On the road today I stopped at a red light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a helmet similar to the one pictured below, except that the color scheme was different. The helmet was predominantly green and black. The words "RAIN GOD" were written in white, with the "GO" in green. (I didn't take a photo and wasn't able to find a photo of the exact same helmet online.)
This caught my attention because the Chinese word for "dog" is 狗 -- transliterated gou and pronounced like the English word go. (When I was first learning Chinese, the P. D. Eastman book title Go, Dog. Go! served as a mnemonic.) So the helmet design highlights the dog in God, and it is a green dog. I connected this with my recent posts God and dog at the Panama Canal and The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) A further coincidence is that this helmet is produced by a company called Zeus; an important step in the train of associations in my "God and dog" post had been that Suez:Zeus::dog:God. Looking at the photo now, I also notice a black "two-prong crown" behind the words "RAIN GOD," but I can not be sure the helmet I saw also had this.
(Incidentally, if the letters GO, written in a different color, are removed, what remains is an anagram of INDRA -- who was indeed a "rain god" and is considered the Indian counterpart to Zeus,)
A rain dog. Words that become other words when written backwards. Suddenly I thought of a story fragment one of my sisters had written when she was a little girl, called The Planet Tennalp. Fortunately, my family has kept lots of our juvenilia and I have it in a PDF, so I was able to look it up. It begins thus:
Once upon a time there lived seven dogs. Their names were: Thunder, Lightning, Snowy, Misty, Rainbows, Showers, and Sleet. They were the Weather Dogs. They lived on Tennalp.
Weather Dogs, including one named Showers. And of course Tennalp is basically just planet written backwards. As we read on, we learn that Tennalp was created by a sorcerer called Nrogara (Aragorn backwards) from the planet Dalrow (world backwards, with a vowel added for pronounceability). Given this context of things written backwards, it can scarcely be considered a mere coincidence that the opening sentence -- "there lived seven dogs" -- contains a backwards devil as well as a backwards God.
All this flashed through my mind in a second as I waited at the red light. In my original "God and dog" post, I recounted a story from Whitley Strieber in which God/dog was associated with seeing a coincidentally meaningful license plate. I glanced down at the license plate of motorcyclist with the Rain God helmet: "192 NYT." NYT was at least a meaningful series of letters -- New York Times -- so, although the number didn't immediately mean anything to me, I memorized it for future reference. Later, while still on the road, I suddenly thought that 19 - 2 = 18 and 19 + 2 = 21, so the number encodes 1/8/21 -- January 8, 2021. Of course it doesn't, though, because 19 - 2 is actually 17. So close!
⁂
Note added: I just looked again at the PDF file I opened to check The Planet Tennalp -- 33 pages of miscellaneous story fragments with titles beginning Mo-Sa -- and noticed that the very first page is one of my own childhood compositions, from which I quote the second paragraph.
He walked over to his coon-shee, who was nibbling at the rich, green moss which carpeted the forest floor. The coon, too, was a recent purchase. It was a strong, healthy stallion of good pedigree, and the flickering patches of green on its sleek, black coat were unusually brilliant. It carried on its back a huge, lidded basket with several small saddle-bags tied to it.
What is this coon-shee? The name is a hybrid of Cŵn Annwn and cú sídhe -- Welsh and Irish faery-hounds, respectively -- and my idea was that they were actually faery horses (or, to be precise, diminutive chalicotheres), mistaken by outsiders for dogs because of their small size and clawed feet.
Do I really need to make that coinsídhence pun again? You must surely be getting tired of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment