Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney

Poking around a used bookstore this afternoon, I felt a magnetic pull to a particular book, which, when I took it down from the shelf, turned out to be a wordless retelling of Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse, in gorgeous watercolors showing a level of attention to biological detail almost reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer.

As I looked through the book, I felt myself entering a light trance state and was overcome with a sense of deep psychic rapport with the artist, as if I were experiencing, in condensed form, all the emotions he had felt as he had planned, composed, and painted the pictures. The experience left me fighting back tears, with an unshakable sense that the artist's spirit had somehow been literally present.

I felt an urgent need to get in touch with the artist, to let him know how much I had appreciated his work, and -- this thought came out of left field -- to wish him a happy birthday. I turned to the front of the book to find the artist's name and how I might contact him, but when I saw that he had published the book 15 years ago and dedicated it to his great-granddaughter, I realized he was unlikely to be still among the living.

A visit to the artist's website when I got home confirmed this. Jerry Pinkney departed mortality on October 20, 2021, having entered it in 1939, on -- as I somehow already knew -- December 22.

Jerry, if this somehow reaches you, thank you.

K. West, five years or hours, and spiders

I was listening to some David Bowie last night and was struck by the album art for Ziggy Stardust.

Right above Bowie is a sign that says "K. WEST." I naturally associated this with the singer Kanye West, who has appeared on this blog before, though of course Kanye hadn't even been born at the time the album was released. Looking it up, I find that Ziggy Stardust was released on June 16, 1972, and Kanye was born on June 8, 1977 -- almost exactly five years later.

The first track on Ziggy Stardust is called "Five Years."

In 2022 I had a dream about "Kanye West with Aunt Nancy's coffin." In the dream, the coffin had a note on the bottom that said, "Please wake me up at 5 p.m. Aunt Nancy." So there's another reference to the number five in connection with time. In my commentary on the dream, I wrote, "I assume 'Aunt Nancy' has something to do with Anansi, the anthropomorphic spider trickster of West African folklore." The full name of the Bowie album is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Update (10pm, same day): YouTube recommended a video from the Nephilim Looked Like Clowns guy, and I watched several minutes of it. At around the 7:50 point, we have this little exchange:

Paul: They basically just slapped a bunch of animals together and created monsters, you know hybrid kind --

Jamie: Chimeras!

Paul: Yeah, exactly --

Jamie: Texe Marrs, he's a classic, he would talk about those things --

Paul: That's it. And that was the time --

Jamie: [imitating Texe Marrs] "They're making chimeras and spiders in space!"

Paul: Exactly.

That's a pretty direct hit for Bowie's "spiders from Mars."

Pro-cat

Yesterday afternoon, I bought some half-liter plastic bags. I use these bags when I clean out the cats' litter boxes, and I've been buying them regularly, the same brand of bags from the same store, for many years. When I got home and opened up the package of bags, I found that the company had changed their design. The bags, which had always been featureless before, now had something printed on them:

The bags are now decorated with a cartoon lion -- or, rather, what looks like a housecat with a lion's mane and tail. At the bottom of the bag is the Chinese character for "half," indicating the bag's half-liter capacity, and at the top it says "Pro の Cat." The central character is Japanese but is commonly used in Taiwan (which was formerly occupied by Japan) as a substitute for the Chinese character 的, which is transliterated as de and very roughly corresponds to our preposition "of" (and thus, coincidentally, to de in Spanish and French), except that the Chinese word is a post-position, coming after its object rather than before it. That is, the Chinese structure "A 的 B" is equivalent to the English "B of A." I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that の has a similar function in that language, which is why the Taiwanese treat the two characters as interchangeable. A quick Google search confirms this, and even uses "cat" in the example:

の (no) connects two nouns. It lets the first noun modify the second noun. Examples: 私の猫 (watashi no neko): my cat.

So apparently the intended meaning is either "professional cat" or "the pro's cat" -- both of which Google Translate renders as プロの猫 (puro no neko). However, my first thought when I saw it was that it said pro-cat -- an adjective describing one who is in favor of cats.

I remembered that earlier that day I had done a bit of browsing on 4chan and had come across a thread beginning with a post that said simply, "Protip: Stay away from people who don't like cats." Clearly a "pro-cat" post, and the use of protip (Japanese プロのヒント, puro no hinto) incorporates the other meaning of pro as well.

Having made that connection, I went back to 4chan to look for that thread. It was on /pol/, but I incorrectly remembered that it had been on /x/, so, figuring it was recent enough to still be in the current catalog, I started scrolling through the /x/ catalog. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find a thread asking for thoughts on this symbol:

It just looks like a random hodgepodge of symbols to me. The three Chinese characters are 玉 (jade), 藻 (algae), and 前 (before), and right in the middle is the Japanese character の. As discussed above, this character doesn't actually mean anything; it's a grammatical particle. I would be like creating a similar symbol in English with the word of in big letters. Extremely odd. And I found it because the "Pro の Cat" bag had led me to search for the pro-cat thread.

Later, I was looking up the Tolkien character Thû, who is mentioned a lot in Doug's books. Apparently, he is the Necromancer, who later developed into Sauron, and his precursor was Tevildo, Lord of Cats (the Neko-mancer?). The image associated with Sauron is a single eye, and the pro-cat thread on /pol/ began with an image of two "one-eyed" cats:

The Cunning One, the mother invested in his destiny, and the visiting prince

In “Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One,” I reported a dream about a mother who thought her infant son would grow up to be “The Cunning One. The One Mighty and Strong.” She was, I noted, “seriously invested in this idea of her son's destiny.” One sign of his destined greatness was that Prince William himself had come to pay his respects to the baby.

This morning, I was reading about the mathematician Gauss in Ian Stewart’s Why Beauty Is Truth. “By the time the boy was two,” he writes, “his mother knew she had a prodigy on her hands, and she set her heart on” ensuring his success, whereas Gauss’s father “would have been happier if Carl had become a bricklayer.” When a prominent geometer correctly predicted that Gauss would become “the greatest mathematician in Europe,” his mother “was so overjoyed that she burst into tears.”

