Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting

On April 22, William Wright posted "Shushan!", which included a clip from the James Bond spoof movie Johnny English Reborn in which a Chinese man who apparently turns out to be a spy or gangster or something is wearing a nametag that says Susan, prompting English's sidekick to say, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan." Here's a slightly longer version of the clip William posted, since what happens afterward is also relevant.

On April 23, I left a comment there saying that it reminded me of a scene in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch where Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) says, "You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

On April 24, I checked my students' homework, and one of the prompts was this:

"Susan call me last night" -- intentionally ungrammatical, as the students are supposed to correct it by changing the verb to the past tense. The only way "Susan call me" (without a comma) could be grammatical would be if it meant "Call me Susan," with the word order changed for emphasis -- like that Billie Holiday song, "Crazy he calls me / Sure, I'm crazy."

Susan call me. Sure, I'm Susan.

In a comment on the "Shushan!" post, William Wright wrote this to me:

Do you have a story that attempts to connect these dots, or is it just the dots themselves - the fact that they exist - that are most interesting to you? I only ask, because your comments here, and your writing on your blog definitely focus on identifying dots, but not really connecting them.

I understand what he means -- that I mostly just document syncs without interpreting them -- but I don't think the connect-the-dots metaphor really works. Noticing syncs just is connecting dots. (In fact, one of my first sync blogs was called No Cigar, alluding to the TMBG song "See the Constellation": "No cigar, no lady on his arm / Just a guy made of dots and lines.") Sync is inherently about connections and relations; a fact considered in isolation can't be a sync. I think what he means is that I connect lots of dots but rarely succeed in stepping back and seeing what kind of picture all those connected dots are forming. Or even if I do see a larger picture, I don't know what it means.

For William Wright, though, each connection is a dot, and "connecting the dots" means interpreting these connections as contributing to an unfolding story.

Anyway, that comment got me sidetracked thinking about connect-the-dots puzzles. I thought about how we always called them "dot-to-dots" when I was a kid, but I hadn't heard that term in a long time and wondered whether it was still common. I ended up skimming the Wikipedia article on the subject, which had this illustration of a dot-to-dot of a front view of a face:

Later the same day, I opened the Brave browser to start writing this post. The home screen has various background images that change from time to time, but this time it was this:

Its a starry sky in which some of the star "dots" have been connected with lines to form the Brave logo, which is a stylized front view of a lion's face, as a constellation. It's conceptually very similar to the dot-to-dot from Wikipedia, and the shape even suggests a drooping mustache.

The night before (April 23), I had been reading Henry M. Morris's literalist commentary on the Book of Job. Noting that constellations are referenced more in that book than anywhere else in the Bible, Morris says that this obviously has nothing to do with astrology as we know it (which he naturally views as satanic) and speculates that perhaps the constellations originally had some theological meaning and served as a sort of proto-Bible. That is, before the actual Bible had been written, people would look at the constellations to remind themselves of certain revealed doctrines. What these may have been he cannot say, since the key to their meaning has been lost, and in any case they have been superseded by the Bible proper.

In some way, therefore, these constellations must have symbolized to the ancient patriarchs God's purposes in creation and his promises of a coming Redeemer. This primeval message has been corrupted Satanically into the fantasy messages of the astrologers, but since we now have God's written Word, it is no longer needed. To the early generations, however, it may have served as a memory device, perpetually calling to mind the primeval promises given to Adam, Enoch, and Noah, and those in the line of chosen patriarchs. Even when the world was destroyed in the great flood, the starry heavens remained the same, conveying God's promises to future generations, at least until enough of the written Word was available to make the sidereal signs no longer necessary.

It may be impossible at this late date to fully recover this ancient "gospel in the stars," though a number of attempts have been made.

This syncs closely with William Wright's comment -- or rather with my own modification of his metaphor. Today we still "connect the dots" in the sky and see constellations, but the meaning of the resulting pictures remains opaque. Morris's theory is that in the past God had revealed what the constellations meant, but that now, without access to that revelation, figuring out their meaning may be impossible. "A number of attempts have been made," but I'd wager no two interpreters have read them the same way.

