Amber and the Silmarils

Amber is the resin of long-dead trees, preserved in the form of a stone.

The Silmarils were stones preserving some of the light of the Two Trees of Valinor long after the trees themselves had been destroyed.

The word amber originally referred to ambergris, a substance produced by sperm whales. In a comment on my post “Blue-Green Abelard and gray and yellow amber,” Bill connected ambergris with Captain Ahab’s leg which was bitten off and swallowed by the white sperm whale Moby Dick:

This is potentially where the ambergris comes into play. Ahab wanted revenge for the loss of his leg to Moby Dick, which the whale had eaten. Ambergris is from the whale's intestines, and can, I think, not irrationally be linked to Ahab's leg passing through those intestines.

One of the Silmarils is associated with a similar story. Beren was holding one of these stones in his hand when that hand was bitten off and swallowed, Silmaril and all, by the werewolf Carcharoth — whose name strongly suggests a large white predator of the seas: Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark.

Beren and Ahab are of course very different characters, but the parallel still seems potentially significant.

Fool me once . . .

I ran across these two titles today in the very small English section of a used bookstore in Taichung:

Robin Hobb, by the way is just about the most hobgobliny name ever.

I also noted the rather Numenorean imagery (Tolkien always specified a green wave) on the cover of this book by another Robin:

I used to be able to list every Robin that there was, and it used to drive my mother crazy. She used to say, “Robin Lister, if you don’t stop listin’ Robins!” . . . Robin Hood. Christopher Robin. Robin Williams. Robin the Boy Wonder. Robin Goodfellow. Robin redbreast. Natural all-natural Robin whitebreast. . . .

My Hebrew names

Before learning the true (ultimately Greek) etymology of Tychonievich, I had assumed for a long time that it derived from a native Russian/Ukrainian word meaning “calm, peaceful” — plus, of course, the patronymic “son of” suffix. When I was involved with the Esperanto movement, I used the name Trankfilo, punningly respelling the word for “peaceful, tranquil” so as to end with the word for “son.” Years later, when I drove past Ben Salem Wayside (in Virginia, near the college where my sisters were studying), I saw in that (Hebrew for “son of peace”) another translation of my name.

Bensalem, it turns out, is also the name of the titular utopia in The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon.

Ben Salem was a translation of what (I thought at the time) my name meant. The other way of giving yourself a Hebrew name was pioneered by the great Magician who, having been baptized Alphonse-Louis, saw a reasonably close phonetic match in the Hebrew names Eliphaz and Levi. In a 2021 post, I applied the same procedure to my own first and last names and arrived at the Hebrew words Olam and Tikkun.

Tikkun olam is an established term in Judaism. It literally means “repairing the world.”

Bill has recently proposed that to make restitution for my alleged past-life sin of “breaking the world,” I am expected to repair the world by somehow bringing back Atlantis.

Tolkien’s Atlantis

Yesterday I posted “Raising Atlantis,” in which I explained (though the explanation was surely unnecessary for most of my readers) that the Akallabeth was “Tolkien’s version of the Atlantis story.” I mentioned first learning about Atlantis when I read all the dialogues of Plato as a child. The larger context of the post was the assumption that there is something true behind these stories.

Today I checked Synlogos and found a link to an article called “Tolkien’s Atlantis: What Can We Learn from the Ancient Story?” — not by anyone in my sphere of influence, but by a Romanian named Robert Lazu Kmita, writing for a Catholic newspaper called The Remnant. It calls the legend “an old, true story” and cites the dialogues of Plato as our main source.

Lots of people are interested in Atlantis, granted, but the timing is uncanny.

My gold suit

As anyone who has been following developments here will know, Bill Wright has decided that I'm the reincarnation of the Tolkien character Ar-Pharazôn the Golden, who in Daymon Smith's interpretation (though not as far as I know in canonical Tolkien) literally dressed up in gold-colored clothing and makeup. I'm not really sold on this identification (or, for that matter, on any of the numerous other past lives various people have tried to pin on me from time to time), but in the interest of transparency, I thought I should disclose the fact that for several years I was the owner of a metallic gold-colored suit.