Stewart gives each of his chapters a title descriptive of its central character — for example, “The Household Name” for the chapter on Euclid and “The Persian Poet” for the one about Omar Khayyam. Gauss’s chapter, from which I have quoted above, characterizes him as “The Cunning Fox.”

Just after reading anecdotes about the young Gauss, I put down the Stewart book and read a bit in Meaningful Coincidences by Bernard Beitman. On the second page I read was this story:

On the train, Kammerer’s wife was reading a novel with a character named “Mrs. Rohan.” She saw a man get on the train who looked like their friend Prince Rohan. Later that night, the prince himself dropped by their house for a visit.

"It came to pass" in the Book of Mormon does NOT match biblical usage

As I explain over on my Book of Mormon blog, the book's distinctive (over)use of the phrase "it came to pass" shows the fingerprints of Joseph Smith, not of ancient authors.

Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One

1. Aurora

Yesterday, while on the road, I suddenly had the John Denver song "Rocky Mountain High" pop into my head, and I started singing to myself some of the few lines that I know: "Colorado Rocky Mountain high / I've seen it rain fire in the sky" -- at which moment a woman came into view wearing a black T-shirt with the word AURORA in large white letters.

Aurora is a city in Colorado, very close to Denver. An aurora, the atmospheric phenomenon, could aptly be described as "fire in the sky." Seeing the word also made me think of Aurora Mace Potter (1898-1990), who was my mother's mother's mother and the only one of my great-grandparents to have survived beyond my infancy.

2. Batless baseball

I had two memorable dreams last night. In the first, I had gone with some other people (not clearly defined) to watch a baseball game. The game took place on a grassy field, and the spectators, of whom there were not many, sat on picnic blankets in the grass in the same are where the players were playing. There were no uniforms, and it was sometimes a bit hard to tell who was on which team and who was just a spectator. Actually, I'm not even sure there were two distinct teams involved.

The game was played without bats, gloves, or visible bases. The pitcher would roll the baseball down the field as if bowling, trying to make it bounce in unpredictable ways, and the batter-equivalent would cup his right hand and try to scoop up the ball as it rolled (without actually grasping it; use of the opposable thumb was against the rules) and send it flying. Doing so was the equivalent of a "hit," and he would then run the bases or be tagged out as in regular baseball. Being tagged out was called being "given the gift." Nothing on the field was marked, not even the bases, so you just had to know which areas of the grass were considered to be bases.

A dog was also participating in the game. It was a smallish beige-colored dog somewhat similar to a pug in size and shape. Something about it reminded me of a whiteboard eraser, and I referred to it as a "Japanese eraser dog." I'm not sure why I thought it was Japanese.

I've never had the slightest interest in baseball, and at first I was bored and kept dozing off on the blanket. Later I became more interested, and later still I began to participate in the game. (The distinction between players and spectators was quite porous.) I successfully scooped the ball that was bowled to me and started running. One of the other players had retrieved the ball and was running after me, trying to tag me out. I had no idea where the bases were, and the directions shouted by the spectators didn't help much. I just ran as fast as I could, bobbing and weaving as I went, in the hope that I could just tire out my pursuer. In the end, he got me, and I heard a spectator say, "They gave you the gift, man. They gave you the gift."

After the game, I was full of enthusiasm both for the sport and for the "Japanese eraser dog" and couldn't stop raving about them. I said I wanted to buy a dog of that breed, and that I could probably just Google Japanese eraser dog to find out what it was really called. I had also decided that I definitely had to learn how to play baseball. I kept talking about how it worked every single muscle in the body. In particular, the fact that you had to scoop up the ball in a cupped hand and catch it without a glove meant that it was "just as good as rock climbing" for the finger flexors.

I immediately went to a park where I could practice baseball techniques. Even though the sport I was so hyped up about was played with a ball but no bat, I found myself practicing with a bat but no ball. There was a tee-ball tee with no ball on it, and I was supposed to practice swinging the bat at the spot just above the tee, where the ball would have been if there had been one. On my first try, I hit the tee itself and sent it flying. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Then I noticed that most of the other people doing this exercise weren't using bats but rather bullwhips. The idea was to make the whip crack just above the tee, where the baseball would be. What this skill had to do with actually playing baseball is unclear.

Upon waking, I thought that this is what a game of baseball would look like in Alice in Wonderland. I also thought the ball-with-no-bat and bat-with-no-ball permutations might tie in with the "dick with no balls" syncs from a while back.

3. The Cunning One

In the second dream, my wife said, "Did you remember to record your voice for Peggy? Your forget, didn't you?" I protested that no one had ever asked me to record my voice for Peggy, so I couldn't very well have forgotten it.

"Peggy" then turned up -- a dark-haired woman in her early thirties who could have been either White or Chinese (not clear in the dream) -- and explained what she wanted me to do. She was making a video about her baby for YouTube, and she wanted me to do a voice-over for her in a basso profundo "James Earl Jones voice." Here's what she wanted me to say:

Joseph Smith said that he would have a successor. The Cunning One. The One Mighty And Strong. And then, years later, a boy was born . . . .

At that point, I was to say her infant son's name, obviously implying that he would grow up to be that successor to the Prophet. I was hesitant to do this for her and tried to persuade her that making this video maybe wasn't the greatest idea. She tried to downplay it as "just for fun," but I could tell she was seriously invested in this idea of her son's destiny. I said something like, "I'm just worried that later, like when he's nine or ten, he's going to find this on YouTube, or his classmates are, and it's going to be really embarrassing." I left unspoken the further concern that maybe someone would recognize the voice as mine. We reached an impasse, and in the end she dropped the subject.

A few minutes later, I found her singing to her baby, who was not present: "If you've been kissed by a California prince without a crown . . ." (or perhaps it was "without a throne"). I immediately understood what she was referring to and had a vivid mental image of it: She and her baby had been hanging out in a cave a few days after he was born, and Prince William had come to pay his respects to the baby. Something along the lines of the Wise Men visiting Christ.