Early on the morning of April 25, I was skimming /x/. The first thing to catch my eye was the image used for this astrology post:

I first noticed it simply because it was a connect-the-dots constellation (Scorpio), but a closer look reveals a more specific sync: Unlike a typical constellation diagram, which has lines connecting one star to another, this one has the stars connected by dots. This matches William Wright's use of the metaphor, in which each individual connection or sync is a dot, not a line.

Another /x/ post really got my attention:

Like the Brave background image, it's a front view of a lion's face in a starry sky. Rather than a typical dot-to-dot constellation, though, this looks like a supernatural apparition. It made me think of Aslan, the lion Messiah of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered if he had ever been depicted that way in art. After a few image searches -- aslan stars, aslan sky -- failed to yield anything, I tried spirit of aslan. This didn't yield any faces-in-the-stars, either, but one of the results caught my eye because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors:

I clicked through to the page it comes from, a 2021 blog post by Stephanie McGann called "Narnia #9: The Last Battle." Here's how it begins:

Before reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons.  

In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. Lewis for his treatment of Susan. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems.

Since the name Susan had unexpectedly cropped up again while I was pursuing lion-constellation imagery, I decided on a whim to do an image search for susan constellation. The first result to show an identifiable constellation was this one:

That's Scorpio, the same constellation from the /x/ post.

I remembered that various forms of the name Susie had been in the sync-stream a few years back, and looking them up reminded me of one of the reasons I'm hesitant to interpret syncs too much these days: Back then, I was extremely confident that all the syncs were predicting that Trump would be back in the White House in 2021, and that obviously didn't pan out. (It's weird to see how political the sync fairies were back then; I'm glad that seems to be over.) One of these Susie/Trump posts was "Hey, Suzy, where you been today?" That's the opening line of the 2019 Weezer song "The End of the Game" -- which also features an unexpected Aslan reference:

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?
I'm looking for you every way
No sign of you when I wake up
I'm on an island with no sun

I feel like I've known you my whole life
You got me crying like when Aslan died
Now you're gone

Going back to the Johnny English Reborn clip, Tucker says, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan" -- saying "a Susan" as if it were a common noun. I know Debbie has posted several times in comments here about a dream in which she was told that she was "a Susie," but I can't find it because comments aren't searchable. Could I trouble you to post it one more time, Debbie?

In the Snatch scene, Bullet Tooth Tony is sitting between two female twins when he says "You can call me Susan." Shortly after that line, he says to the twin on his right, "Pass us the blower, Susie." It's a bit odd saying people can call you Susan when you're sitting right next to someone who actually is called Susan.

This theme of female "twins" -- or at least two women who are hard to tell apart -- also appears in the Johnny English clip. Johnny is at the home of Pegasus, the head of MI7, and her elderly mother is there, too. Also in the house is a Chinese assassin dressed as Pegasus's mother, so that they look the same from behind. Johnny keeps mistaking them for each other -- attacking the mother, then apologizing to the assassin, then attacking the mother again.

Female twins -- and stars, and lions, and crying -- were featured in my March 25 post "She's so rocky, shisa star."

One other thing before I forget it. In his April 22 "Shushan!" post, William Wright compares something Johnny English says to a passage from the Book of Mormon. English says:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

The BoM passage (with boldface added by William) is:

Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.

And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls.  (Alma 37)

I've been reading through the Bible a few chapters a day, and included in my reading for April 24 was this passage in 1 Corinthians:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (1 Cor. 1:27).

This is obviously very similar the the BoM passage, so much so that skeptical readers will say Joseph Smith plagiarized from Paul. Besides the identical "confound the wise" wording, though, Paul also mentions confounding "the things which are mighty" -- a link to Johnny's claim that "The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key."

English compares the key to the stone with which David felled Goliath. Interestingly, a "key of David" is mentioned in the Bible:

These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth (Rev. 3:7).

The speaker -- "he that hath the key of David" -- is Jesus Christ. Since Aslan also represents Jesus Christ, this is a link to the "Aslan closed the door" picture above.