Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.

This past July, ben, who comments here, alerted me to the fact that William Wright, who (as WW) wrote that interesting guest post for Bruce about orcs, had started a blog of his own, called Coat of Skins. Mr. Wright assumes that both the Book of Mormon and Tolkien's Legendarium are true and writes about how they interrelate -- Abinadi was the reincarnation of Faramir, the Book of Ether contains a hidden reference to the Brother of Jared opening the gates of Khazad-dûm, that sort of thing. It's a bit fringe even by my standards, but I find it interesting and have been reading it regularly.

One of the early posts was "The Liahona as a Palantir (the Anor Stone)" Palantiri are generally black, but Mr. Wright argues that the name Anor Stone (anor being Sindarin for "sun") suggests that this one had a golden appearance, matching the description of the "brass" Liahona in the Book of Mormon. This caught my attention because back in December 2020, I had some syncs (documented in "Red Sun, Yellow Sun") connecting the Liahona with the Sun.

Early on in my reading of Coat of Skins, I Googled an unfamiliar name used in a since-deleted post there and discovered the work of Daymon Smith, who I had never heard of before. He's a Mormon linguistic anthropologist who has written extensively about the Book of Mormon, and whose most recent work also involves treating the works of Tolkien as non-fiction and trying to integrate them with the Book of Mormon. I read a few pages of his Jaredites-from-Numenor story The Words of the Faithful but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered his sprawling Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, which I have found absolutely fascinating. I bought all eight books (it consists of five volumes published as eight books, whatever that means!) and am currently reading the final (eighth/"fifth") one.

On August 2, Mr. Wright posted "Eleanor and 'Wake Up Time.'" He recounts a dream in which he saw a man in a tailcoat playing a grand piano. When the pianist noticed he had an audience, he turned around and said, "Hello, everyone. My name is Eleanor," and then Mr. Wright immediately woke up. Upon waking, he figured the name must actually have been El-Anor, Sindarin for "Sun-Star." Later, he was reminded of this dream when he was watching a documentary about Tom Petty and saw this image:

This synched with his dream because it included a grand piano, the Sun (anor), and "Wake Up Time." (He had woken up from his dream when he heard the pianist say "My name is El-Anor.") Although the post didn't mention it, elanor is also the name of a flower in Tolkien, and "Wake Up Time" is from Tom Petty's album Wildflowers.

The "Wake Up Time" image caught my eye because WUT is visually very similar to my initials, WJT, and because when I was in college people thought I looked like Tom Petty and used to call me Tom. Despite this, I don't really know anything about Petty or his music -- except, now, this song.

Immediately after reading the post and listening to "Wake Up Time," I picked up an old book I had had printed and bound about a week before but hadn't started reading yet: Paradise Found by William Fairfield Warren. I opened it up and found that the very first sentences is, "This book is not the work of a dreamer." This insistence that he was not dreaming when he wrote the book seemed like a potential sync with the idea of "wake up time."

The next morning, I met with a businessman whom I tutor in English. He told me that he'd read an English article called "Why Are Piano Keys Black and White" but didn't want to discuss it because it was too boring. This random reference to piano keys also seemed like a potential sync. It also made me idly wonder how many keys of each color a piano has (I knew the total was 88), so I looked it up: 52 white and 36 black.

Later in the day, I wanted to get some background on William Fairfield Warren, so I checked his Wikipedia page. His first listed publication is The True Key to Ancient Cosmology. I also clicked a link to the article about his brother, Henry White Warren. Among this latter Warren's works was Fifty-two Memory Hymns. So, just after learning that a piano has 52 white keys, I ran into this reference to a musical work with the number 52 in its title, written by someone named White whose brother wrote a book called The True Key. This was enough of a sync to make me curious about the contents of Fifty-two Memory Hymns, so I found it online. The first hymn in the collection includes this stanza:

Enthroned amid the radiant spheres,

He glory like a garment wears ;

To form a robe of light divine,

Ten thousand suns around Him shine.

The plural reference to "ten thousand suns" may be referring to the stars as "suns," making it a link to El-Anor, "Sun-Star."

I discovered all this on August 3. Later that same evening, I was reading the first volume of Daymon Smith's Cultural History. Although ostensibly a history of the Book of Mormon, it includes many long digressions on a variety of other topics, and one of the things I read in it that night was Keith Richards's story of how he "wrote 'Satisfaction' in my sleep. I had no idea I'd written it." He woke up the next morning and found that he had recorded it on a cassette during the night, with no memory of having done so. This happened, Smith mentions, while Richards was "living in St. John's Wood."

So "Satisfaction" is "the work of a dreamer" -- an obvious sync with Warren's assertion that his book is no such thing. The dreaming happened in St. John's Wood, which syncs with the opening lines of Petty's "Wake Up Time":

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams,

You follow your leader into the trees

The strangest sync, though, was that the story was about Keith Richards, one of the Rolling Stones. William Wright writes that, in thinking about his "Eleanor" dream, he began considering the possibility of "the man introducing himself actually representing a stone," or "that the man and his piano could have represented both of these possibilities -- an actual man and a stone." Keith Richards: an actual man, and an actual Stone.