Upon waking, I of course knew that Harry is the prince who lives in California. Nevertheless, the man I saw in the dream was unmistakably William, Prince of Wales. I also thought upon waking that "the Cunning One" certainly doesn't sound like a good guy and is in fact a direct translation of the name Saruman.

Googling James Earle Jones, I find that he was in a couple of well-known baseball movies: Field of Dreams and The Sandlot, neither of which I have ever seen. The poster for the latter film, as shown on Wikipedia, ties in with the idea of a dog playing baseball:

Again with the butterflies!

Oy gevalt.

I was visiting a school (not my own) and saw on the grounds this plant with a blemish on its leaf that looks like a pale blue or gray butterfly. No sooner had I snapped a photo than I looked up and saw an orange-and-black flutter by. Not a monarch, obviously. I think it was Phalanta phalantha (not a typo; they added an extra h to the species name), the common leopard or spotted rustic, or perhaps a close relative. I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo, but here’s a picture from the Internet to give you an idea of what it looked like:

Oy, sync fairies, enough with the butterflies already!

Stichomancy and the Venn diagram, Communion and ex-communion, Tycho, Charles Wallace, sci-fi Joan, and Conan

This morning I was reflecting on the fact that I am currently associated with two largely distinct circles of bloggers: the Romantic Christian group (including Bruce Charlton, Francis Berger, William Wildblood, and Kevin McCall) and what I think of for lack of a better term as the Dougosphere (including William Wright, Leo, and WanderingGondola) -- and that I foresaw this development immediately before it began taking shape.

On the evening of July 23, 2022 -- when I as yet knew none of the members of the latter circle -- I wrote this in my personal notes on a Tarot reading, unpublished at the time:

My impression was that there’s some other group of associates I need to open myself up to, without leaving the Romantic Christian circle behind. The mental image that accompanied this thought was the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram (forming the vesica piscis where Christ sits enthroned in the Maiestas Domini icon), and I associated this with the strange object in the sky of the Eight of Cups (a combined crescent moon and full moon?).

Hours later, at approximately 4:00 a.m. on July 24, WanderingGondola sent me her first email. I would discover Bill about a year later and then Leo through Bill.

The note quoted above had to do with the one-card Tarot reading reported in my post "Break on through to the other side." I revisited that post this morning. At the time, I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, and I posted a sync related to that. I had read this in Clelland:

I've listened to a lot of people tell their owl experiences, and even though these are just stories of people seeing a bird, they almost always get described as a blessing, an honor, a gift, or an outright spiritual event.

Hours after reading that, with its reference to "a lot of people" considering owl sightings "an honor," I ran across this multiple-choice question in an English textbook:

Many people would consider it a(n) ______ to meet and shake hands with the president of their country.

There were four words to choose from to fill in the blank. The correct answer was honor. One of the other options was owl.

It was immediately after writing about that owl-honor sync that I drew the Eight of Cups, leading to my Venn diagram image and the sense that I was going to become a member of two different "groups of associates." I didn't make the connection until today, but in my note on the Tarot reading, I link the central section of a Venn diagram with Maiestas Domini iconography. Another common term for this type of image is Christ in Glory, and glory is a near-synonym of honor. The source of the image -- Christ enthroned in a mandorla, surrounded by the Four Living Creatures -- is Revelation 4, where the Living Creatures are called "beasts," and we are told that "those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne" (Rev. 4:9).

I was thinking about why I ended up in the center of the Romantic/Dougosphere Venn diagram and what my role in that position might be. Since I've been getting impressive results these days from stichomancy (divination by randomly selected Bible verses), I decided to give it a try. Asking about my role in the center of the Venn diagram, I got this answer:

Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish (Psalm 49:20).

In the context of the Christ in Glory image, which I had just been thinking about before getting that verse, "in honour" refers to Christ's position in the center of the mandorla, which is shaped like the central part of a Venn diagram. He is surrounded by four "beasts" (the term used in the scriptural source of the image, even though one of them is a man) which are outside of the mandorla. If the two arcs of the mandorla were extended into full circles, forming a complete Venn diagram, two of the beasts would be in the leftmost section and the other two in the rightmost, with Christ (or, in the Tarot adaptation of the image, a dancing woman) in the center.

So I understood the stichomantic answer to mean that my role in the center of the Venn diagram has no point if I don't understand it. Without understanding, I might as well be in only one of the circles, like the four beasts in the icon.

I asked the obvious follow-up question -- "How can I understand, then?" -- and got another truly-random Bible verse:

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee (Job 12:7).

One obvious interpretation is that I can understand my role in the center of the Venn diagram by asking and learning from members of both circles, whose position in the diagram corresponds to that of the four beasts. (One of these beasts is an eagle, a "fowl of the air.") Not exactly earth-shattering advice, but I continue to be amazed at how apropos these stichomantic verses keep happening to be.

Some hours after the stichomantic reading, I checked Bill Wright's blog. One of the new posts, "'Ow, Wills' and Owls" was documenting the fact that, in talking to his dog Willow, he had inadvertently said something that sounded like "owls," and that this had struck him as potentially meaningful. I found this synchronistically interesting for several reasons. First, my linking of the word honor with the center of the Venn diagram -- essential to my understanding of the stichomantic reading -- was based on a sync involving the word owl. Second, Bill was talking to his dog, which is a link to "ask now the beasts." Third, I remembered that when I had brought up the random Bible verse website, the verse it had first displayed, before I had asked my question and clicked "New Verse," had contained the word willow. Looking it up now, I find that it was this verse:

He took also of the seed of the land, and planted it in a fruitful field; he placed it by great waters, and set it as a willow tree (Ezekiel 17:5).

Bill's first blog, which I never read because it was deleted before I knew of him, was called "A Good Seed."

In the afternoon, as I often do on Sunday afternoons, I went to a coffee shop in Taichung and then walked to a used bookstore a mile or two away.

