His Dark Dove

William Wright's latest post, "A Numenorean Flying Ship," discusses Jeff Bezos's latest spaceship launch -- of a phallic rocket called New Shepard and decorated with an enormous black feather (even though Blue Origin's logo is, naturally enough, a blue feather). One of William's fellow Mormon-Tolkien-crossover thinkers has written of the Black Feathers as a group of Númenorean baddies, and William has been exploring the idea of Númenor (Tolkien's star-shaped island divided into the regions Andustar, Forostar, Orrostar, Hyarnustar, and Hyarrostar) as a heavenly body rather than a literal island. He quotes some of Tolkien's posthumously published notes suggesting that he had once toyed with the idea of spacefaring Elves and Númenoreans. This one in particular caught my eye:

For upon the Straight Road only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey; for being straight that road passed through the air of breath and flight and rose above it, and traversed Ilmen [outer space] in which no mortal flesh can endure.

The phrase Straight Road is here used to refer to space travel. This is interesting vis-à-vis New Shepard's black feather. When, a few months before the birdemic, I began a post with the word corvids, that post was called "Birds that go straight" and characterized the crow as one such because "'As the crow flies' means in a straight line." In my December 2020 post "Red crows of the sun," I discuss my childhood idea that crows and all other black-feathered birds are actually from outer space.

William Wright is far from the first to connect bald Bezos and his phallic rocket with Dr. Evil in the second Austin Powers movie (whose phallic rocket I recently referenced in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana," though William didn't catch it).

There are more parallels. Dr. Evil has a son named Scott Evil. Bezos has a son with a woman named Scott. Bezos named his rocket after Alan Shepard. Dr. Evil's rocket was part of a program named after Alan Parsons. Bezos's company is called Blue Origin. Dr. Evil sings "What if God was one of us? Blue blue blue blue blue blue blue." I'm telling you, these are some top-shelf coincidences!

My last post included the Ava Max music video for "Kings & Queens"; this begins with footage of white doves in flight, which are later replaced with parrots in the rest of the video. Parrots replacing doves made me think of my favorite Flaubert story, "A Simple Heart," which ends with the Holy Ghost appearing in the form of a parrot. With this context of subverted holy-dove imagery, Bezos's black feather made me think of the Tori Amos song "Black-Dove (January)," the lyrics of which apparently came to her in a dream:

I used to vaguely connect this song with the Waco massacre of 1993, since the lyrics repeatedly mention Texas, and David Koresh is an anagram of His Dark Dove. Listening to it again now, I notice other things:

Black-dove black-dove

You don't need a space ship

They don't know you've already lived

On the other side of the galaxy 

She had a January world

So many storms not right somehow

How a lion becomes a mouse

By the woods

But I have to get to Texas

Said I have to get to Texas

And I'll give away my blue blue dress

Notice how the black dove is associated with space travel (all black birds are from outer space), and there's also mention of a "blue blue dress" (cf. the blue robes of the spacefaring "wizards"). "How a lion becomes a mouse / By the woods" is interesting, too. Satan is called a roaring lion in the Bible, but William Wright has recently been connecting "Satan-Saruman" (his term) with the rat or mouse. I recently posted about a sinister mouse in the woods.

The most interesting and unexpected link has to do with Koresh himself, though. Remember that this post began with the Texas launch of a penis-shaped spaceship called New Shepard. Today I learned that before they were called Branch Davidians, the Waco group had a different name:

Shepherd's Rod.