William Alizio's links to other stories

In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess me name," I linked Tim, a being who appeared to me in the dreams related in the November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's book The Key and with a character called Tim in an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about a man named William Alizio. You may recall that my second Tim dream occurred in unusual circumstances: I was reading Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil when I felt an overpowering urge to sleep, accompanied by a mental singsong chanting a poem by James Joyce ("Sleep now, O sleep now . . ."). I lay down on the floor to sleep, and Tim appeared immediately.

Yesterday's post "Narrative Reasoning" recounts another dream. In the dream, I was in my study and heard a line from the Aeneid in which Turnus addresses the goddess Iris (who is the rainbow) and asks who brought her down to him. In the dream, I thought this referred to the Iris Murdoch book and, looking up at where it had been on my shelf, I found that its place had been taken by a green leather book that said Narrative Reasoning in gold lettering on its spine. Later I went through all the books in my house (which is a lot of books) and found only one that in any way resembled the one in my dream: a big green (though not leather) book with gold lettering, containing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Chamber Music in a single volume. The poem which had called me to "sleep now" while I was reading Iris Murdoch is from Chamber Music.

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Today I was emailed what I guess would be considered "channeled" material, written by someone not known to me personally in June 2019. This material is supposed to have been supernaturally received and to recount true events. It is unpublished, but by a vanishingly unlikely coincidence, one of the few people with whom it had been shared is a reader of this blog and noticed its parallels with the William Alizio story.

In this story I was sent, Joseph, his wife Asenath, and their son -- who is a merman! -- are living on the shore, waiting and not really doing anything. The couple finds themselves "unable-unwilling entire, to do much of anything, consequential, at all," being in a state of "lassitude, loss, desuetude." It is upon this scene that "there came to these shores, two cunning wise ones 'wizards,' Blue gowned . . . who first arrived, from shores no longer evident." They enter the couple's house and make themselves at home: "these blue-dressed Ones . . . came stumbling . . . into the reedhouse" of Joseph and Asenath. They stay there for years, trying to extract a secret from Asenath: "seeing here a secret kept," they "desired to look into her mystery, but were by her . . . confounded." For ages, "these four (and a fish-boy) encamped, time being passed without enduring its passage." Finally, the secret -- a prophecy of Jesus -- is revealed to them. After this long visit, Joseph and Asenath depart, led by a rainbow: "An arching bow color-resplendent, shown away these espoused ones . . . that rainbow perceptive led them." Later we are told that Joseph, being "sickly" is carried (by the rainbow, I think; the writing isn't the clearest!) "to lands still green . . . Returned, rainbow whim, treasure following, now to rest."

Compare this to the William Alizio story: Alizio, like Joseph, is stuck in a holding pattern, unwilling to do anything consequential; he spends his time pretending to work, pretending to do yard work, and reading the TV Guide. One day he comes home to find that Tim and Patrick have made themselves at home in his house. Although they are apparently aliens ("little bald men" who arrive in a "spaceship"), Tim and Patrick are dressed as blue-gowned wizards: "blue robes and dunce caps." Just as the blue wizards in the Joseph story are there to extract a valuable secret, Tim and Patrick eat up all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" (the name of a breakfast cereal). Finally, Alizio eats a can of chicken noodle soup while the visitors are there, this being a food stereotypically consumed by "sickly" people.

In the Joseph story, the wizards' robes change from blue to white -- possibly relevant, as William Wright has connected Tim with Saruman the White.

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Today I noticed a link to "these four (and a fish-boy)" on the cover of The Philosopher's Pupil. Here's the cover art on my copy (purchased by its original owner on October 30, 1984, within a stone's throw of the Empire State Building):

Starting from the foreground, we have a man, then a woman, and then a figure in shoulder-deep water who could, for all we know, be a merman. Although pretty much everything in the picture is blue, none of these three foreground figures is wearing blue clothing; only the woman has any visible clothing at all, and her bathing suit is black. Only the two figures in the background -- "these blue-dressed ones" -- appear to be fully clothed. In the story, Joseph and Asenath are on the shore -- with their merman son presumably in the water nearby -- and the two blue wizards come to them from another shore. Here, too, the couple and the blue-dressed strangers are on opposite sides of a body of water. There is also a potted plant on the couple's side, and the story mentions Asenath having "a garden."

Although William Alizio is unmarried, Tim and Patrick send him on a mission with a female partner, and the two of them have to escape danger by swimming across a small body of water.

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Later today, the rainbow in the Joseph story made me wonder again about my dream, which began with Turnus's address to the rainbow goddess and ended with The Philosopher's Pupil being replaced with a mysterious green book called Narrative Reasoning.

Thinking about the green book, I wondered if there were any books titled simply Green. Well, yes, it turns out:

Remember that I'd already identified Tim with the character in this book:

From what I can gather from the Amazon page, Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns -- "snatched from her front porch and deposited with much ceremony into the world of little green men" -- just as William Alizio is kidnapped by "little men" and taken away to their planet. Leprechauns are of course closely associated with rainbows and with the name Patrick.

The first sentence of the first review on the Amazon page is:

Lilybet Green can't imagine anyone capturing a leprechaun for anything other than their Lucky Charms, but Balthazar the Leprechaun is indignant that humans want to capture his people for their gold.

Lucky Charms is a sugary breakfast cereal for children, made by General Mills, just like Hidden Treasures in the William Alizio story. Looking back at the story, I see that it is only Patrick -- the one with a leprechaun-adjacent name -- who eats the Hidden Treasures.

Clearly, finding The Key was just the beginning of this web of syncs.

Both Iris Murdoch and James Joyce were Irish, by the way.