Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter

William Wright has a new post up, "Leon Eggbert and Sun-Moon Time," in which he analyzes that name: Leon Egbert, which was included in some of his "words." He begins by respelling the last name with a double-g and interpreting it as Egg-bert.

As I've mentioned before, the TV aspect of my childhood education was sadly neglected. However, one program I did watch religiously was Sesame Street, being a particular fan of the Bert and Ernie sketches. When Q*bert came up back in 2021, I thought of this:

And when I saw Eggbert, I thought of this sketch:

As the scene opens, we see Ernie with a feather duster and what looks like a small stone (cf. Vaughn J. Featherstone) but turns out to be an egg. The egg is just sitting there on the counter, much like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, and Bert asks Ernie to "put my egg away, please" -- that is, to "put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," as in the version of the rhyme favored by Ludovicus Carolus, that most holy illuminated man of God. Ernie begins making excuses and giving reasons for not restoring the egg to its proper place, to the point where we begin to suspect that, like the king's horses and men, he can't. Finally, the exasperated Bert says, "Drop it, Ernie," resulting -- thanks to Ernie's literal-mindedness -- in Humpty's having his great fall. As in my "Humpty Dumpty revisited," Humpty is still sitting on the wall (or counter) when he cracks.

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The first element in the name Egbert doesn't actually have anything to do with eggs. It is related, rather, to our modern word edge, and the name as a whole means "bright edge," with the "edge" generally understood to be that of a sword. I think this fits with William Wright's ideas about Pharazôn, who did terrible things but whose story perhaps ends in redemption. In the Book of Mormon, the imagery of a bright sword represents the repentance and redemption of people who were once murderers:

Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son of our great God, which shall be shed for the atonement of our sins (Alma 24:12-13).

(There is perhaps a link here to "Makmahod in France?" Joan's sword was stained when she found it -- both literally and perhaps also figuratively with a long history of bloodshed -- but she kept it bright and never used it to shed blood herself.)

As in Egbert, so in Schwarzenegger does the egg element mean "edge." Arnold's surname indicates someone from Schwarzenegg -- "Black Ridge." This black edge obviously complements the bright edge of Egbert. Schwarzenegger has featured in past syncs here primarily in his role as Hercules in Hercules in New York. Interestingly, Hercules has recently resurfaced, and in connection with a ridge. In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I refer to a passage in Pausanias. Here it is:

On crossing the river Erymanthus at what is called the ridge of Saurus are the tomb of Saurus and a sanctuary of Heracles, now in ruins. The story is that Saurus used to do mischief to travellers and to dwellers in the neighborhood until he received his punishment at the hands of Heracles. At this ridge which has the same name as the robber, a river, falling into the Alpheius from the south, just opposite the Erymanthus, is the boundary between the land of Pisa and Arcadia; it is called the Diagon.

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William Wright's identification of Humpty Dumpty as a bright egg possibly ties in with "With?" -- a bit of doggerel riffing on a nonsensical passage in Ulysses. The last two stanzas but one are as follows:

Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft

Our polyvinyl chloride soft.

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

The sync fairies drew my attention back to this just yesterday. I was talking with a friend who runs a high-end cable company, whom I hadn't seen in six months. She told me about a problem they were having with the jackets of one of their new products, which were formerly made of PVC but recently changed to a different material because of pressure to phase out PVC in the European market for environmental reasons. The problem was that the new material was less flexible than PVC, causing it to crack slightly when the cables are braided. As I said, I hadn't seen her in half a year, and we very rarely talk about manufacturing issues in this kind of detail anyway, so hearing that so soon after I had randomly written about the softness of PVC (because I thought Phthailer suggested phthalates) was a noteworthy coincidence. In the same conversation, she happened to ask how to say "hail a cab" in English, which also ties in with the poem -- "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car."

In the next stanza, Darkinbad the Brightdayler goes "down in the dark abyss." In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen," I had cited Aleister Crowley's reading of "Humpty Dumpty":

Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter . . . .

It's a little weird to say the wall is the Abyss -- surely he falls from the wall into the Abyss? At any rate, when I wrote the Darkinbad quatrain, I had no thought of Humpty's being "bright" or going into an "abyss"; these links were later supplied by William Wright and the Great Beast, respectively.