Flammarion

In my December 28 post "Birds," I reported hearing Bernard Beitman talk about two trees he called the King and the Queen and having the spontaneous thought that he should have called them Roger and Camille instead. Googling those two names led me to discover Roger McGuinn, frontman for the Byrds, and his wife Camilla.

The name I had thought of was not Camilla, though, but Camille.

Today I read Doubt Not the Dream, a collection of poetry by San Antonio, Texas, poet and amateur astronomer Aline B. Carter (1892-1972). I had known of her for some decades, thanks to her famous pupil Whitley Strieber, but for whatever reason today was the day I decided to track down her poems and read them. One of her pieces, called "Trees," ends with these lines:

Infinity has chosen trees to sing

Of prophecies the rolling ages bring.

This image of trees signing made me think of Roger and Camille/Camilla, whom I had originally thought of as trees but who turned out to be a singer and his wife. Six pages later, I found an epigraph from Camille Flammarion:

"Events vanish for the place which brings them forth, but they remain in space . . . everything in an eternal permanence." -- Camille Flammarion

I know very little about Camille Flammarion, except that his name is attached to the Flammarion engraving, which he published but apparently did not create. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side," I noted the Flammarion engraving's similarity to (a mirror-image of) the Rider-Waite Eight of Cups.

This past Friday, December 27, I acquired by serendipity a modern Italian Tarot deck, designed by Pietro Alligo and drawn by Antonella Platano. Doing my first one-card pull with the new deck, I drew none other than the Eight of Cups:

I was struck by the conceptual similarity of the image to Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I recently set as my phone's wallpaper. Cropping it to fit the phone's screen had even given it the dimensions of a Tarot card:

The imagery on the Tarot card also connects with this photo, which I happened to run across this afternoon:

Here's another take on the same theme, complete with a Green Door:

This is Rex.

I note this as a very unusual sort of dream experience, unusual enough to make me think it might turn out to be precognitive or otherwise meaningful.

My entire visual field was a computer screen showing some kind of ASCII art, which I think was meant to represent a sauropod dinosaur, with a long neck on the left side of the screen and a long tail on the right. I heard the sound of someone repeatedly tapping the space bar, and the ASCII dinosaur parted like a pair of curtains, with the left half moving over to the left and the right half to the right, leaving empty white space in the middle. In this white space appeared what looked like a passport photo.

Faces are rarely well defined in my dreams, but this one was exceptionally clear and detailed, so that I could easily recognize the person if I saw him in real life. He was a Black man with very dark skin and a wide square jaw. His head was completely shaved, and he wore a shortish salt-and-pepper beard, with no mustache but otherwise a full beard. He wore a pair of glasses with round lenses, similar to the John Lennon style but a bit larger. He wasn’t exactly smiling but looked friendly.

A disembodied voice that sounded like a young White woman’s except for its rather flat “Gray”-like intonation, possibly machine-generated, said, “This is Rex. You know Rex. Or anyway, you’ll recognize him. By the way, he’s quite tall.”

Rex’s face stayed on the screen for about 15 to 20 seconds, with no further commentary from the voice, and then I woke up.

Fourier transforms and Morpho menelaus (plus Jokes with Racial Slurs)

This morning I was in a public place reading Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry. I was reading this passage on p. 111:

We should not give Galois all the credit for this transformation. He was riding a wave that had been set in motion by Lagrange, Caughy, Ruffini, and Abel.

As I read this reference to "transformation" and "a wave," in a history of mathematics, a man walked in and sat down a few tables away, facing me. He was wearing this shirt, except that his was blue rather than black:

I continued reading, and in the very next paragraph found this:

Liouville spoke to the French Academy -- the body that had mislaid or rejected Galois's three memoirs -- in the summer of 1843.

Wanting to refresh my memory of what had happened with Galois's three memoirs, I flipped back a few pages (to p. 103) and reread this:

As I mentioned, in February 1830 Galois submitted a memoir on the theory of equations to the Academy for the Grand Prize. The secretary, Joseph Fourier, took it home to give it the once-over. The ill-fortune that constantly dogged Galois's career struck again: Fourier promptly died, leaving the memoir unread.

That's Joseph Fourier, for whom the Fourier transform is named. This is a paper book and thus not searchable, but according to the index, this is the only mention of Fourier in the book.