I found this in a Deseret Industries thrift store in Utah (Kanab, I think, or possibly American Fork) when I was stationed there as a Mormon missionary. (Yes, they send Mormon missionaries to Utah for some reason.) It was a "Western"-style suit with a pointed yoke and all that, and the whole thing was made of glittering imitation cloth-of-gold. I bought it, for no deeper reason than that it was cheap, it fit me perfectly, and I would probably never find anything like it again. I tried it on a few times but then never wore it again because, well, when and where would anyone ever wear something like that? Eventually, I donated it to a Goodwill in Columbus, Ohio, and I hope it has found a good home.

One of my associates adapted the lyrics of "(I've Got a) Golden Ticket" from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to be about my suit: "Cause I've got a golden jacket / I've got a golden pair of trousers, too . . . ."

I don't know if any photos of me wearing the suit have survived. I'll see if I can find any.

Raising Atlantis

In Joseph Smith’s Enoch material, there is an account of an island that rose up out of the sea:

There also came up a land out of the depth of the sea, and so great was the fear of the enemies of the people of God, that they fled and stood afar off and went upon the land which came up out of the depth of the sea.

And the giants of the land, also, stood afar off; and there went forth a curse upon all people that fought against God (Moses 7:14-15).

When I read this as a child, I remember thinking it was probably where the legend of Atlantis came from. It was an odd connection to make, though. Why would an island rising up out of the sea give rise to legends about the opposite? At the time I knew Atlantis only from Plato, whose works I read at a comically young age, and there is no hint there of Atlantis having risen up from the sea. Nor is there any account in Joseph Smith of the new island later sinking.

Though I read parts of The Silmarillion in my early teens, I never finished it and never read the Akallabeth portion, which is Tolkien’s version of the Atlantis story. I’m reading it now. Tolkien, it turns out, agrees with my childhood intuition that Atlantis originally rose up out of the sea:

To the Fathers of Men of the three faithful houses rich reward also was given. Eonwë came among them and taught them; and they were given wisdom and power and life more enduring than any others of mortal race have possessed. A land was made for the Edain to dwell in, neither part of Middle-earth nor of Valinor, for it was sundered from either by a wide sea; yet it was nearer to Valinor. It was raised by Ossë out of the depths of the Great Water, and it was established by Aulë and enriched by Yavanna; and the Eldar brought thither flowers and fountains out of Tol Eressea.

This new land is Númenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis. In Tolkien, it was raised by an angelic being as a gift to faithful Men. In

Smith, it was apparently raised by Enoch as a place to which his enemies could flee. Still, the parallel is interesting.

In my teens I would write my own story about land being raised up from the sea. The manuscript appears to have been lost, but I remember the general concept. In the center of a large sea, halfway between two continents, was the island of Rundrow, inhabited by the Motens, a people mighty in magic. In an event known as the Pathraising, the Motens, by means of artificially induced volcanic activity, raised up from the sea floor a number of Paths, which were extremely long (hundreds of miles), perfectly straight tracks of dry land cutting right through the ocean and connecting Rundrow to several different points on the two continents. This massive geographical transformation changed the ocean currents, created whole new types of ecosystem, and made Rundrow the center of the world, ushering in what was known as the Path Age

The Path Age gave way to the Grass Age, when the Paths were taken over by magically altered Grass and rendered impassable, cutting off Rundrow from the rest of the world and leading to a widespread decline into barbarism and lawlessness. This was eventually rectified, and a Second Path Age begun, with the development of Pathkine, a breed of heavy-duty cattle (something like elands, but much larger and more robust, with rather baroque horns) specially designed to keep the Grass at bay.

Possibly relevant to recent syncs in which Atlantis is “Cowtown.”

