"The Open Doors" syncs

I found Revelations on archive.org (borrow only) and read Whitley Strieber's story "The Open Doors." As anticipated, sync city.

For starters, the book begins with an epigraph from George MacDonald:

For the moments of a man's life are in spirals: we go back whence we came, ever returning on our former traces, only upon a higher level, on the next upward coil of the spiral, so that it is a going back and a going forward ever and both at once.

-- George MacDonald

England's Antiphon

The idea of Revelations is that it's a series of 10 fantasy and horror stories, one associated with each decade of the 20th century. Strieber's "The Open Doors," the story for the 1950s, is a stream-of-consciousness narrative from the point of view of the dying and delirious John von Neumann, racked with guilt over his role in the creation of the atomic bomb and in the UFO cover-up.

This is not a summary or a review, just a series of excerpts that were synchronistically relevant.

"How you cling, von Neumann," he said to the air. "Von Nooman," he said again, pronouncing it like an American. "How can you be the one?"

The "Nooman" spelling is a link to "planet n00b." ("What if Mars is planet n00b?" Von Neumann was one of a group of Hungarian Jewish scientists known as "the Martians.")

The earth, he saw now, was not a globe at all: the energy of time was what rounded it and set it on its perfect traverse of the sky. In reality the world was an immense tapestry, its leading edge being woven by the busy worms of life.

Someone called jason had left a comment on the "planet n00b" post: "Needs a comma. There's no planet, noob. Earth is a flat plane and space is fake and gay."

We applaud. Clatter, clatter, clip clap clatter. "Blue Moon" had been playing on the radio in the ready room: "Blue Moon," was it Dorothy O'Shea? The Manhattan Colleen.

The above quote is from page 242 of Revelations. In "Hurry up the cakes!" I posted three pictures, including a moon landing cake and the number 242. I had linked the moon landing cake to a comment by WanderingGondola: "You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?)." Incidentally, the S:E:G: value of the word revelation (and of apocalyptic, antichrist, and seven seals) is 121, so the plural -- two revelations -- would be 242.

At this point, I took a short break from reading to check my blog comments. There was a new comment by WanderingGondola on "Open the door." The comment linked back to my old post "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," One of WG's comments on that old post began, "Hah, the more you know!" I went back to the Strieber story and read this:

"I don't quite follow."

No, certainly not, because if you did, I would have you killed for your own safety and the safety of the world. The more you know, America, the deeper you go.

On p. 251 the title phrase "the open doors" finally appears. It's about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The men in the B-36, listening to WEAF on their radio while they arm their bomb. "The Fat Man is up. Three. Two. One. Armed. Prepared for delivery. Open doors . . . the open doors . . ."

Did you know that the final verse of "Walk the Dinosaur" describes an atomic bombing as seen through the eyes of a caveman?

A shadow from the sky, much too big to be a bird
A screaming, crashing noise louder than I've ever heard
It looked like two big silver trees that somehow learned to soar
Suddenly a summer breeze and a mighty lion's roar
I killed a dinosaur, I killed a dinosaur

Open the door, get on the floor
Everybody kill the dinosaur . . .

If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog, you will see a link to my latest post and links to three other posts, apparently chosen by Google on the basis of how popular they have been recently. When I was reading old blog comments before, I noticed that the last thumbnail was Goya's etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

On p. 256 of "The Open Doors," von Neumann is explaining how difficult it is for us and aliens to perceive each other correctly, or even to perceive each other at all.

"It is probable that a quantum barrier would exist between entities, due to the absolute lack of perceptual referents. This would men that the first difficulty would involve actually seeing one another, for we would of necessity see what our expectations allowed us to see and no more. I refer here to a neuronal and informational difficulty. We literally could not see what we could not anticipate. I suspect, incidentally, that a milder form of this problem affected the Mesoamerican peoples when they confronted the Spaniards. This is why the Spaniards reported such curious passivity in their armies, and why just a relatively few Spaniards could work the defeat of thousands.

"However, it is my belief that the perceptual barrier will be of a double nature, that is to say, that neither side will be able to 'get it right' until the other does.

"What will we see, in the absence of reality? I can only refer here to 'the sleep of reason begets monsters,' for that, thus far, is all we have encountered."

Regular readers will already know that I have been listening to the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations recently. Here are some of the lyrics to one of the songs from that album, "Map of the Problematique":

Life will flash before my eyes
So scattered almost
I want to touch the other side
And no one thinks they are to blame
Why can't we see
That when we bleed we bleed the same

I can't get it right
Get it right
Since I met you

Loneliness be over
When will this loneliness be over
Loneliness be over
When will this loneliness be over

At this point, having had Muse brought to my attention, I took another break from reading to watch the video for "Knights of Cydonia" again. This frame caught my eye.

I'm not sure why, but I thought, "Is that supposed to be Pancho Villa? Did Pancho Villa have a famous horn that he blew?" I ran a search.

Virtually all the results are longhorn cattle -- specifically, a Texas longhorn steer from Alabama named Poncho Via (sic), former world record holder for the longest horns.

Then I went back to "The Open Doors" and read this, on p. 260:

What will they say in a thousand years, of our age? It was a time of music and science, the chief products of this civilization. Prior to the West, man had only a little music, the curious mixolydian twanging of the Greeks, the long mourning Roman horns, the elaborations of China. But then there came the bursting flower of five centuries of song and thought, the discovery of the natural world curiously linked to the invention of instrument after instrument after instrument, the lost chord to the unified field, the chance missed by music also missed by science, and thus no fusion between science and religion, no service to the divine.

Besides the "long horn" reference, the mention of mixolydian, one of the seven diatonic modes, is a link to "Mere Locrianism."