While I was in the coffee shop, I was reading The Synchronicity Highway by Rob and Trish MacGregor. The book ends, unexpectedly, with an interview with Whitley Strieber -- which is highly appropriate, since it was on Whitley's podcast that I first discovered the MacGregors. In introducing Whitley, they describe how the publication of his alien-abduction memoir Communion had hurt his career as a novelist:

Accused of writing fiction as though it were true, reviled by skeptics and comedians who ridiculed his description of rectal probes, his fiction career suffered. He and his wife, Anne, eventually lost their home in upstate New York, where the abductions had occurred. Communion had become ex-communion.

Ex-communion isn't a standard English word -- but Trish MacGregor was brought up in Venezuela, and we are probably seeing the influence of her other native language, in which the word for "excommunication" is excomunión. As I recently noted in the comments on "The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates," "Excommunication literally means exclusion from the Communion of the Lord’s Supper."

Just after reading the sentences quoted above, I happened to glance up at the TV on the wall of the coffee shop, which had been playing an American football game. I was surprised to see that the screen had frozen up, and that a couple of employees were trying different things with the remote in an attempt to fix it. The frozen image, which was on the screen for at least a minute, was this:

It's a yellow football helmet with a black mandorla on it that says "HURRY UP." I know it's meant to be a football, but the combination of shape and color scheme makes it highly suggestive of the cover art of Communion:

Another new post from Bill is called "Crom and Crumb" and includes a video of every time Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Conan the Barbarian, says the name Crom. (Both Conan the Barbarian and Conan O'Brien have been in Bill's sync-stream.) As I walked from the coffee shop to the bookstore, I passed an advertisement that said "crush on you CRUUM":

Probably Arnold's most famous quote as Conan is the one about how the best thing in life is "to crush your enemies." By the way, if you zoom in on the ad, you'll also find the name Bill -- or, rather, Billlie, with a triple-l and the last two letters upside down.

In the bookstore, I normally make a beeline for the English section, but this time, on a random whim, I picked up one (and only one) Chinese book and flipped through it. The book is called 月球之書 ("The Book of the Moon"), and inside it I found this:

It's a portrait of Tycho Brahe, the same one Bill recently ran across and included in his December 12 post "Tycho Brahe and Hair . . . also in the context of Black Holes."

In the English section, I ran across a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, but finding an extremely popular author in a bookstore scarcely counts as a sync. I also found a copy of A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle, which I don't think I've ever read. (I read A Wrinkle in Time in elementary school, but as far as I can remember never read any of the sequels.) I took it off the shelf to look at, and the unicorn on the cover got my attention. The blurb on the back explains that in this novel "Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time." The name of Charles Wallace -- a secondary character in Wrinkle but apparently the main protagonist of Swiftly -- turned up in my dreams a couple of months ago, as documented in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace." The syncs were enough to make me buy the book.

Another book that caught my eye said The Genesis of Misery on the spine, and I took it off the shelf having no idea what sort of book it was going to be. It turns out to be, according to the inside flap, "A reimagining of Joan of Arc's story given a space opera, giant robot twist." A few weeks ago, you may recall, I bought "a novel by Lidia Yuknavitch called The Book of Joan, which looked to be a sci-fi reworking of the story of Joan of Arc." I did not buy this second such book, being very much put off by this:

It's an old, familiar story: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war. But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Pronouns in the blurb? You've got to be kidding me. The author, "Neon Yang (they/them) is a queer nonbinary author based in Singapore," and flipping through I even found one of the characters being referred to as xer. I've admittedly read a lot of pretty awful literature in the name of sync, but everybody's got to draw the line somewhere. When the author implicitly defines they as this character's object pronoun and then immediately proceeds to use it as a subject pronoun, that's a bridge too far for any self-respecting English teacher.

When I went to pay for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the cashier was wearing a very distinctive button. I asked her about it, and her response was to offer to give it to me! I said that wasn't necessary but asked if I could take a photo. Here it is:

Walking back to where I had parked, I noticed a parked scooter with a helmet whose design made me think of the Wheel of Fortune. This got my attention, since I'd recently seen the Wheel of Fortune on another motorcycle helmet, so I took a closer look.

Right under the wheel-like design is the name Conan in Chinese, and to the right is a Japanese manga character known as Detective Conan.

The gray and amber Wheel of Fortune card

These blue and orange butterfly syncs are on my mind, and I had the idea of searching 4plebs for /x/ posts about butterflies of those colors, just to see what would turn up. I didn't end up getting that far, though. When I start typing in the URL for 4plebs, autocomplete always gives me https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ (a randomly selected /x/ post), and I generally just press enter, see what kind of random post I get, and then proceed to put in my search terms. This time, the randomizer served up this, an uninteresting "post your wishes" thread, but the image in the original post arrested my attention:

The picture on the left is from the /x/ thread; the one on the right you will recognize as the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, as drawn by Pamela Colman "Pixie" Smith and repeatedly featured on this blog. The only difference is in the color palette. The /x/ version has only four colors: amber (the wheel, serpent, and Four Living Creatures), a darker or more muted amber (Hermanubis), light gray (the sky, the sphinx, and the books), and a darker gray (the clouds).

This obviously corresponds to the four butterfly colors: light and dark amber/orange, and light and dark blue. In fact, I had just been thinking earlier today about how in the traditional eight-color palette of Marseille-style Tarot decks -- which I analyzed several years ago in much greater detail than any normal person would do --  the same underlying color is realized as gray in some historical decks and blue in others -- so I was already primed with the very specific idea of blue and gray being interchangeable on Tarot cards.

In yesterday's post, I also had this very same amber-and-gray palette juxtaposed with the light and dark orange and blue butterflies -- on a card, no less:

Dark and light blue and orange butterflies again, and x, "the unknown"

This morning, a student was showing me a card game in which each card was divided into two parts like a domino. One of these had a picture, and the other had a number, shape, or color. The card she chose to show me as an example was this:

The butterfly in the center is, you guessed it, a dark blue Morpho menelaus. Right next to it is a light blue butterfly. Above the morpho is a light orange butterfly, and next to that is a dark orange one. These are the four butterfly colors featured in "Another light-and-dark butterfly pair," where they were associated with the word and color amber. Here, the top of the card says yellow, but the color it is written in is pretty clearly amber, not yellow.

