And searching my pockets for answers, I said you were real --Serendipity hung in the air like a spell.
That was where my train of thought stood when I stopped at a coffee shop. I had been there for several minutes before I noticed this, on the back of the denim jacket of another customer across the room:
The eight-pointed stars -- indicating a god or goddess in the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia -- also got my attention because The Three Princes of Serendip (whence serendipity) was one of the main inspirations for Voltaire's Zadig, where one of the main characters is a Babylonian queen named after the goddess Astarté.
The jean jacket was also a link to Jay Leno and the blue-clad Wizards or Wise Men. Several minutes after noticing it, I caught this on the TV:
A blue shirt prominently displaying the word MAGE. (I assume it actually says image, and that the sleeve is occluding the first letter, but the sync fairies are opportunistic like that.) This word -- the French form of magus, singular of magi -- is precisely apropos, as it can refer either to a wizard or to one of the biblical Wise Men.
Since tradition calls the Magi the Three Kings of Orient, this is also a link to The Three Princes of Serendip, Serendippo being a fictional country in the Far East. The eight-pointed stars are also a link, since the Star of Bethlehem is often thus depicted:
11 comments:
In case it should turn out to be relevant, the caption on the TV reads "任何人都會拆這個托樑，任何人都會" -- "Anyone can remove this joist, anyone can."
Also, there's a heading on the t-shirt (if I read it aright): "inner writing" & "into the mind"...
And, in the context (our context, the context of the serendipitous sync-stream, not the literal surface of the tv show), what's "this joist"?
I didn’t realize December 3 was the first day of Advent this year (but was of course soon informed by the various “trad” bloggers at Synlogos). An auspicious day for Wise Men posting.
I don’t know, Wade. Any ideas about the “joist”?
Firstly the question arises in regard to the expression "Anyone can remove this joist, anyone can": is the possibility being described here a negative, or a positive, one? In other words, if someone were to "remove this joist", would that be a good or a bad thing? Intuitively, I'm inclined to suppose that it's a good thing. To paraphrase: "Anybody can remove this joist. That's a good thing, and it's easy..."
I must confess that I wasn't very familiar with this word "joist", and hearing it in this context my first inclination was to associate it (perhaps not entirely mistakenly) with the idea of joint. Proceeding to look the word up, I saw that relevant synonyms for joist include beam, girder, rafter, timber--and that immediately put me in mind of Matthew 7:3-5:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
I do think this makes for an interesting correlation with some of your recent musings on the eye and the pupil, the apple of the eye, and "have a nice ay/aye/eye". There's an expression, "the mind's eye", meaning I suppose "the imagination". This connects your ruminations on the eye with your current reflections on the mind and imagination. For starters, I might be inclined to understand the joist as that which blocks the imagination's receptive capacity to receive... what? Images? Messages? Serendipities/ synchronicities? If I'm interpreting the sentence under consideration here aright, then it's easy to remove this blockage and revive the mind's receptiveness to serendipity, etc.
On the other hand, as I indicated previously, I'm tempted to hear the joist as what joins. The joist is certainly, in some sense or other, what upholds. So, bringing this to bear upon Jesus' use of the idea-- that which ought to join, or at least uphold, has become a source of blockage/ blindness (in the context of an eye) that must be cast out/ removed.
If I might attach an addendum... I think it's interesting to look back at the tv image from which this sentence about the joist derives. I can't help but look at this image without seeing it as somewhat analogous to a tarot card image (and I'd encourage you to take a crack at it yourself as if it were). We have a man-woman dyad. He's looking upward, she's looking down at the viewer. Their arms similarly pose themselves, though his hands link and hers apparently don't. He wears a vivid blue t-shirt, she wears a black dress (?): black and blue. The picture you supply of the magi is heavily characterized by a black and blue color scheme. When I don't just think about "this joist" in isolation from the tv screen image from whence it derives, I can't help but construe it somehow to mean, "This joist, which you see illustrated here in this tv screen image, may be undone by anybody."
Incidentally, I blew up the picture of the magi advancing upon the holy family and scrutinized it. I like this image, no doubt because I find the holy night of Christmas legend it depicts to be enchanting, but also because I'm strongly drawn to the color twilight blue. In the image's lower right corner, parallel and to the right of the manger, is a mosque-- at least, I see what appear to be minarets; an anachronism, presumably born of an intention to depict the atmosphere of the middle east.
Also, William, this seems rather intriguing. The television in the second photo of your original post is branded "Sampo", which apparently also happens to be a magical item from the Finnish Kalevala myths.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sampo
Though I feel a bit embarrassed about these constant follow-ons, it's the nature of the business at hand that things sometimes just keep coming to one. Another theme of the original post is eight-pointed stars. On the possibility that the minarets of the holy night/ magi image might be relevant, I googled "minaret definition" and thence I learned:
late 17th century: from French, or from Spanish minarete, Italian minaretto, via Turkish from Arabic manār(a) ‘lighthouse, minaret’, based on nār ‘fire or light’. Compare with menorah.
I'm intrigued by the affinity between minaret/lighthouse and menorah, the eight-branched lamp.
Okay, one last comment. Yet again, I blew up the holy night/ magi image to have a closer look. I took it to an extreme this time, like 5000%, and then began scrolling along the horizon line from left to right. When I got to the manger/ creche, I was surprised to see the face of a panda bear staring back at me. In fact, I didn't even recognize the creche, I just thought I was looking at the face of a panda bear. As I kept farting around, I regained my bearings and recognized the panda face as the creche.
That led me to google the term "panda". There were actually two terms, two versions of "panda" listed-- the first being, of course, the bear. But the second was a Hindi term, denoting a Brahmin genealogy expert and priest. Hindi "panda" is derived from Sanskrit "pandita", "learned, wise".
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