Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more

Let's see, where to start with this tangled web of syncs?

On October 14, I posted "Syncs: Drowned boy, unmask, gold medal, The King in Yellow." Wandering Gondola posted a comment saying that the mask theme made her think of the 2000 video game Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, adding:

It took a little longer to realise the "drowning boy" figures into this too. Majora is rather dark and disturbing, to the point it spawned a popular creepypasta-thing, Ben Drowned. I knew little about it before reading Wiki; figures it started on /x/.

I do a bit of lurking on /x/, and something that gets posted there from time to time -- I think I've run into it there three or four times -- is the 1996 video game Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages, with an indignant-looking Gray on the cover:

So when Wandering Gondola mentioned video games, /x/, and the word drowned, that's what I immediately thought of. I thought it was kind of a minor sync, since I'm currently reading Majestic, Whitley Strieber's 1989 novel about the Roswell incident -- but then I'm quite often reading something Gray-related, so it's not that impressive a coincidence. And a novel set in the New Mexican desert obviously isn't going to have anything about drowning in it, right? I mean, you can't very well drown in a desert.

Oh, wait, scratch that. Late last night I read this in Majestic. The speaker is intelligence officer Will Stone.

The light was boring down on us, glaring malevolently through the evening. Fear literally rolled over me, transforming me in an instant from a competent if slightly uneasy CIG officer into a terrified little boy.

One moment I was standing there and the next I was racing through the underbrush. I had no clear thoughts. I just wanted to get away from that light. I was drowning in the ocean of desert.

Not just drowning, but a little boy drowning -- even though it's actually describing a grown man running through a desert.

Just now I looked up the cover art for the first edition of Majestic. Here it is:

That's a nod to E.T., of course, but an even more direct nod to Michelangelo. E.T. copied the general finger-touching theme from Michelangelo,  but the Majestic cover includes even the cracks in the paint on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and its human hand is in exactly the same position as God's in the Michelangelo painting. It's the finger of God, producing a flash of electric light. (On a ceiling. Remember that.)

Michelangelo was a bit of a sync, since I had randomly thought of him last night. I had been writing notes to myself about the chronology of the Exodus and wrote that the mention of "a new king, who knew not Joseph" didn't really make sense if (as per Deuteronomy) Joseph lived four centuries before the Exodus. I wrote: "It would be like saying of some early 20th-century figure that he had never met Michelangelo. I mean, of course he hadn't!"

Why was that the example that came to mind? Why the early 20th century? Why Michelangelo? Why hadn't I thought of some figure who lived 430 years before my own era? Trying to figure that out now, the best guess I have is that I was subconsciously primed by the recent "drowning" syncs. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the early 20th-century poem with its refrain about "talking of Michelangelo," famously ends with the line "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." Here's how it begins:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Strieber's work constantly focuses on the importance of the "overwhelming question"; and in order to avoid assuming an answer to the question "What is it?" he steers clear of talk of "aliens" and always refers to the Other People with the neutral term visitors. Also, keep in mind that bit about being etherized upon a table. The general image suggests the classic "alien abduction" scenario, of course, but the precise choice of words is also relevant.

Oh, before I forget, Wandering Gondola's comment which led me to Drowned God, although it was responding to my "drowned boy" sync, was actually appended to a different post, October 15's "The world was fair in Durin's day." That's a line from Tolkien's Song of Durin, sung by Gimli in Moria. The song also refers to shining crystals:

The light of sun and star and moon

In shining lamps of crystal hewn

Undimmed by cloud or shade of night

There shone for ever fair and bright.

The ending of the Song of Durin, like that of Prufrock, references both drowning and waking:

But still the sunken stars appear

In dark and windless Mirrormere;

There lies his crown in water deep,

Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

Yesterday one of my employees and I went through the twice-yearly ritual of completing the meaningless fire-safety paperwork that gives the fire department something to do between fires. As always, a series of photos have to be attached: of a staff member holding a fire extinguisher, opening the door, answering the phone, etc. One of the required photos was this:

That's a pointing finger and an electric ceiling light, plus a mask for good measure.

This morning, less than 24 hours after taking the above photo, I was browsing a meme dump and found this:

The ceiling-light "sun" also suggests a UFO, of course, and it reminded me of "The time I mistook the sun for the Andromeda Galaxy."