It also occurs to me that in the past I've used that same set of four colors to represent the four classical elements: air (light blue), water (dark blue), fire (light orange), and earth (dark orange, which is brown). The idea was that light/dark represented the Aristotelian elemental qualities of hot/cold, while orange/blue stood for dry/moist.

By the way, Debbie has sent me a photo of the orange monarch and blue Morpho menelaus butterflies she mentioned in her comments. Here it is:

During my lunch break today, I was reading Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth while I waited for my food. When the food arrived, I switched from that physical book to an e-book, The Synchronicity Highway by Trish and Rob MacGregor. (The connection to the present post is that the original Morpho menelaus sync was with Stewart's book and another sync book by the MacGregors.)

On p. 34 of Why Beauty Is Truth, Stewart explains, for the benefit of the genuine layman, some very basic mathematical symbols:

There are three kinds of important symbols for this book, and I'll mention two of them now. One is our old friend x, "the unknown." This symbol stands for a number that we do not yet know, but whose value we are desperately trying to find out.

Minutes later, I was reading in The Synchronicity Highway an interview with the founder of an alien-abductee support group called the Xperiencers. The MacGregors ask about the origin of the name and are told:

Xperiencers is derived from the word experiencers used by Dr. John Mack. I decided to drop the "e" and allow "X" to represent the unknown as is done in solving common equations.

King Kong's limousine and other nicotine dreams

Last night I slept with a nicotine patch on, curious about the unusually vivid dreams which are a known side effect of doing so. This is about as close as I've ever come to "experimenting with drugs," unless you count the nutmeg incident.

Vivid dreams were delivered as advertised. I remember three of them.

1.

In the first dream, I was exploring a forest with a few other people. Deep in the woods I found an enormous white vehicle, apparently abandoned, and I said excitedly, "Guys, I think I just found King Kong's limousine!"

I climbed up to the top of the vehicle and went in an open window. Inside, I found a cash register. A sign on the register had a headshot of a gorilla and said something like, "I don't have to give you a receipt because I'm a gorilla." There was fine print underneath about how gorillas are not subject to the regulations of the EU. I thought this was very witty and took a photo.

I climbed out the window and up onto the top of the vehicle. That's when I discovered that it wasn't actually a single huge vehicle but rather four white automobiles stacked one on top of another. My climbing upset the balance, and the upper cars slid down and began rolling down the street (there was a street now) out of control. They were going the wrong direction, and drivers were swerving to avoid hitting them. I regretted climbing up on top of the car; if I had stayed inside, with the cash register, I would have been able to put on the brakes.

I was concerned that if the cars kept going, they would end up plunging into the sea and disturbing the whales and dolphins.

2.

In the second dream, my parents and siblings and I, all more or less our current ages, were moving back into the house in Derry, New Hampshire, where I had lived between the ages of two and seven. We were driving there in a Jaguar SUV which had a special feature: You could connect your luggage to the back of your seat, and then when you arrived you could take out the whole seat, which had wheels on it, and use it as a convenient way to transport your luggage. My dad was the only one to use this special feature; the rest of us moved out luggage around the old-fashioned way. "This is a Jaguar," he said. "We should take advantage of its features."

The house in Derry was very large and still had all our things in it from when we had lived there back in the 1980s -- but everything was clean and in good repair and showed no signs of having been abandoned for decades. The living room was illuminated by thousands of white Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling. As we passed a couple of small bookcases, I said, "I remember this was back before we had that many books." One of the walls had three portraits on it: my father, my mother, and between them a Black woman I didn't recognize. White birch trees were visible through the window, and my dad starting singing to himself, "Oh, the birches seemed dreamlike on account of that frostin' . . . ."

I found it emotionally overwhelming to be back in Derry. I kept thinking to myself how much better it was than anywhere else we had ever lived, and what a mistake it had been to leave. I thought I would definitely go to church on Sunday, even though there were probably few people I remembered remaining in the local congregation. I thought of a particular family, the Carders (I mentally pronounced it the New England way, dropping the r's), who had a pumpkin farm, and figured they would probably still be around.

3.

In the third dream, I had just finished teaching an English class, and the students and I were all going downstairs to the lobby. I realized that one of the students had forgotten something on his desk, and for some reason instead of sending him back upstairs to get it, I went myself. I was disoriented at first because I found that the layout of the classroom had been rotated 90 degrees. The board, which had been on the south wall, was now on the west wall, and all the desks were facing it. I couldn't figure out who had rearranged everything or how they had done it so quickly -- we had only been out of the classroom for a few seconds.

I found the desk where the student had left one of his books, and I discovered to my annoyance that someone had also left some trash in the little shelf under the desktop -- some kind of plastic wrapper and, I was surprised to find, a fork. The fork had four silver tines, and the handle was made of a hard green material and was decorated with a leafy pattern. I picked everything up and took it downstairs. By the time I got downstairs, the book and the plastic wrapper had changed into dishes, so I just left everything in the kitchen sink.

Upon waking reflection, I suspect that the fork ties in with my recent dream about "The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates." I dreamed of a river with a "fork" in it, and in my analysis in that post and the comments, I connected this with the river that flows out of Eden and then divides into four rivers. The green handle of the fork with its leaf pattern represents the Garden, and the silver part which divides into four tines represents the river that "was parted, and became into four heads" (Gen. 2:10).

Stichomancy vs. polygamy

This is a further experiment with stichomancy -- posing a question and getting a truly-random Bible verse as an answer.

Since I've been reading lots of polygamy-denier material lately, I decided to ask, "Is polygamy of God?" I got this:

And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness (Mal. 1:3).

Esau was a polygamist, so that seems to be a "no" answer. Of course the verse immediately before it says "yet I loved Jacob," and Jacob was also a polygamist -- but the stichomantic premise is that you interpret the verse as an answer to your question, without regard for the original context.

