William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs

Yesterday's post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr" left me on the lookout for synchronistic occurrences of the numbers 42, 126 and 333. I was mostly expecting to see those numbers themselves, maybe on license plates or something, but another idea also popped into my head with a curious clarity: Three triangles could represent 333.

I never saw any of the expected numbers. Nor did I run into three triangles anywhere.

This morning (October 24), I checked for new comments on my blog and found one from Wandering Gondola, timestamped 2:54 this morning, on my October 19 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more." In that post, I had referenced one of William Wright's stranger ideas:

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.

William Wright stopped blogging on September 17, announcing that he was finished. When I visited his blog on October 19 to get the Brother of Jared link, that was still where things stood.

Wandering Gondola's comment of this morning ends with this paragraph:

While writing this I thought to check William Wright's blog, and found he's posting again. (A second small sync: Another Will Wright is famous for simulation games, most notably The Sims, which lets players create and somewhat control virtual people. Not-quite-free men!)

Her use of the variant form Will Wright led me to make a connection I hadn't before: I am currently reading Whitley Strieber's novel Majestic. An air force base called Wright Field, often shortened to Wright, is mentioned many times; and the main character's name is Will Stone. Stones -- supernatural, capitalized Stones -- are a central theme on William Wright's blog.

I went straight to Mr. Wright's blog and read his first post since he resumed blogging: "The Great Pumpkin and 'waiting.'" It was posted on October 20, the day after "Syncfest," and it mentions the same Brother of Jared story I mentioned there:

I look to the story, or rather my updated story, of the Brother of Jared to demonstrate the truth of that sentence I just wrote.  He moved a mountain by faith.  In an earlier post, I suggest that the mountain that he moved was actually Durin's Door in order to access the mines of Moria, obtain Mithril that could be fashioned into stones, and have Jesus fill those stones with light.

That could be a striking coincidence -- or, more likely, he reads this blog, and my shout-out influenced his decision to start posting again. Be that as it may, it certainly is a striking coincidence that Mr. Wright ends his post by talking about three triangles in a Tom Petty music video:

In the video, there are 3 colored triangles and also loose colored string on the set.  At the midpoint of the video (about the 2 minute mark), we find Petty singing in front of a black backdrop.  He then proceeds to smash through this backdrop to reveal a member of the band behind it.  With that band member is the red triangle, and the red string now seeming to extend out from both him and the triangle.  We then see the blue triangle with the same band member now with blue string, and lastly the yellow triangle, but this triangle is inverted and now, to me at least, resembles more something like a jewel or diamond.

And then I suddenly remembered what "three triangles" had meant to me decades ago.

Approximately 20 years ago, when my brother and I were rooming together in college, he asked to borrow my battered copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion. When he was near the end, he brought it to me, showed me one of the pages, and said, "Why on earth did you write 'The Statue Got Me High' in the margin?"

Well.

In 1994 or thereabouts, I discovered They Might Be Giants and Whitley Strieber, in that order. The first time I listened to the TMBG song "The Statue Got Me High" (from the 1992 album Apollo 18), it just absolutely scared the bejesus out of me. As soon as I heard the very brief instrumental intro before the singing starts, I got goosebumps and my mouth went dry, and it jogged loose a free-floating memory, unattached to anything else, of looking up at my bedroom ceiling and seeing three small triangles of bright white light, themselves arranged in a triangular pattern. I still don't know why, or why I had such an extreme emotional reaction to that image. I decided the song was "satanic" but from time to time felt the urge to listen to it again anyway -- which would always leave me terrified and vowing never to play it again.

Communion also scared me to death. I guess I spent quite a lot of time being scared to death in those days. But nothing scared me more than the shock of recognition when I read this passage, from a transcript of an abductee support-group meeting:

Sam: Does anybody ever experience light without any source? You see it on the wall or on the ceiling. It could be in a triangular shape or round. Sometimes I see a triangle. Three triangles together on the ceiling. Has anybody else seen that?

Notice that the comment that led me to William Wright's "three triangles" post was on a post of mine with "ceiling lights" in the title. Part of Mr. Wright's explanation for his decision to start blogging again is "I just find stones are on my mind constantly, even as I go about other things.  It is just always there."

Now check out some of the lyrics to "The Statue Got Me High":

The stone it called to me

And now I see the things the stone has shown to me

A rock that spoke a word

An animated mineral it can be heard

. . .

And now it is your turn

Your turn to hear the stone and then your turn to burn

The stone it calls to you

You can't refuse to do the things it tells you to

Fortunately I am no longer capable of being scared to death, but this is still really, really weird.

Note added:

After posting this, I went and read the other new William Wright posts. In the October 22 post "Fiber optic cables, ceramics, and ethernet conversions: A stone metaphor," he relates a dream he had a few months ago:

In the dream, I was back in the house I grew up in (and that my parents still live in).  I was talking with my dad about something, and I started to say something like "It just feels like things are close, because I can hear you guys upstairs on your ceramics making a lot of noise".  As I was saying this, my dad's face transformed into that of Keanu Reeves as the character of Neo in the Matrix movies, which was a bit strange, and I found that it was difficult to tell whether the words I said were coming from me or the person I was now facing as Neo.  As soon as I became aware of this, I woke up.

In the video for "The Statue Got Me High," as the intro is playing -- the part that freaked me out so much when I first heard it and made me remember the three triangles -- the camera zooms in on a giant ceramic cup and saucer:

As they sing, "And now I see the things the stone has shown to me," we see this:

This video was made seven years before The Matrix, but it certainly seems to prefigure it:

After reading Mr. Wright's posts, I found a new comment from Wandering Gondola -- who plays lots of video games so I don't have to -- pointing out that my three triangles in a triangular configuration suggest the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda franchise. It's a bit different (Zelda on the left, a reconstruction of what I saw on the right) but certainly suggestive:

Zelda made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and then I seemed to remember that Fitzgerald had appeared on this blog once before. He had indeed, in the October 2022 post "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," featuring this image:

What's that on F. Scott's head? Look familiar? The image on the Zeus Is a Dick book also suggests a line from "Statue": "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."

In my 2022 post, I connect this juxtaposition of Fitzgerald and dick with Tender Is the Night -- a novel in which the main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, are based on the author and his wife, Zelda.

Oh, by the way, the F stands for Francis.

I've also just noticed that "Statue" contains an indirect Michelangelo reference: "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie" -- alluding to the apocryphal story about Michelangelo saying he created his masterpiece by "just chipping away anything that doesn't look like David."