Mighty in Writing

My last post, "Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong," ended with the tentative conclusion that I needed to investigate the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unlike most Hollywood celebrities, he's only had one to date: Maria Shriver, to whom he was married from 1986 to 2021.

I had a dream with Maria Shriver in it back in 1991. In fact, her presence in the dream is how I date it. I didn't know Shriver's name at the time but recognized her as that lady reporter I had seen on TV the day before. The day after the dream, I described her to my mother, and she told me the person I was thinking of was Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family. My family never ever watched TV news except, for some reason, during Operation Desert Storm, i.e. the first two months on 1991. I don't remember what role Shriver had in the dream; only that she was present. What I do remember of the plot is recorded in my 2022 post "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'":

There was a red bee flying around in a city -- New York, I believe -- and I was sure that it was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage. It was going to be a two-dimensional explosion, though, the shock waves extending out from the bee in a circle rather than a sphere. I was running around the city in a panic saying, in an awkward sort of English entirely different from the way I really talk, "Mother, this bee is very dangerous to me." Why "mother" I don't know -- my mother was not present in the dream.

The name Shriver means "writer, scribe." Putting that together with Strong, the surname used by Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York, I immediately thought of the Brother of Jared:

Behold, thou hast not made us mighty in writing like unto the brother of Jared, for thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them (Ether 12:24).

The Brother of Jared is closely associated with the word deseret:

And it came to pass that Jared and his brother . . . did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees (Ether 2:1, 3).

In his book The World of the Jaredites, Hugh Nibley spends five or six pages making the case that the word deseret is Egyptian. Apparently the Egyptians sometimes superstitiously avoided writing the character for "bee" and would replace it with one which normally meant "red" and was pronounced dsrt (vowels unknown). Whatever value this somewhat fanciful etymology may have, it is a clear synchronistic link to the "red bee" in my 1991 dream.

In the dream, New York or parts thereof is about to be destroyed. This ties in with Hercules in New York, and also with my earlier conclusion that New York's Empire State Building represents the Great Tower from which the Jaredites fled. Although the dream itself was set in New York, Maria Shriver's presence linked it with news coverage of the war then going on in Iraq -- i.e., Mesopotamia or Babylonia, which is where biblical tradition places the Great Tower.

Language is "confounded" at the destruction of the Tower. The Arnold Strong Reality Temple meme also refers to such a confounding, as every word in the English language has been replaced with nigger. And Arnold has to "escape" from the temple, perhaps because it is about to be destroyed.

Note that, besides being "mighty in writing," the Brother of Jared was also physically "a large and mighty man" (Ether 1:34), like Arnold.

The fiery disc inside the temple could be interpreted as representing the circular explosion of the red bee.

I looked up and transcribed the listening exercise that started this. Here it is:

AS: Hello. I have a reservation here under the name Alex Schwarz.

R: Welcome to our hotel. Let me just confirm your booking. Could you please spell your last name?

AS: S-C-H-W-A-R-Z. Schwarz.

R: I'm afraid I don't see your name.

AS: That's odd. I received an email confirmation.

R: Did you use another name for the reservation?

AS: Ah, I might have put it in my wife's name instead

Question: What mistake did the man make?

The choices are:

A. He booked a single room instead of a double room.

B. His reservation date was a week later.

C. He did not make the reservation in his own name.

D. He spelled his name wrong.

The trouble with the receptionist -- whose job is literally to "receive" guests -- is because Schwarz made the "mistake" of not booking "in his own name." This reminds me of something Jesus said:

I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive (John 5:43).

In his wife's name, in his father's name -- in his brother's name? For that is the only name by which the Brother of Jared is known. Though Mormon tradition gives him the name Mahonri Moriancumer, the Book of Mormon itself never calls him anything other than "the brother of Jared" -- which is decidedly odd, given that the Brother is a much more important character than Jared himself. One of the greatest prophets of all time, but flipping through our scriptures all we can say is, "I'm afraid I don't see your name."

Note added: As if in confirmation that I'm on the right track, I just ran across a reference to the Great Tower in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. It's a somewhat bizarre metaphor, as blood is a liquid and one does not readily think of it as a building material. After being told, "Your trouble, old Lazarus, is that you can't stand the sight of the slavemaster's blood," an elderly Negro replies (ellipsis in the original):

"No," said the Infidel. "No. More blood will only add crime upon crime. No!" He suddenly stood up from the table, looked at each of us as if to plead, like a criminal before a jury he knows is about to send him to the death chamber. He breathed deeply as he had done earlier, and let his shoulders sag. "Blood upon blood; crime upon crime; brick of blood upon brick of blood of a new mad Tower of Babel which, too, will fall. . . . There can be no triumph in blood." Then he turned and faltered slowly away from the table.