Finding Boster the Nose

In childhood, one of my brothers wrote a series of stories set in a country in which a great many people are named Boster. Most people don't have surnames, but to avoid confusion each person named Boster is given a "Boster title" and is known as "Boster the" plus some random common noun -- Boster the Food, Boster the Cow, Boster the Toe, and so on. The main character in most of the stories is just Boster, the only person of that name not to have a Boster title, which in the first story, Boster vs. Boster the Pig, leads to a case of mistaken identity.

The last story in the series is not about Boster but is the origin story of Johnny Apple Changer, a legendary figure mentioned in passing in some of the Boster stories. Johnny begins his career as a distinguished lexicographer -- "Johnny was so famous that anything he wrote would become a bestselling dictionary, no matter what it was" -- but his work is misunderstood by the reading public, leading the disillusioned Johnny to seek a new career. He falls in with an eccentric called Timer who is pursuing the hopeless project of discovering how to produce magic from apple juice, and it is then that Johnny makes the life-changing realization that what he needs to do is learn how to change apples, modifying regular apple trees so they will grow taller and produce more apples for Timer.

Unsure of how to proceed, Johnny goes to the library and finds a book called How to Find Out How to Do What You Want to Do If It Seems Rather Impossible at This Time, by Boster the Basket. It turns out to be an extremely short book:

If you want to do something that you don't know how to do, there are two main methods of learning how to do it. First, if it is something that other people do know how to do, you go to those other people and have them teach you how to do it. The other method is used when there isn't anyone else who knows how to do this thing that you want to be able to do. That is the situation this book attempts to address.

Simply put, here is how you find out how to do something that you want to do but don't know how to do and no one else knows how to do it either. Go to a certain great wizard named Boster the Nose and ask him. This great wizard can find out -- through his great wizardry -- how to do just about everything. Everything I have asked him about anyway, so he will probably be able to find out how to do whatever it is that you want to do but don't know how to do.

THE END.

On the next, and last, page is this map:

Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all. Then he read a small warning at the bottom of the page: "This map may not be accurate if you do not live to the west of Boster the Nose. If you live north, east, west, or south of Boster the Nose, adjust the map accordingly."

Johnny felt that this might be a little difficult. Especially since the warning gave no guidance whatsoever as to what to do if you live northeast or northwest or southeast of Boster the Nose. And he worried that maybe they did.

So he went off to Timer to find out if he could help. After all, he had lived here for a long time, and he might know where they were in relation to Boster the Nose.

"Hmm... Boster the Nose?" Timer said, looking up from the apple juice box he was working with at the moment. "Never heard of him. But I'd bet we're to the west of him. Just start going that direction. If you don't find him, you can always turn around and try something else."

Johnny couldn't dispute the logic of that, so off he went to try and find Boster the Nose. He took the book with him so that he could check and make sure he was on course as he walked.

Less than an hour later, Johnny has indeed found Boster the Nose by following Timer's sage advice.

I reread this story a week or so ago and could definitely empathize with Johnny's situation.

⁂

Update: a couple of hours after publishing this, I checked my blogroll and saw that there was a new Duckstack up, called "Reflect Eject." It includes almost exactly the same advice Timer gave Johnny:

You can spend a lot of time trying to untangle these philosophical problems if you're inclined to, but unless you invent some very clever sophistry they're essentially unsolvable. . . . If something paralyzes you to the point of inaction and missed opportunities, you're better off just picking a path at random and sprinting down it. If its wrong you can always sprint back.

That Duckstack was actually published a few hours before this Boster the Nose post. The Life and Changes of Johnny Apple Changer was written decades ago, I possess the one and only copy, and I announced my intention to post about it on May 25, so there's no way either of us could have influenced the other by any normal means.

An additional sync is that ducks play an important role in the Johnny story. He writes a dictionary in verse "just for ducks," but it becomes unexpectedly popular with humans, who grossly misunderstand the definitions due to their unfamiliarity with duck culture. It is this that moves Johnny to give up lexicography and apprentice himself out to Timer.