When I went out on the morning of August 4, I found that this cardboard box had been left out in front of my house for the recycling people to pick up.

SUNSTAR -- a pretty on-the-nose sync with El-Anor. If you've got good eyes and can recognize some basic Chinese/Kanji characters, you might notice that there's a 石, "stone," in the fine print, too (in the phrase 第二石油類, "second petroleum category").

Around noon on August 4, I was pacing around my study thinking of this and that, and I thought how "Wake Up Time" begins with following your dreams into the trees -- similar to how Dante's Comedy begins with the poet sleepwalking into a forest. The very last words of the Comedy are "il sole e l'altre stelle" -- "the sun and the other stars," El-Anor again. Dante's journey takes him in the end to Paradise, so there's also another sync with Paradise Found.

Then I remembered that WW’s post had mentioned that El was also a name of God, and that Dante discusses this somewhere in Paradiso. I thought for a second that Dante even connected El with the Sun, but then I remembered that, no, that was the Irish poet known as A.E. or Æ. (For the relevant quotes from each poet, see my 2019 post "U.E. echoes A.E.") I was, as I have said, pacing around as I thought about all this, and just as I thought of A.E., I turned and saw this on my wife's desk:

She has a whole set of these yellow apples, each marked with a different phonetic symbol. The one marked with the pen name of an Irish poet just happened to be the only one visible, and my eyes just happened to fall on it just as I was thinking about that poet, who wrote of our earliest ancestors, "I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored."

The apple is the traditional fruit of Eden, or Paradise, and in the Greek version (Garden of the Hesperides), it's even the golden apple. The golden apple is a solar symbol, too: "The Song of Wandering Aengus," by A.E.'s lifelong friend Yeats, begins (like Dante and Tom Petty) in a forest -- "I went out to the hazel wood" -- and ends with the line "The golden apples of the sun."

Then I remembered what had happened the night before (August 3). I was teaching a children's English class in which one of the students used to go by the English name Apple but later changed it when she found out it wasn't really a very normal name. Some of the other students like to tease her about it, and on the evening of August 3, one of them had made a pencil sketch in which there was a big apple in the sky radiating light. The student formerly known as Apple accused him of drawing an apple on purpose to annoy her, but he insisted (in bad faith, obviously) that it wasn't an apple, it was the sun. It was a monochrome pencil sketch, but of course the apple/sun would be understood to be yellow in color. I'm sure Eris was looking down from Olympus and chuckling at these two arguing and fighting over, of all things, a golden apple.

On August 9, I discovered one of Daymon Smith's now-defunct blogs -- called (there's the forest theme again) these mystry woods -- and skimmed, among other things, a 2015 post called "It is what It is," which begins with a picture of a Klein bottle.

This series of thoughts in the post -- I'm quoting three non-contiguous passages here -- got my attention:

"I am that I am" must be saying something about Language, capital L.

Maybe L and the Word, and what-ever-Is-is are really "just" light?  Different kinds of Light?

How can we understand L? or EL?

Here the letter L is used to represent Language, and Light, and the divine name El. Remember A.E.'s fantasy of our ancestors looking up at the sun and "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored"?

Smith ends his post by finally talking about the impossible Klein bottle: Klein bottles "don’t exist here as bottles, but we can describe them. They exist in L."

The next day, August 10, I was reading Smith's Cultural History -- Volume 2A now -- and Smith mentioned that the CJCLDS is "a corporate body with rights of ownership irrespective of human life-spans." This made it sound like copyrights owned by a corporation never expire, which would mean the Book of Mormon isn't in the public domain -- but I was quite sure that it is in the public domain. I ended up Googling it to make sure, and the highlighted answer was no!

Still thinking that must be wrong, I scrolled down to the fourth result, which was from the church’s own website and said the text itself was in the public domain.

Clicking that link for details, I found a forum conversation in which one of the participants had a name and avatar that caught my eye:

That's another Klein bottle, and the guy's name appears to be A.E. The thread is about the possibility of publishing an edition of the Book of Mormon with no verse numbers -- and just such an edition of the Book of Mormon has been published by none other than Daymon Smith, who posted the first Klein bottle!

Oh, and on August 25 I happened upon someone wearing this "Wake Up Time"-esque T-shirt:

Note added: On the same day that I posted this -- September 13, even though it's reporting syncs from early August -- William Wright revisited Tom Petty on his blog, with "Rock & Roll in Rivendell: Tom Petty, Elrond, and Alma the Younger." I'm not sure which of us posted first, but I didn't see his post until the next morning, and there's no indication in his post that he had read mine. Looks like just more synchronicity.