Sunday, September 15, 2024

Dogs, illusions, and musical vortices

I wrote my last post, “The leopard in the bath,” in a coffee shop with this on the wall:


Against a background of wood, juxtaposed with a quote from Victor Hugo and the handwriting of Aleister Crowley, is a white ceramic cup, the inside of which appears to be a vortex lined with musical staves. It reminded me of the black and white vortex on a wood background into which the dog is sucked in “Warp and woof.” The video, you recall, presents itself as being a funny video about a dog’s reaction to an illusion, but in the end it turns out not to be an illusion at all.


That post mentions the idea of a “time warp,” and in 
the leopard post I mention the Other People’s apparently “‘broken’ relationship with Time.” Later, while searching one of my old blogs for references to the leopard in the bath, I ran across a post where I used a diagram of musical staves to illustrate “Dunne’s theory of infinite temporal dimensions.”


This got my attention and prompted me to run an image source for music vortex. The result that most caught my eye was this one:


This has warp/radial staves, complementing the woof/concentric staves in the coffee cup. I clicked through to the page it was from — only that one, not any of the other search results — an article called “Expecting inspiration” from the magazine Computer Science for Fun. Incredibly, it devotes a whole paragraph to online videos of dogs reacting to illusions:

A clue to why expectation is important lies amongst all the cute animal videos on the web: videos of magic tricks for dogs! The magician makes treats disappear and we see the dog's confused reaction. The dog tries to find the missing snack by looking down, then around, then further away. This demonstrates expectation. The dog made predictions of what would happen, creating a scenario where they got the biscuit. It then used them to search, gradually looking in more unexpected places.

Since videos of dogs reacting to illusions has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of a “music vortex,” that’s a very impressive coincidence.

I mentioned that the coffee cup music vortex is next to a translated quote from the French poet Hugo (a quote I’ve discussed here before). This reminded of the 2011 movie Hugo, which attracted the attention of the OG Internet synchromystics back when it came out. I never saw it, but I knew the poster featured a huge clock with both radial and concentric lines:


I watched the trailer on YouTube and found that it prominently features a key (like the Hugo quote about three keys, one of which is a musical note) and a dog (though not a black and white one):



5 comments:

William Wright (WW) said...

It is interesting you mention 'Hugo" (I have never seen the movie, by the way).

A little while ago, I had written a post on symbols and some I had noticed just based on where I live or have lived.

My current town or city is named Hugo. I think I looked into the town name around the same time I was thinking about those other symbols I mentioned. It is, in fact, named after Victor Hugo, go figure (or at least that is the prevailing theory). A bunch of French Canadians settled the town. The main road going through the town center is called "Frenchman Road", and the road intersecting that one leading to the main shopping center is "Victor Hugo Blvd".

A couple of Victor Hugo's best known books are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables.

The Hunchback symbolism should be fairly obvious here as we are dealing yet again with a Being known as a "Humpback". (Like the Whale, Camel-Lion/ Giraffe, etc.) and Notre Dame in Paris is a Catholic Cathedral. Brings Peter to mind. Quasimodo was also the 'bell-ringer'. To "ring a bell" means to remember something, but perhaps only vaguely or not specifically, which also could point to the question of Peter's Mind, or his memory, and where it is.

I am only familiar with Les Miserables from the musical. The lyrics from one of those songs "Do you hear the people sing?", where Frenchmen are singing of freedom, sometimes comes to my mind, and did just now when I thought of the musical: "Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?", with barricade referring, in my imagination here, to a barrier that currently cannot be traversed by Men, but may some day.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

My first exposure to Hugo was in a book by Jacques Cousteau, who took issue with Hugo’s unsympathetic portrayal of the octopus in Toilers of the Sea. To this day, I think of Hugo first as a defamer of cephalopods and only secondarily as a poet and novelist. I think you’re right, though, that the “humpback” connection in Notre-Dame de Paris is potentially significant.

William Wright (WW) said...

On a hunch, I finished the Back to the Future trilogy by watching the final movie. If I was still writing on the blog right now, I would have had a bit to say about it, but there was a part that stood out to me, and an experience relating to it, that is relevant for your post here, I think, and thus a quick comment.

Dr. Brown meets a woman named Clara (Claire...), who becomes his love interest. There is a scene where they are both looking up at the moon through a telescope, and they find out they have a mutual love for the writings of Jules Verne.

I had a distinct thought I should do a quick search on your blog for "Jules Verne". The search results took me to just one post titled "More 333 syncs" that you wrote back in June 2022 - there weren't any other posts that showed up. Remarkably, it was in that post that you first saw and took a picture of the coffee shop image that you started this post off with. Here is your post link:

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/06/more-333-syncs.html

I thought that was pretty interesting!

Anyway, the third movie has a few little winks, perhaps specifically having to do with Claire. For example:

The Clara/ Claire that Dr. Brown meets is constantly dressed in purple. There is only one scene in which she wears another color, and that is when Brown tells her he has to leave her. In all other scenes, which involve several different outfit changes, she wears purple. Brown even makes a brooch with her name on it that has purple flowers.

In my original Chipmunk post from early last month, I associated Claire with the chipette Jeanette who is Simon-Peter's counterpart. Just like the other chipmunks, Jeanette has a signature color that she always wears: Purple.

https://coatofskins.blogspot.com/2024/08/alvin-chipmunks-wisemen-and-chance-to.html

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Ah, Verne! The other great French cephalopod-phobe!

William Wright (WW) said...

When I read your response, I just noticed that the first part of Cephalopod - Cephal - is almost the same as Peter's name in Aramaic: Cephas.

The Cephal part of that name is also an interesting tie to Peter, since it means "Head". And Heads have come up in all sorts of topics with Peter - like tons, whether leaping from his Head, wearing helmets or discs on top of one's head, finding his mind, and even placing him at the "Head of the Table", has all come up in relation to Peter.

Furthermore, his Head somehow relates to people being able to use their Feet to make some kind of walk. Indiana Jones had to start walking from the Lion's Head with a very pronounced first step. Which gets to the "Pod" ending of Cephalopod. The whole name literally means "Head Foot".

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