Further note added: That Duckstack even includes a long line made of ASCII characters, connecting two parts of the post.

A blue-green amber drink

I stopped at a convenience store this morning, and they were promoting a particular sort of tea:

Chinese has distinct words for "green" (綠) and "blue" (藍), but it also has a broader word (青) that embraces both colors. Green tea is 綠茶. The slightly different beverage being advertised here is 青茶, which also literally means "green tea" but uses the word for "green" that can also mean "blue" (though the tea leaves themselves are of course green and not at all blue). Tea shops that have English menus often translate it as "blue-green tea," even though there is nothing blue about it, because there's no other obvious way to distinguish it from ordinary green tea. The advertisement also uses various shades between blue and green to promote this sort of tea.

As you can see, though, the actual color of the beverage is neither blue nor green but -- what else? -- amber.

Blue and green have a political meaning in Taiwan, too, with blue being the color of the pro-China party and green the color of the current ruling party, which is more pro-independence. A recently founded third party, in order to express its centrist position, says that its color is 青, realized in its logo as cyan. 

All roads lead from "Bananas and Blow" to (basically) the same Chinese expression

The naturally occurring rebus in "Bananas and blow" made me think of the idea of "canting arms" -- a coat of arms which represents its bearer's surname by way of a (usually partial and kind of lame) rebus. Wondering if I could come up with one for my own name, I decided "tyke on a fish" was a reasonable approximation of Tychonievich, at least by the rather low standards set by other canting arms, so I ran an image search for child riding a fish and found this:

It’s a Chinese poster of a baby riding a carp, with the caption 幸福有余. The first two Chinese characters mean "happiness," and the second two mean "plenty, surplus, more than enough" but are pronounced the same as the Chinese for "have fish" or "there are fish." Hence the fish illustration. It is for similar reasons that fish are always part of a traditional Chinese New Year feast, because "having fish every year" represents "having plenty every year." When I found the picture, which was yesterday or the day before, I didn't pay any attention to the Chinese. I just wanted a picture of a tyke on a fish.

Earlier today (technically yesterday), I posted "Hey, Mary, show me that riff," featuring a Leo Moracchioli music video. Bill left a comment asking about the Chinese characters on Leo's T-shirt, which I hadn't even noticed. His shirt reads 吉庆有余 -- a variant of the phrase seen on the fish poster, except that it says "good luck" or "fortune" rather than "happiness" (though Chinese doesn't really make much of a distinction between those two concepts). The last two characters are exactly the same, with the "enough and to spare" meaning and the "fish" homophony.

I had looked up the Leo video because the tune of "Bananas and Blow" reminded me of "Sultans of Swing." So two entirely different associative trains began at "Bananas and Blow" and ended with a four-character Chinese idiom meaning "plenty of luck/happiness."

Some have tried to use their will, but our way will be gentler still

In a comment on "Bananas and blow," Bill recounted a dream he had about Anne Hathaway, a movie actress who has the same name as Shakespeare's wife. He mentioned that her surname could be read as "hath a way," and I quoted the line in Ulysses where Stephen makes the same pun:

He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.

Just now, I put on some music on YouTube, and an unfamiliar Noe Venable song was cued up by the algorithm:

If you're not paying attention, you might miss the part where she whispers this:

Some have tried to use their will,

But our way will be gentler,

Gentler still than the fangs of discipline.

Hey, Mary, show me that riff

"Bananas and Blow" has been stuck in my head for a few days now, but I've noticed that sometimes it morphs into "Sultans of Swing," presumably because the two melodies begin rather similarly.

The canonical version of the latter song is of course the one by Leo Moracchioli and Mary Spender:

Mary, dressed all in black, playing a black banjo, and addressed at the beginning of the video with something just one consonant shy of "Hail Mary," is a possible tie-in with the Black Madonna theme. Bill has tied the Black Madonna to the spider-demon Ungoliant, though, so it's perhaps worth noting that I've posted ("Spider's oil and walking the line") about how spiders -- and specifically a "Mama" spider -- do not tolerate banjo music:

When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

What spiders do like is recorder music. Interestingly, Bill just brought that instrument up in a comment on "Bananas and blow":

Some visualize the Pied Piper's pipe as a duct flute, also known as a recorder. I like that theory given the reference to "records" on Stones, and the recorders who put them there, in my story and the magical and resonant sound that are meant to come from them. 

