by the irresponsible use of magic and had become a harsh desert world. All the Standard Fantasy races had adapted to this new environment and were now entirely different -- huge hairless dwarves, long-legged elves adapted to running, cannibalistic halflings, and so on.

In the handbook was a brief description of this place, with the details left for individual DMs to work out as they saw fit:

The Lake of Golden Dreams lies on the western side of the Smoking Crown [a volcano], where a thick yellowish steam constantly rises from its boiling waters. Where the yellow water is not too deep, it is possible to see that the bottom of the lake is laced with hundreds of tunnels and passageways. According to rumor, these tunnels lead to an incredible city that lies at the heart of the Smoking Crown. It is difficult to say whether there is any truth to this story, however; those who have survived the scalding waters long enough to swim into the tunnels have never returned.

As we developed this in our own gameplay, the Lake of Golden Dreams was the "official" name of this body of water, but locals generally referred to it as the Pot of Yellow Stew (sort of like how the "Lake Isle of Innisfree" about which Yeats waxed poetic was actually known to the locals as Rat Island). We decided that the tunnels under the lake led not to a city in the heart of a volcano but to a portal to a similar boiling yellow lake on an entirely different world. This was Dune Freak Lake on the island of New Athas, on another planet, so called because of a desert monster that had once emerged from it (such monsters having the best chance of surviving the scalding waters and getting through the portal alive).

New Athas was a frozen tundra, entirely different from common or garden Athas. The people there were descended from Athasians who had made it through the portal in the distant past, and they were thus tundra-adapted versions of desert-adapted versions of the original Standard Fantasy races.

And that's about it, really. We never really developed New Athas in any detail and there are no real stories associated with it. I'm posting about it here because of how it ties in with comments on "Mint and highlighters," about a pot of gold being connected with drinking from gilded lilies, and with the downfall of Numenor -- which involved an attempt to reach another "world" and (in Bill's version of the story) ended with Numenor being frozen and put "on ice."