Fra. P. said jokingly that everything contained the Truth, if you knew how to find it; and being challenged, proceeded to make good. It is here inserted, not for any value it may have, but to test the reader. If it is thought to be a joke, the reader is one useless kind of fool; if it is thought that Fra. P. believes that the makers of the rimes had any occult intention, he is another useless kind of fool.
-- footnote to Aleister Crowley's exegesis of nursery rhymes
Having predicted Slow Joe Crow, Fox in Socks continues to be applicable to the world of 2020.
Mr. Knox, sir, what a shame, sir!
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No, I don't think Dr. Seuss was a prophet; and no, I don't think this is a coincidence. Writers who deliberately write nonsense, like those who use drugs, partially enter the world of dreaming and open themselves up to all kinds of influences, including subconscious precognition and "Jungian slips." It's the Edgar Cayce effect, named for the famous "sleeping prophet."
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Update: Immediate confirmation from the synchronicity fairies! Literally the very next thing I did after clicking "post" was to open up my phonics book to see what I was teaching today.
A nose, a fox, and a rose in a pot. The "cone on a fox" echoes my earlier association of Slow Joe Crow's nose with a plague doctor's mask. As for "There's a hole in the cone and the robe and the bone," I mentioned that I've been reading Scott Alexander's Unsong, and at the moment I'm in the middle of the kabbalistic analysis of "There's A Hole In My Bucket"; the chapter uses as an epigram Leonard Cohen's line "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."
5 comments:
A hole in the cone: easy -- a leak
A hole in the robe: an imperfect attempt at a cover-up, a "wardrobe malfunction", the mask slipping
A hole in the bone: "There are three general classes of bone markings: (1) articulations, (2) projections, and (3) holes. . . . A hole is an opening or groove in the bone that allows blood vessels and nerves to enter the bone. As with the other markings, their size and shape reflect the size of the vessels and nerves that penetrate the bone at these points." Not sure what to make of that!
I should mention that ice cream leaking through "a hole in the cone" is associated with Donald Trump via his pre-presidency encounter with Ali G -- whose real name is Cohen, as in "there is a crack in everything."
Also: Biden is famously fond of vanilla ice cream and reportedly got a hairline fracture (hole in the bone) recently while playing with his dog.
"Writers who deliberately write nonsense, like those who use drugs, partially enter the world of dreaming and open themselves up to all kinds of influences, including subconscious precognition and "Jungian slips.""
Yes, there are many clever people who project all kinds of depth and meaning onto the deliberate nonsense of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake - which in reality is what remains after a vastly talented prose writer has nothing left to say, yet craves status for saying it.
"Yes, there are many clever people who project all kinds of depth and meaning onto the deliberate nonsense of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake"
I know, I was one of those people as a child! Does it show?
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