It would fit Bill's story much better if the Mama spider liked banjos and hated recorders, so I suppose he'll leave some comment to the effect of "There you go inverting things again." Take it up with the sync fairies, Bill.

Given the "Bananas and Blow" context, it's noteworthy that that verb appears twice in the lyrics of "Sultans of Swing":

A band is blowing Dixie, double four time

and

Uh, but the horns they blowin' that sound

Blue-Green Abelard and gray and yellow amber

This past Sunday, May 25, I attended a birthday party and Zhuazhou ceremony for the son of one of my former employees. When I entered the house, I noticed a book -- it later turned out to be a purely decorative fake book -- called Cyan. Later, with a bit of searching online, I was able to determine that the cover of this "book" was taken from the Summer 2021 issue of a "beauty and lifestyle magazine." The cover illustration shows a woman in a white turtleneck holding an orange between her chin and knee.

Cyan, as a name for the color between blue and green, seemed potentially significant in connection with the Blue-Green Abelard. In the Charles Williams novel The Place of the Lion, you will recall, there is a pterodactyl of which one the characters feels that "in some way it was Abelard. It was Abelard."

The parents of the birthday boy had decorated the house with a dinosaur theme, including this display of balloons:

Only one of the balloons is yellow (see "Caster and the yellow balloon"), and it, also uniquely, is decorated with a blue-green pterodactyl. Also, oddly given the dinosaur theme, several of the balloons have a black and white "cow" pattern, calling to mind "Roman literature and the Cow Tools dancers," in which I dreamt of dancers dressed like this guy:

One of the other guests at the party was wearing this shirt (I found the photo online later):

Under the large words in the center (“Superb Brewed”), it says “ENJOY AROMATIC AMDER.” I noticed this because one of my sisters sometimes used to be called Amder, due to the fact that when she was little she often wrote her name with a backwards b.

Later the same day, I went for the first time to a store that sells water coolers, softeners, filters, and so on. All the walls and furniture were painted blue-green. This product caught my eye:

The product is called Amberlite, and on the bag is a warning to keep it away from “ill-smelling articles.” So that’s two Amber-based names, each juxtaposed with the color cyan and a reference to smells.

Amber in the modern sense is yellow-orange in color and has no smell associated with it, but the word originally referred to an excretion of the sperm whale, ill-smelling when fresh but becoming aromatic over time. Later, when the same word was applied to fossilized tree resin, the whale product was qualified as “gray amber” (whence ambergris), in contrast to this new “yellow amber.”

Of all the spectral colors, cyan is perceptually closest to gray. Some people, including both my father and my wife, while not in any physical sense colorblind, are unable to distinguish cyan/teal from gray.

Back in December, I posted “The gray and amber Wheel of Fortune card,” juxtaposing the colors of the two types of amber and linking gray to blue.

Not all these books are fake

The Chicago Sun-Times is getting a lot of flak for publishing a summer reading list that was slapped together by a confabulating Fake Intelligence and is primarily made up of books that don't actually exist. Not all the books on the list are fake, though. Care to guess which one I might actually be rereading this summer?

Bananas and blow

On the evening of May 22, I put on some music on YouTube, and the algorithm cued up something I'd never heard before: the 2000 Ween song "Bananas and Blow." Before you click, be warned that it's ridiculously catchy, and you'll find yourself singing it at the most inappropriate moments.

As a parody of songs romanticizing life in Latin America, I saw it as a sort of humorous counterpoint to the recent "La Isla Bonita" syncs. Bananas have of course come up numerous times on this blog.

