I've been a miner for a heart of gold

My last post linked Emmett Brown, from the Back to the Future movies, with the brown emmets, or ants, on the A page of Animalia:

As the syncs drew my attention to the word brown, I remembered that its curious etymology had come up on this blog before, in the October 2021 post "Bern, baby, bern!" According to Etymonline, brown comes from:

Old English brun "dark, dusky," developing a definite color sense from 13c. . . . The Old English word also had a sense of "brightness, shining," preserved only in burnish.

In the 2021 post, I discuss this strange case of a single word meaning both "dark" and "bright." Rereading it now, though -- after writing "With?" -- I immediately thought of Darkinbad the Brightdayler:

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

(Hight, incidentally, is an archaic synonym for "named, called." It was particularly favored by Edmund Spenser, who like me found it a convenient rhyme.)

Emmett Brown would be a good alternative name for Darkinbad. Brown, as discussed, captures his oxymoronic dark-brightness. Emmett, the name, is thought to be from a Germanic word meaning "whole" or "universal" ("all things"). Emet also happens to be the Hebrew word for "truth," that which is brought to light. "It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?" (Job 11:8). "Truth shall spring out of the earth" (Ps. 85:11).

This image of Darkinbad going down into the dark to bring out the light of truth, combined with that of the brown emmets, made me think of the old legend of gold-mining ants, recorded by Herodotus and picked up by the medieval bestiaries. Herodotus says these emmets were "the color of a cat," which I guess means brown, since that's the natural color of cats in the wild. I ran an image search for gold mining ants to see if they would be portrayed as brown, and the first result was from a site called A Book of Creatures:

A Book of Creatures, abbreviated ABC. Creature and animal are roughly synonymous, so this is a link to Animalia, which is an alphabet (ABC) book, and which also features brown emmets.

The emmets in Animalia aren't mining gold, though. Instead, they seem to be interested in the Ace of Hearts.

Last night I used the YouTube Music app and let the algorithm choose the songs. The second one it chose was Neil Young's "Heart of Gold":

I want to live

I want to give

I've been a miner

For a heart of gold

In my last post, I interpret the Ace of Hearts as a symbol of having "one heart" and being "pure in heart." A "heart of gold" is obviously a very similar concept. I specifically understood "oneness" or "purity" of heart to mean having "an integrated self, not one torn apart by conflicting motives." It is therefore interesting to see that just below the Ace of Hearts in the picture is the word ATOM in big gold letters. The etymological meaning of atom is "not cut" or "not divided."

Also last night, I was listening to a podcast with John Dehlin and Matt Harris, about the Mormon Church's history of racism:

In the course of the discussion, Harris mentions that one of the only Mormon apostles of his era to question racial inequality in the church was Hugh B. Brown. The part of my mind that makes puns instead of thinking found this funny and said, "Well of course he was critical of 'white supremacy'! The dude's name is literally Hue Be Brown." Just now I looked up what the B. stands for and found that his full name was actually Hugh Brown Brown. That seems like a pretty strange thing to name someone; apparently his middle name came from his mother's maiden name, which was also Brown. That double Brown, paired with a first name that sounds like hue ("color"), seems to be the sync fairies' way of underlining the importance of that word and color.