The word transform made me think of the butterfly on the cover of Stewart's book, since this insect is famous for the transformation, or metamorphosis, it undergoes in the course of its life cycle. On a hunch, I googled fourier transform butterfly just to see what would come up. My mathematical education has been quite rudimentary, and I didn't know the first thing about Fourier transforms, but my hunch turned out to be a good one. It led me to the Wikipedia article "Butterfly diagram," which begins thus:

In the context of fast Fourier transform algorithms, a butterfly is a portion of the computation that combines the results of smaller discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) into a larger DFT, or vice versa (breaking a larger DFT up into subtransforms).

What really caught my eye was the accompanying illustration:

I would have thought that the graph's resemblance to a butterfly was pretty self-explanatory, but whoever put the article together thought it necessary to include a picture of an actual butterfly -- and not just a simple drawing of a generic butterfly, but an entomologically accurate picture of a particular species: Morpho menelaus. The caption even mentions the seemingly irrelevant fact that the butterfly pictured is a morpho.

As a reminder, what attracted me to Stewart's book in the first place was the synchronicity of finding a Morpho menelaus butterfly on the cover:

I haven't finished Stewart's book, but if the index is anything to go by, it has nothing about butterfly diagrams, and the only reference to Fourier is the one quoted above, about how he died before he could read Galois's memoir. Whatever the logic behind putting a butterfly on the cover, it presumably had nothing to do with Fourier transforms.

What prompted the Google search that led me to the butterfly diagram was the connection between butterflies and the idea of transformation. This led me to a blue morpho butterfly like that on Stewart's cover but rotated 90 degrees. A few pages later, Stewart introduces this definition of symmetry: "A symmetry of some mathematical object is a transformation that preserves the object's structure" (p. 118). Then, using an equilaterals  triangle as an example, he explains why 90-degree rotation does not preserve structure and is thus not a symmetry of that object:

Nor is it a symmetry of Morpho menelaus.

Speaking of triangles, last night I somehow ended up discovering the existence of this book on Amazon:

This a case in which you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The free sample Amazon offers contains neither jokes with racial slurs nor instructions on how to avoid such jokes. Instead, it has jokes like this one -- which I don't think contains a racial slur, though I suppose it may, much like the punchline, have been lost in translation:

A vicar changed into speaking to one in all his parishioners. He stated "When you get to my age you spend lots extra time considering the hereafter." "What do you assert that", enquires the parishioner. The vicar replies "Well, I frequently discover myself going right into a room and wondering what did I are available pay attention after."

Kind of reminds me of this one:

You are not my mother. You are a Snort.

Yesterday’s post “Birds” included an image from the P. D. Eastman book Are You My Mother? The most memorable line from that book, the only one I can quote from memory, is the one that serves as the title of this post.

On Friday morning, I was reading a children’s book called Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth to some young students, and one of them pointed to the words “SNORT! SNORT!” in an illustration and asked me what it said.

Then this afternoon, I ran across this image on /x/:

Birds

I know vaguely who Matt Walsh is and what TikTok is, and that's about the extent of my engagement with either of those alleged cultural phenomena. But sometimes you're just at a place in your life where YouTube is like, "May we interest you in this video of Mr. Walsh doing ad reads and reviewing the worst TikToks of 2024?" and you're like, "Sure, what the heck."

I didn't get through the whole thing, but the first segment is about an alleged trend among TikTok women where you tell your husband or boyfriend that you saw a bird -- just that -- and film his reaction. If he really cares about you, of course, he will find this news intensely interesting. Matt Walsh then proceeds to hold forth at some length on the subject of why someone seeing a bird is not intensely interesting. I would comment on the interestingness of his commentary, but we wouldn't want to get too meta here. If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

I got off YouTube and went directly to Bernard Beitman's book Meaningful Coincidences. I had left off on p. 137, where Sanda Erdelez is mentioned, so I picked up from there. Two pages later, I found this:

Jungian therapist Helen Marlo expects coincidences during psychotherapy. . . . Marlos described a patient who wanted to be a bird. This wish reflected his desire for a strong mother (bird) to nourish him. The following week, the patient walked to the window and for the first time noticed a baby bird inside a nest that had been perched in an adjacent window for several weeks. At that moment, the mother bird flew to the nest to feed her baby a worm. The event helped decrease the patient's inhibitions about discussing these needs.

So he saw a bird, but it was significant. The claim that his wanting to be a bird meant he wanted "a strong mother (bird) to nourish him" reminded me of something I had read just yesterday, Michelle Stone's 2014 essay "Claiming Our Heroines – The Untold Story of Lot’s Wife." After the opening paragraph, in which she discusses our "need to come to recognize our Heavenly Mother," this illustration is inserted from P. D. Eastman's classic 1960 children's book Are You My Mother?