The "blow" in the song is cocaine. One other song has come up on this blog which is also built around a slang term for cocaine: the 2006 Red Hot Chili Peppers "Snow (Hey Oh)" -- which, although it is by a band branded as "red," features the repeated line "so white as snow." "Bananas and Blow" is from the album White Pepper -- which, again, was released in 2000 and thus could have no reference to the "white as snow" Chili Peppers and their cocaine song.

I think the name White Pepper is meant to be a Beatles reference (the White Album and Sergeant Pepper), as some of the other tracks on the album seem to be deliberately Beatlesy. One such song is the next one YouTube served up after "Bananas and Blow": a track called "Flutes of Chi" that seems to be channeling George Harrison:

For Bill's benefit, there's a potential Pharazon reference in there: "Wrap yourself up in gold / The fruits of the old / Are ripe to be told, my friend."

I don't know what "Flutes of Chi" is supposed to mean, but I assume chi is the Chinese word now more usually transliterated as qi, which besides its familiar meaning as a sort of vital force in Chinese medicine and martial arts, appears in compound words with meanings ranging from "balloon" to "angry" to "gasoline." As it happens, one of these compound words combines qi with the character for "flute": 氣笛. The meaning, though, is presumably not what Ween had in mind. It means "air horn," that is, "a pneumatic device designed to create an extremely loud noise."

It took me a second to remember where I'd heard a song about an air horn before. It was the 2018 They Might Be Giants Dial-A-Song tune "The Neck Rolls Aren't Working."

On the morning of May 23, the day after I'd discovered "Bananas and Blow," I stopped for an oil change on my way to work. I was waiting outside, but the mechanic's wife said (in Chinese), "It's too hot outside. Come sit here where the fan can blow on you."

That's the way fans are talked about in Chinese. No one says "turn on the fan" or "use the fan"; it's always "blow the fan" (吹電風扇). That's also the verb used for flutes and other wind instruments, come to think of it. You don't "play" the flute; you "blow" it (吹笛子).

She showed me to a seat right in front of an electric fan, and I realized that I was looking at -- a naturally occurring rebus for the title of the Ween song:

Bananas and blow.

Say after me: It’s no better to be safe than sorry

So after a few days of reflection, my considered opinion is: Fuck it, let’s rock.

Sync-posting is back, the Rosary is back, comment moderation is off, no one is banned, and we’re gonna ride this thing till the wheels fall off.

Being cautious and responsible and measuring out my life with coffee spoons was never going to work. It’s not my style, it’s not what I’m here to do, and the only thing that makes me feel better about these past few days is the reflection that after all kicking against the pricks is, in its own way, kind of reckless.

As soon as I have time, look forward to posts on “Bananas and Blow,” Blue-Green Abelard, and how to find Boster the Nose. In the meantime:

Stepping back from sync

“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” I’ve persisted in sync-posting for long enough now that I think I can say that it’s not getting me anywhere and that its effect on my readers has been net negative.

I will still be logging syncs as they arise and trying to make sense of them, but I won’t be doing any of that work in public anymore. The theory was that with more people trying to interpret the syncs, their “objective” meaning would emerge more quickly. In practice, what happens is that each person interprets things in light of his or her particular hobby horse, and no consensus or clarity is produced.

There’s also the issue that no one really knows where syncs come from or how trustworthy that source may be. If I’m getting messages in a language I can’t read, from sources whose motives and reliability are unknown, why would it be a good idea to share all those messages with the world?

As I’ve said, I will continue to explore syncs in private. However, I will be discontinuing all practices (stichomancy, Tarot reading, Randonautica, etc.) which actively seek to induce synchronicity. More data points aren’t helping anything and only serve to distract me and to fill up my limited free time which would be better spent actually thinking.

Yet another six-legged spider

I was reviewing homework with a group of elementary school students. Their assignment had four sections, each of which had four questions, and so the questions were numbered from 1.1 to 4.4. When we got to question 2.2, one of the girls said, "Two two is a rabbit!" This is a pun in Chinese. The word for "rabbit" is 兔, pronounced tù, and it is common for children to double the word, somewhat analogous to saying "bunny rabbit."