A follow-up question, "What kind of person was Brigham Young?" got a much more on-the-nose answer:

And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart (1 Kgs. 11:3).

I'm not sure what's going on here, but it's obviously not just random chance.

The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates

I had a dream last night which I don't remember very clearly, but another man and I were preparing to hike upstream in the bed of a large river. I was wearing a black suit and dress shoes and was belatedly realizing that this was not the best way to dress for such an activity, and that my suit and shoes were going to get pretty wet and muddy. My associate was even less appropriately dressed, in a white suit and white shoes. He explained that this was because on our way we were going to meet a woman who wanted to be baptized, and he wanted to be ready to perform the ceremony without delay. (In a Mormon baptism, both the baptizer and the baptized dress all in white.) He suggested that I might be able to help out with the baptism, but I said, "I can't actually do that, you know. I've basically been excommunicated."

As we trekked up the river, we soon came to a fork, where a narrower river on our left and a wider one on our right flowed together. Neither of us was sure which of the rivers we should follow to reach our destination, though I was leaning more towards the one on the left. I woke up before we had made a decision.

In the afternoon, I started reading Why Beauty Is Truth by Ian Stewart -- one of my two books with blue morpho butterflies on the cover -- but before opening it up, I had a strange hunch. In The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Trish and Rob MacGregor -- the other blue morpho book -- there had been a section on stichomancy, which means divination by opening a book (typically either Virgil or the Bible) at random. I decided that before starting Stewart's book, I would ask what I could expect to find in it and then get a truly-random Bible verse to answer that question. The Truly Random Bible Verse Generator gave me this:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat (Gen. 1:29).

This is God speaking to Adam and Eve, explaining that there will be plenty for them to eat in the Garden of Eden.

I opened up the Stewart book and read the preface, which was about Évariste Galois and had no relevance to the Bible verse. Then I finished the preface and came to page 1 of the book proper. Here are the opening sentences:

Across the region that today we call Iraq run two of the most famous rivers in the world, and the remarkable civilizations that arose there owed their existence to those rivers. Rising in the mountains of eastern Turkey, the rivers traverse hundreds of miles of fertile plains, and merge into a single waterway whose mouth opens into the Persian Gulf.

That very specific reference to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates reminded me of my dream, which had also had two rivers merging into a single waterway. The rivers in my dream could not have been those rivers, since the Euphrates (on the left) would have been wider than the Tigris (on the right), but it was nevertheless a sync. Then I read this in the second paragraph:

The rivers brought water to the plains, and the water made the plains fertile. Abundant plant life attracted herds of sheep and deer, which in turn attracted predators, among them human hunters. The plains of Mesopotamia were a Garden of Eden for hunter-gatherers, a magnet for nomadic tribes.

Right there on the first page, Stewart refers to "a Garden of Eden" and clearly means by that expression a place where there is plenty of food because of the "abundant plant life" -- a stichomantic bull's-eye.

Unacorns, unaversities, and universaties

Yesterday, Bill posted “Unicorns, Unacorns, and Hope Balls,” in which he respelled unicorn as unacorn in order to make it read better as Elvish.

This made me think of Ted Kaczynski, who targeted universities but was known as the Unabomber with an a. Looking it up now, I see this originally meant “the university-n-airline bomber,” but until today I had always thought it was just an arbitrary respelling of the prefix uni-.

This morning, less than 12 hours after readings Bill’s post and thinking about the “unaversity” bomber, I saw a small child wearing a sweatshirt that said, “Harvard Universaty, Est. 1636.” Misspellings of famous names are pretty common in Taiwan, especially on children’s clothing, but the timing and the precise nature of the error — university respelled with an a — make it a remarkable coincidence. And Ted Kaczynski’s alma mater was, you guessed it, Harvard.

The word varsity also comes from university, so apparently any vowel in the word can be changed to a.

Another light-and-dark butterfly pair

In my December 2 post "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," I noted the coincidence of running into Morpho menelaus butterflies on the covers of two different books. The two butterflies looked the same except that one appeared to be a darker color than the other.

Then in December 7's "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I again encountered two pictures of M. menelaus butterflies, one darker in color than the other.

In that second post, the butterflies were juxtaposed with the name Amber, which I interpreted as referring to the color amber (yellow-orange). In a comment, Debbie told a story about a monarch butterfly, and she mentioned that "Amber is also the color of the Monarch." I added a comment of my own further connecting the morpho and the monarch:

The Morpho menelaus butterfly is consistently described as having an "electric blue" appearance, and the etymology of electric leads us right back to amber. And of course the butterfly’s namesake, Menelaus, was a monarch, the king of Sparta.

The morpho and the monarch also belong to the same family of butterflies, Nymphalidae.

Today, August 9, I was looking through an English textbook for children, a new edition I haven't taught with before, and I found this in a reading passage on p. 63:

It's a monarch butterfly and a viceroy -- "not the same species, but they look like each other." Although these two species do not actually differ in color, the photographs chosen for the book make the viceroy look significantly darker -- so, as with the two morpho pairs, we have a pair of look-alike butterflies, one of which is darker than the other. These particular specimens are orange, not amber, but both species can be amber -- and, more to the point, Debbie had already explicitly connected her monarch butterfly with my morphos and with the color amber.

The very next page of the textbook, p. 64, used this sentence to illustrate a grammar point:

"This butterfly is not as pretty as the blue one" -- so even though the picture is of orange butterflies, not blue ones, the very next page explicitly mentions a blue butterfly.

For all three of these butterfly pairs, the color difference is an illusion, an artifact of the way in which they were photographed. Monarchs and viceroys are actually the same color. All Menelaus blue morphos are the same color, but their structural coloration means they can look very bright or very dark depending on the angle of the light.

Writing that last sentence made me think of an Anne Hills song my parents used to listen to. I don't know it very well, but I remembered these lines:

And in this leaning toward the night,

There is nothing without shadow,

And no dark without the bright,

In the angle of the light.

I looked up the lyrics, and this is what comes immediately after the lines I remembered:

We were sitting on a hill,

Finding four-leaf clover,

Sure that we had time to kill

Turning love and friendships over.

Words were borne upon the breeze,

Like September leaves we caught them,

Shared their colors, let them go

Just another day in autumn.

Four-leaf clover! In "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I had connected this four-leaf clover image with the butterflies of the title:

The reference to "September leaves . . . in autumn" also ties in with this bit in Debbie's monarch butterfly comment on that post:

Also regarding your reference to Amber. Amber is also the color of the Monarch and Fire (ember) and in the Northen Hemisphere the season of FALL.

The 'ember' months, being : September, October, November and December until Dec 21 when we 'transform/transition' from FALL to winter.

The autumn leaves reference also made me go back and reread my poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited," in which Humpty "had a great fall" in the sense of enjoying the splendid autumn scenery. These lines caught my eye:

For Humpty Dumpty is my name,

The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame,

And I intend to see it all

And stay till the last day of fall.

Humpty plans to stay "till the last day of fall," while Debbie also explicitly states that "FALL" (she emphasizes the word) lasts "until Dec 21." What really got my attention, though, was the reference to "The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame." This title which Humpty claims for himself was a nod to Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. By a weird coincidence, late last night I suddenly felt an urgent need to change the wallpaper on my phone. It has been a Marseille-style Ace of Swords for a long time, probably around a year, but I suddenly wanted something different, a very specific image.

This afternoon, I happened to pick up my phone at precisely 3:33. When that happens, it is my habit to take a screenshot to document a potential sync indicator:

I hadn't thought of "Humpty Dumpty revisited" until I wrote this post and looked up the Anne Hills song with its "September leaves" reference, so that poem played no conscious role in my sudden wallpaper-changing urge.

The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies

My students often have homework assignments where they have to record themselves speaking English and send me the recordings via a messaging app. This afternoon, I was checking this recording homework and, trying to tap the play button to listen to one of the recordings, I inadvertently tapped the student's name instead, which brought up her profile on the app:

The two butterflies immediately caught my eye:

They both look like Morpho menelaus to me, but one is much darker than the other. Compare them to these two M. menelaus I posted in "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies":

How impossibly perfect a sync is that?

Notice that, besides the two butterflies, the main feature of Amber's background is a large circle, and her name, Amber, is in the circle. In my last post, "Some people just can't live without joy," I reported a dream about a large circular symbol that was "a yellow-orange color much like that of Waite's Wheel of Fortune." One of the definitions of the word amber is "a pure chroma color, located on the color wheel midway between the colors of yellow and orange." In fact, Waite's Wheel of Fortune may be explicitly intended to be amber in color. Waite's basic design comes from a drawing by Éliphas Lévi depicting the Wheel of Ezekiel. Here is how Ezekiel's vision of the Wheels opens:

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire (Ezek. 1:4).

The word amber occurs only three times in the Bible. All are in the Book of Ezekiel, and two of them are in the Wheel vision. (Incidentally, the word Tetramorph is often used in connection with the vision in Ezekiel 1 and with the four Living Creatures depicted on Waite's Wheel of Fortune card. Since tetra- is a prefix meaning "four," this ties in with the sync involving four Morpho butterflies. The Tetramorph creatures in Ezekiel also have four wings each, like butterflies.)

After typing the line "How impossibly perfect a sync is that?" above, I took a break from writing this post so that I could meet with a student. I drink a lot of water while teaching, so before going to the classroom I went to the kitchen to fill up a pitcher. The decorative motif on the glass pitcher jumped out at me:

The pitcher is decorated with blue four-leaf clovers. Some are light blue, others are dark blue -- and still others, like the one in the foreground of the above photo, have both colors. It doesn't take much imagination to see this clover as two stylized pairs of butterfly wings, one light blue and the other dark.

A four-leaf clover is a symbol of luck, or fortune, and is thus a link to the Wheel of Fortune. The link is more specific than that, though. Almost exactly a year ago, I posted "Green and the Mushroom Planet," which ends with this paragraph:

It is not specified how many wedges each Mushroom Stone is divided into, but it must be an even number (since the lines cross at the center), and four to eight seems likeliest -- much more than that, and the wedges would be too narrow to contain pictures. Couldn't such a design easily be misinterpreted as a four-leaf clover, or vice versa?

A circle divided radially into either four or eight segments, I wrote, would resemble a four-leaf clover. Waite's Wheel of Fortune is divided into eight segments, while the variant on the motorcycle helmet is divided into four:

Finally, in his latest post, "The Red Bull, Part 1," Bill reveals that The Last Unicorn -- which includes a character called Mommy Fortuna and is thus a link to the unicorn Wheel of Fortune -- also features a blue-and-purple butterfly. Bill posted this clip, in which the butterfly quotes a modified version of a verse from Deuteronomy which I have quoted several times:

The butterfly speaks mostly in nonsense, a verbal collage of snippets from poetry and song. One thing he says made my ears perk up: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover." I immediately recognized this as a line from A. E. Housman's poem "Reveille,"  which I read in 2022 and quoted in my post "You be trippin." Looking back at that post, I see that I mention misreading Housman's "silver dusk" as "silver disk" -- so another Wheel reference. The poem also mentions "the sky-pavilioned land"; the sky is blue, and pavilion is etymologically "butterfly" -- so there's another blue butterfly link.

When I heard the butterfly quote Housman, I remembered that I had very recently visited Housman's Wikipedia page, but I couldn't remember why. Combing through my browser history eventually jogged my memory. I visited his page on December 4 in connection with my research on Pamela Colman "Pixie" Smith. Pixie, you will recall, is the artist who drew Waite's Tarot cards, including the Wheel of Fortune, and the motorcyclist with the unicorn Wheel of Fortune on her helmet had had PXY -- Pixie -- on her license plate. Pixie, it turns out, had been a member of the Suffrage Atelier, an artist's collective founded by Laurence and Clemence Housman -- brother and sister of the poet -- and by Alfred Pearse. Laurence Housman's book The Anti-Suffrage Alphabet included artwork by Pamela Colman Smith. This same Laurence Housman, it turns out, did woodblock illustrations for the 1893 edition of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, a poem about which I have sync-posted before.

