I've been reading the Psalms. Yesterday I read Psalm 17 and found a minor sync, too minor to bother posting:
Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of they wings (Ps. 17:8).
The "apple of the eye" is the pupil, and many Bibles so translate it. The sync was with the Galahad Eridanus poem I quoted in October 30's "Newspapers, April 22, the eclipse and the peck":
Ascend, O moonInto the sunEclipse's eyeThy will be done.Lo, Abraxas!To thy pupil cometh sight,For from thy shadow shineth light!
Today I read Psalm 19:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).
In a note added to the October 30 post quoted above, I posted this meme I found on /x/:
(I should mention for the benefit of my Black readers that most 4chan edgelords don't actually hate you. They like to say nigger just because it's something you're not allowed to say. In my considered opinion, that's a good enough reason.)
Just how massive of a coincidence is this? Well, the psalm has handywork, and the meme has demiurge, which is Greek for "craftsman." Both feature a temple or tabernacle of the sun, and a strong man running out. The psalm mentions that he's running a "race," and the meme prominently features a racial slur. Both feature the word language. The psalm says "there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard"; to what does their refer? The most recent possible antecedent would be the two nights of the previous verse. The meme also implies that there will be no speech nor language where a certain word -- also beginning nig- and also denoting darkness -- will not be heard.
Also, note that this is Psalm 19 -- or XIX in Roman numerals. Supposing you weren't as big and fast as Arnold, you might opt to escape the Reality Temple on horseback rather than on foot:
5 comments:
How did I never realise that was Arnie?! (Know Your Meme has surprisingly few examples of the meme, but that exact instance is one of them.)
The double night reminded me of an old meme with even more gratuitous language, enough that I won't link it here. On KYM, its polite alias is "Angry Robotnik", so-named for a particular version of Sonic the Hedgehog's main villain, Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik; one of the examples brings in a parallel-universe character, Eggman Nega, for punny results. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a larger selection of OC though (wow, I thought that place died years ago). I guess there was something about seeing beloved characters spewing obscenities with little context... (Looking at KYM's gallery, one single image has a second NSFW-wall. The characters involved are from Warframe, of all things, but can you guess what word is used?)
Schwarz is the German for “black,” so Arnold’s own name is a DN.
In the spirit of interweb memetics, this about sums up my reaction (albeit I mean it sincerely, not in mocking).
I thought Arnold's surname meant "black poughman" or someone from Schwarzenegg, a mountain peak near Salzburg in Austria.
"Have I ever mentioned how utterly promiscuous the sync fairies are?"
William, I only recently became aware that you were blogging again and so I've been pleasantly whiling away the time catching up on your latest adventures in synchronicity. Earlier just this evening I read several of the posts preceding this piece, including the one that touched on the Rilke poem. Since I studied German in college, even to the point of being an exchange student in Germany for a semester (and despite my present-day knowledge of German being pretty poor), I feel a certain curiosity about looking at German texts and so I scrutinized the Rilke poem in the original German.
"The eyes" in German is (as you no doubt know) die Augen. "The apples" in German is die Äpfel. The first sentence of the poem is:
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften.
Mitchell's translation, which you quoted, understandably elides the German somewhat. I would translate the last clause, literally, as "wherein the eyes' apples ripened." (There's obviously a pun on "apples" and "ripened".)
Apropos of Psalm 17:8, the apple of the eye, and pupils...
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