Then when we got to the last question, a different student said, "Four four is a spider!"

"Why is four four a spider?"

"Because a spider has six legs and --"

"Are you sure a spider has six legs?"

"Sorry, I mean a spider has eight legs, and four plus four is eight."

It's such an unlikely mistake to make, particularly in this context. The fact that a spider has eight legs was the whole point, the whole reason spiders were brought up at all, and yet she still said "six."

More subconscious telepathy? Or just the sync fairies trying to drive home the six-legged spider symbol?

Old Kris Kringle is the king of . . .

Most straightforward Chinese mnemonic ever, but somehow I never noticed it until today, with the help of a brief dream in which I heard the Burl Ives song “Jingle Jingle Jingle” playing in Moab, Utah, in July.

Comments are now moderated

It has regrettably become necessary, for reasons that shouldn’t be too hard to imagine, to turn comment moderation on again. Thank you for your patience with the inconvenience.

Yellow cheese books

In a very brief dream during a nap, I ran an image search for yellow cheese, and all the results were pictures of books with plain yellow covers.

Last night I immagined San Pietro

Mental jukebox this morning was “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna.

I first discovered that song when I was reading Dandelion Wine in a cafe in 2016. I was reading the scene where the dying Colonel Freeleigh phones Mexico City, where a friend holds the receiver out an open window so that the colonel can listen to the sounds of life in the city one last time. “La Isla Bonita” was playing in the cafe as I read, harmonizing wonderfully with the story.

Today I was struck by the title of the song. The island where I live was formerly known as Formosa. When the Portuguese sailed through the Taiwan Strait in 1517, they dubbed the big island to their east Ilha Formosa, which like Isla Bonita means “beautiful island.” A group of smaller islands nearby, now known by the Chinese name Penghu, also received a Portuguese name at that time: Ilhas dos Pescadores, meaning “Fishermen Islands.”

In the Madonna song, the name of the island — or perhaps, as some of the lyrics suggest, of a man who lives there — is San Pedro, “Saint Peter.” Bill has recently revealed that, before deciding for sure that I’m a baddie, he had entertained the idea that I was St. Peter reincarnated. I think that’s just as bonkers as the idea that I’m Pharazon, but it does make that saint synchronistically relevant. Thus, when I saw his name in a link on Synlogos this morning, I clicked: “Peter.. keys.. net… coat of arms… regnal name.  Yeah.”

It’s some brief commentary by a Catholic priest on the new pope’s ring. Although the post is in English, it centers on an embedded tweet in Italian, which includes cognates of both San Pedro and Pescadores.

It’s a “Fisherman’s Ring” bearing an all-gold image of Peter. The priest in his “review” of the ring comments:

I would enjoy larger or if it had an emerald this size of a Roman strawberry (in season) or a Gerrett Popcorn kernel, but I’ll take it.

That’s a pretty random popcorn kernel reference. Popcorn has often appeared on this blog in connection with the papacy and (especially) its Mormon counterpart. The kernel/colonel homophony has also been a theme here, which is a link back to that Dandelion Wine scene with the colonel.

Looking for my copy of Dandelion Wine just now, I found that it was shelved behind (and blocked from view by) a book called Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown.

A shoe (but not a pair) and a pear

In the originally published version of my last post, "Can you metamorphosize?," I incorrectly typed a quote as referring to "syncs from September." I've since corrected it to December, but since errors like these can be serendipitous, I decided to look through my posts from September 2024. I then kept scrolling and looked at some from August as well, including "The Red Redeemed Seer Stone" and "Devil Bunny Needs a Ham." The former post begins with this image and highlights the fact that it contains a single shoe:

About four hours before I revisited that post, Bill left a comment on "Nimrod's Son" saying:

The restoration of Numenor is a pretty big theme in my story. It is a necessary step in getting the prisoners (us) off of this place, as part of the wheat being plucked from among the tares. So I actually don't view the breaking of the world as a sin beyond repair, but something that will be remedied. Some people don't need the intermediary step (likely symbolized by the One Shoe thing in my dreams) but a lot of us will, I think.