"Blood's a rover" is one of several "roving" references by the butterfly in The Last Unicorn. In fact, he introduces himself to the title character by saying, "I am a roving gambler. How do you do?" That word rove ties right back in with the Wheel of Fortune:

Entomological note added: For those skeptical that the light-blue and dark-blue butterflies are the same species, the blueness of Morpho melelaus is structural coloration (the wings contain no blue pigment), and its precise appearance depends on the angle of the light. Here is a specimen so photographed as to make both shades of blue appear on a single insect:

The brown seen around the edges (and on the backside) of the wings is their "true" color, just as the feathers of a blue jay are pigmented only with melanin and are thus "actually" dark brown.

I suppose this is a link between M. menelaus and the blue-skinned Hindu gods -- who, as it was explained to me by an Indian roommate decades ago, are actually "black" (i.e. pigmented with melanin) but are depicted as they are because "blue is the radiance of black." The "blue" skin on the face of a mandrill is structurally colored, so a primate with structurally-blue skin is certainly a biological possibility.

Some people just can’t live without joy

I dreamed that there was a large table, on which was a very large piece of white paper with a circular diagram on it. The interior of the circle was a yellow-orange color like that of Waite's Wheel of Fortune and was full of lines and symbols in a pattern much busier than that of the Wheel and more suggestive of something like Facsimile 2. I don't think it was Facsimile 2, but I include this illustration to give a general idea of the style of the diagram.

It was very large, maybe six feet in diameter. Three men were standing around the table discussing it. Two of them were wearing blue robes, and the third was wearing a conservative black business suit. I didn't get a good sense of their faces.

One of the men said, as if expressing a conclusion derived from careful consideration of the diagram, "Some people just can't live without joy."

Moral weaknesses are neither immoral nor morally neutral

I recently saw a conservative Mormon podcaster praising one Alex O'Connor as his "favorite atheist," so I decided to check him out. Near the top of the list of his most popular videos is one called "Homosexuality Is Not Moral And Here's Why." If that sound improbably based, that's because it's a bait-and-switch. By not moral he means not that it is immoral but rather that it "has absolutely nothing to do with morality."

O'Connor's case is as follows: For something to fall within the sphere of morality, it must (a) be a conscious choice and (b) have some effect on human well-being. Homosexuality -- which he implicitly defines narrowly as a pattern of sexual attraction, not including any of the behaviors that attraction tends to motivate -- is not consciously chosen and does not affect well-being. Therefore, it is neither moral nor immoral but rather has nothing to do with morality, and in conclusion, "you should still vote yes on marriage equality, and you should still celebrate the invaluable freedom that it represents." Yes, that's his whole argument. Keep in mind that he was only 18 when he made this video, so we should cut him some slack, but still.

Hilariously, the top-rated comment on the video is this:

Homophobia on the other hand IS immoral because it's a conscious choice that hurts people.

No. By O'Connor's criteria, homophobia has nothing to do with morality, and we should therefore support homophobia and celebrate the invaluable freedom it represents. Finding homosexuality repulsive is not a conscious choice but an involuntary emotional and physiological response ("Straight men’s physiological stress response to seeing two men kissing is the same as seeing maggots"), a fact which is underscored by the popular terminology equating it to a phobia. Furthermore, homophobia -- narrowly defined as an attitude, not including any behaviors that attitude may tend motivate -- doesn't actually hurt anyone.

Of course, homophobia predisposes one to make certain conscious choices which do affect human well-being -- it may lead one to be unkind to homosexuals, for example. But the same is true of homosexuality, which predisposes one to make choices which are at least as harmful as smoking.

I think we need to recognize a category of moral weaknesses -- such as being lazy or cowardly or short-tempered or insensitive or stupid -- which while not technically "immoral" because they are not consciously chosen, are nevertheless morally relevant and should not be celebrated.

Pull out a hair, blow out ten thousand monkeys

I've had this song stuck in my head all day -- and now you will, too. You're welcome. Don't worry, it's in "English."

For you I pine, for you I balsam

In a comment on yesterday's post "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," Bill wrote, "That author's name for that 'Beauty is Truth' book jumped out at me" -- the author's name being Ian Stewart.

In an update I added today to "Shiva as Kala," I posted a screenshot of Bill's blog which included this image:

Balsam Fir, paired with the recent emphasis on the name Stewart, made me think of a scene from the children's novel Stuart Little by E. B. White (Elwyn Brooks -- have fun with that etymology, Bill!), a book I haven't read in over a decade.

Stuart, a talking mouse, is discussing what laws he will make as Chairman of the World. Someone proposes "Absolutely no being mean," but another child says such a law would never work, as "Some people are just naturally mean."

"I’m not saying it'll work," said Stuart. "It’s a good law and we'll give it a try. We'll give it a try right here and now. Somebody do something mean to somebody. Harry Jamieson, you be mean to Katharine Stableford. Wait a minute, now, what's that you’ve got in your hand, Katharine?"

"It's a little tiny pillow stuffed with sweet balsam."

"Does it say 'For you I pine, for you I balsam' on it?”

"Yes," said Katharine.

"Do you love it very much?" asked Stuart.

"Yes, I do," said Katharine.

"O.K., Harry, grab it, take it away!"

Balsam (which I guess is a pun for "bawl some"?) can refer to any number of very different plants -- "sweet balsam," according to my dictionary, is another name for rabbit tobacco, but apparently it's also the common name for a species of Impatiens -- but the juxtaposition of pine and balsam is a pretty direct link to Bill's balsam fir, the fir being a tolerably close relative of the pine.

E. B. White is somewhat linked to the "cold as ice" theme, too. His much anthologized essay "Once More to the Lake" ends with the words "chill of death."