There is no comment on this in the text of the essay, but clearly Mrs. Stone is implicitly identifying herself with this character from a children's book.

Last night I had listened to Bernard Beitman interviewing Sanda Erdelez. Before introducing his guest, Dr. Beitman opens the show by identifying himself with a character created by P. D. Eastman's friend and mentor Dr. Seuss:

I am your host, Dr. Bernie Beitman, MD, and I'm going to talk about Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss wrote a story about a tree that was toppled by corporate greed. The Lorax, who speaks for the trees, emerges from the stump of the truffula tree and voices his disapproval of both the sacrifice of the tree and the thneed which is made from the tree. I am the descendant of the Lorax. I speak for the trees. . . . I have developed a relationship with two trees whom I call the King and the Queen. . . .

Remembering this this morning, I mentally rolled my eyes and thought, "The King and the Queen? If he really had a relationship with those trees, he would have given them real names, like Roger and Camille."

Why Roger and Camille? They just popped into my head as examples of unpretentious "real" names Wondering where they had come from, I decided to Google roger and camille to see what would come up. Autocomplete suggested roger and camilla mcguinn, so I went with that. I didn't recognize the names, but it turns out that Roger McGuinn, whose wife is called Camilla, was the frontman for the rock band The Byrds.

Sanda and Croatian taekwondo belts

As documented in "A female historian with a deep-blue belt in taekwondo," I recently dreamed about a historian whose first name I thought may have been Sandra, who held the taekwondo rank suggested by the title. Follow-up research led me twice to the word sanda. First, I tried to look up Sandra on Eldamo, but sanda was the closest I could find. Then, in the course of exploring belt ranks in various martial arts, I discovered that sanda refers to a sort of freestyle kung fu. Today, while reading Bernard Beitman's book Meaningful Coincidences, I ran across a passing reference to a "serendipity researcher" named Sanda Erdelez.

I don't think I've ever encountered the name Sanda before, so of course I looked her up. The name is Croatian. In my post-dream research, I had discovered that the Russians (and apparently only the Russians) have distinct light-blue and dark-blue belt ranks for taekwondo. I figured this was due to the fact that the Russian language treats these as two completely different colors (much like the red-pink distinction in English). I got to wondering if Croatian, being a Slavic language like Russian, might make a similar distinction both in color terms and in taekwondo ranks. I went to check the Croatian Wikipedia article on taekwondo.

The first surprise was that Croatian (Hrvatski) showed up as one of a handful of "suggested languages" for me, even though I don't think I've ever checked a single Croatian Wikipedia article in my life. The language also has a gold star next to it, which I guess means the Croats have a particularly exemplary taekwondo article.

Clicking through to the article and looking for information about belt ranks, I had an even bigger surprise:

There, in the middle of an article written entirely in Croatian, are the English words dark blue. The phrase appears once again, as dark-blu, in the paragraph below the bulleted list. No other English color words appear anywhere in the article; just that one. I had been assuming that Croatian, like Russian, probably had a native word that meant specifically "dark blue," but it looks as if, on the contrary, they have no way of expressing that color in their language and have to resort to an English loanword.

How extremely bizarre! I'm willing to bet that if I went through Wikipedia's taekwondo article in each and every language, Croatian would be the only one to include the words "dark blue" or "deep blue" -- and syncs from the dream about the deep-blue taekwondo belt led me directly to a Croatian academic named Sanda.

I have contacted Dr. Erdelez to explain these syncs and to ask if she's ever done any martial arts. I figure a "serendipity researcher" should have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

Update (same night): I looked up Sanda Erdelez on YouTube and listened to an interview of her by Beitman. Just below it on the screen, served up by the algorithm, was a new video (posted 20 hours ago, well after my dream) with “History w/ Sandra” in the title.

Merry Christmas

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Innocence (1893)

And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.

And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?

And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.

And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.

-- 1 Nephi 11:20-23

The asymmetrically colored butterfly

This morning, I visited a local preschool to help the teacher teach the children, in English, how to make Christmas cookies. She had laid out all the ingredients on a table and asked me first to review the English names of them all.

Indicating the first ingredient, I said, "Okay, who remembers what this is called in English?" -- to which a chorus of voices replied, "Butterfly!"

"No, not butterfly. Just butter. Butter."

"Butterfly!"

Finally I got them to say the correct word. Then one of the girls raised her hand.

"But, teacher, this is a butterfly, right?"

She pointed to the sweatshirt she was wearing, which did indeed have a large butterfly on it. The wings on the left were a light magenta color, while those on the right were a much darker version of the same color.