I had no morning classes today, so, as is my habit these days, I went to a coffee shop to read the Book of Mormon -- Chapters 2 through 5 of the Book of Ether. Ether is the name of a prophet, no relation to the quintessence or to anaesthesia ("etherized upon a table"), though plenty of jokes have been made about the latter (cf. Mark Twain's quip that the BoM is "chloroform in print"). This section covers the Jaredites' creation of "barges" (actually hermetically sealed vessels) to cross the ocean, with supernatural shining crystals providing the illumination. The main character is the unnamed "Brother of Jared," whose real name Mormon tradition holds was Mahonri Moriancumer. In his September 2 post "Jaredites in Moria: Making sense out of the Brother of Jared and his shining stones," William Wright proposes that the first element in the name Moriancumer refers to Moria -- the Dwarrowdelf of Tolkien, subject of the Song of Durin -- and that there is a hidden reference in the Book of Mormon to the Brother of Jared, like Gandalf, opening the gates of Khazad-dûm by uttering the password friend.

The shining stones in Ether shine because -- fitting right into a major theme of this post -- they were literally touched by the finger of God:

And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea. . . .

And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear (Ether 3:4, 6).

Note how this also syncs with the Majestic passage quoted above, where a character named Will Stone is suddenly struck with fear when he sees a bright light. Here, the Brother of Jared says the Lord "can do whatsoever thou wilt . . . therefore touch these stones . . . that they may shine," and is then "struck with fear" when the Lord does just that.

The Majestic passage comes right after Will Stone has been inside the crashed alien craft -- generally called a "disk" and sometimes a "saucer." In the description of the Jaredite vessels, we are told over and over again that they were "like unto a dish":

And they were built after a manner that they were exceedingly tight, even that they would hold water like unto a dish; and the bottom thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the sides thereof were tight like unto a dish; and the ends thereof were peaked; and the top thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the length thereof was the length of a tree; and the door thereof, when it was shut, was tight like unto a dish (Ether 2:17).

Saucer, dish, disk -- it's all the same thing.

Drowning -- or asphyxiating underwater, anyway -- is also a concern as the dish-tight vessels are being created:

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, I have performed the work which thou hast commanded me, and I have made the barges according as thou hast directed me. And behold, O Lord, in them . . . we shall perish, for in them we cannot breathe, save it is the air which is in them; therefore we shall perish.

And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air. And if it be so that the water come in upon thee, behold, ye shall stop the hole, that ye may not perish in the flood (Ether 2:18-20).

Just as I was reading this, I became aware of the background music playing in the coffee shop, something about "a rainbow hanging over your head" -- Ha! I thought, like the sword of Damocles! -- fitting given the modern connotation of rainbow. I Googled the line to see what the song was. Here's how it starts:

When it rains, it pours

But you didn't even notice it ain't rainin' anymore

It's hard to breathe when all you know is

The struggle of stayin' above the risin' water line

An unpredictably rising water line was a worry for the Jaredites, too: "ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you" (Ether 2:24).

Remember that Will Stone describes himself as "drowning in the ocean of the desert." In my September 15 post "When life gives you lemons, make le monde," I mentioned that as a child I always thought the Mormon word Deseret was just desert, expanded to three syllables to fit the meter of the song "In Our Lovely Deseret." The word originates in the Book of Ether, where it refers to the honeybees the Jaredites carry with them across the ocean: "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:3).

Here's a coloring-book page from the CJCLDS, showing UFO-esque "barges" complete with honeybees and shining stones:

When I returned home from the coffee shop and went into my study, I found that the desk (etymologically another disk or dish) where I usually read had several small stones on it. They weren't there when I left; I later found my wife had just acquired them and hadn't found a place to put them yet.

Small stones sync with the Brother of Jared story, as he prepared "sixteen small stones" (Ether 3:1) for God to touch with his finger. There weren't 16 stones on my desk, but I guess there were 1 + 6, since the pyrite is clearly the odd man out.

In the afternoon, I taught an English class for very young children who are just beginning to learn the language. When I walked into the classroom, I saw that someone had started and abandoned drawing a rainbow on the whiteboard:

This syncs with the "Rainbow" song I heard in the coffee shop. A mostly-red rainbow also made me think of Ted Hughes -- "Where sun and moon alternate their weathers / To hatch a crow, a black rainbow" -- in connection with "Red crows of the Sun" and my childhood belief that all crows "were in fact red birds from outer space, cleverly disguised as black ones from Earth." If Hughes had been aware of that fact, he would have realized that the sun and moon were actually hatching a red rainbow, bent in emptiness, over emptiness, but flying.

Chinese students of English often forget to add -s to plurals and such, and sometimes they overcompensate by adding it where they shouldn't. In the red-rainbow class today, a girl answered a question with "Nose, I don't." One of her classmates responded, "Nose I don't 就是我沒有鼻子的意思！沒有鼻子的人一定是外星人！妳知道外星人嗎？" ("Nose I don't means 'I don't have a nose'! A person without a nose must be an alien! Do you know about aliens?")

I have never said one word to these kids about "aliens," but I swear sometimes they pick up on things through subconscious telepathy.