Butterflies are symmetrical, which is presumably why they put a butterfly on the cover of Ian Stewart's book subtitled A History of Symmetry. However, I recently posted a photo of that very same butterfly species in which it appeared to be asymmetrically colored, lighter on the left and darker on the right.

It appears that the sync fairies aren't going to drop this theme anytime soon.

This afternoon, I met with an adult student who had some questions about an English magazine article he had read. It was about, of all things, the history of 3D glasses, and had a photo of the old style, where one lens is red and the other blue. This asymmetrical coloration of something that would normally be symmetrical fit right in with the butterfly theme. The red-and-blue combination even suggests the magenta of the preschooler's asymmetrical butterfly.

A female historian with a deep-blue belt in taekwondo

I woke up with a few lines of verse in my mind:

By study hard, within the churchyard

Is found the philosopher's stone

I recognized this as the ending of an obscure poem (so obscure I can't even find it online) by Manley Hopkins -- not the immortal Gerard, but that poet's father -- which I had come across somewhere and filed away as memorable for its Byronic wit.

The way I had woken up with these lines in my head suggested some connection with the dream from which I had awoken, which I then made an effort to recollect. Unfortunately, I was only able to recover a few fragments, none of which shed much light on the relevance of the Hopkins lines.

In the dream, I was obsessed with studying the life and work of a particular female historian, whose first name I believe was Sandra. I had a backpack full of books by and about her, as well as my notes, and I was carrying it with me everywhere I went, so much so that people commented on it and said I should really take a break.

In one of the books, I read that Sandra had "a deep-blue belt in taekwondo." I found that to be a very unusual biographical detail -- how often is a martial arts enthusiast described as anything other than a black belt? -- and I became particularly interested in researching it. I started asking various martial artists of my acquaintance about the deep-blue belt, but none of them did taekwondo and, since each art has its own belt scheme, no one could shed any light on it.

Somehow this ended with me at a mechanic's shop asking if they could upgrade my motorcycle's drive belt to a deep-blue one. The mechanic said it was possible, but that I would have to upgrade the tires as well, since deep-blue belts worked best with "Minos brand tires." I imagined these being very wide tires, like those on Batman's motorcycle in The Dark Knight, and I wasn't sure I wanted my bike to look like that.

Also, at some point in the dream, someone told me I was smoking too much and should quit. I protested that I didn't smoke at all.

⁂

Upon waking, I did some follow-up research. First, Pegasus does produce an ultra-high-performance tire called the Minos. It's an automobile tire, though, and would certainly be "very wide" compared to a normal motorcycle tire.

I then had the idea of looking up Sandra on Eldamo, but the closest I could find was sanda, with various meanings ranging from "shield" to "firm, true, abiding" to the demonstrative pronoun "that." Nothing very enlightening there, but sanda turned out to be interesting in other ways.

Then I turned to the idea of a "deep-blue" belt in martial arts. Japanese and Korean don't even make a consistent distinction between blue and green, so I couldn't imagine they would have belt ranks named after specific shades of blue. Only the Russians, I thought, would make such a distinction -- a hunch which turned out to be exactly correct. The Russian Wikipedia article on taekwondo has a table showing two different systems of belt ranking -- "European" and "Korean" -- and the former does have distinct light-blue and deep-blue belts. Checking the corresponding French and German pages confirmed what I suspected: that this "European" system is in fact a distinctively Russian one, not used in other European countries. Interestingly, the (deep) blue rank is the only one (besides white for beginners) that is the same in both the Russian and the Korean systems:

Of course, this distinction between light and dark blue -- a distinction one is required to make in the Russian language -- has played an important role in recent butterfly syncs.

This brief exploration of various taekwondo belt ranking systems made me curious about Chinese kung fu, which as far as I know has no corresponding system of formal ranks. I soon discovered that sanda (散打) -- transliterated the same as the Elvish words I had found on Eldamo when I was looking for Sandra -- is a kung fu term. According to Wikipedia, "'Sanda' originally referred to independent and separate training and combat techniques in contrast to 'Taolu' (pre-arranged forms or routines)."

⁂

This afternoon, I finally found a possible link between the Hopkins poem and the dream. Wanting something to listen to while I did some housework, I put on Michelle Stone's polygamy-denier podcast, "132 Problems." It struck me that she is, loosely speaking, a female historian -- a self-taught expert on aspects of Mormon history -- that she has pursued her "study hard, within the churchyard" -- remaining super-duper-Mormon and, as far as I know, never being excommunicated -- and of course that her name is Stone.

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).