The other August post linked above begins with a discussion of a game called Devil Bunny Needs a Ham, the premise of which is that you "have decided to climb to the top of a tall building as fast as you can" -- an obvious link to Nimrod and the Tower. It then includes this image of another game by the same company:

After skimming those old posts, I had a tutoring session focused on pronunciation. I use a book called Pronunciation Pairs which drills pronunciation with lots of what are called "minimal pairs" (words differing in a single phoneme only). The set of pairs we worked on this morning was this one:

There’s a single high-heel shoe and a pear (in a book called Pairs, just as the other pear picture was in a game called Pairs).

Tower, fall, and fire obviously relate to Nimrod/Pharazon, and in that post I had also wondered whether Bill still connected him with bucket (pail) imagery.

Can you metamorphosize?

A few days ago, I was supervising some of Diego's preschoolers as they were eating breakfast, and a girl said, "Teacher, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure. What's your question?"

"Can you metamorphosize?"

"Can I what?"

"Transform into a butterfly!"

"Nope, sorry. Only caterpillars can do that."

A chorus of voices begged to differ: "You can! You can! Just be patient!"

They were reciting lines from a children's book called The Very Impatient Caterpillar by Ross Burach, which they've had read to them so many times they've practically memorized the whole thing, and applying them to me was just a random bit of silliness. Synchy silliness, though.

When I brought up Blogger to post this, I found a new comment drawing my attention back to "those orange and blue butterfly syncs from December."

Nimrod's Son

As reluctant as I am to add fuel to Bill's recent speculations, God forbid that I should self-censor for such a reason.

For those who have missed all the drama here and at Leo's blog, Bill has decided that the syncs are telling him that I'm the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, a megalomaniacal villain from the writings of Tolkien who made war on the gods, bringing about the destruction of Númenor/Atlantis. This, in turn, means in his mind that deep down I'm a very bad dude despite apparently being a fairly decent person in my current incarnation.

Bill understand the Tower of Babel story to be a reference to Pharazon's assault on Valinor, as each was a hubristic attempt by mortals to force their way into "Heaven." A well-established tradition identifies Nimrod as the person responsible for building the Tower, so Bill's idea that I am the "son" or avatar of Pharazon made me think of the Pixies song about being dismayed "to find out I'm Nimrod's son."

I wasn't at all familiar with that song. It's musically harsh and profane, and I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing until today. Yesterday, I couldn't have told you anything about it except that it includes that line, "to find out I'm Nimrod's son." I looked it up, and the first line is:

One night upon my motorcycle through the desert sped

The motorcycle is my preferred mode of transportation, and my blog is called From the Narrow Desert.

The lyrics also include a puzzling reference to "chocolate people, well I'll be damned." I don't know whether Bill still associates Pharazon with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or not. That was part of a network of links connecting Charlie Bucket, Thomas B. Marsh, Peter, and Pharazon. Bill has said he no longer identifies Peter with Pharazon, so I'm not sure which (if either) of these two now separate characters inherited the "bucket" associations.

"Nimrod's Son" is from the 1987 album Come On Pilgrim. Here's the cover art:

It's a bald man wearing a hair shirt. People wearing gorilla suits and that sort of thing have been a repeated symbol here and on Bill's blog. Besides that, Bill has often used hair and baldness to symbolize the good guys and bad guys, respectively, so a bald man wearing a hairy garment could represent a bad guy trying to pass himself off as a good guy. A more positive interpretation would be based on the fact that hair shirts, like sackcloth, are a symbol of repentance -- though actually repenting for something "you" allegedly did in a past life, of which you have no memory and with which you have no sympathy, is impossible, meaningless, and at odds with Moroni 8.

"Nimrod's Son" makes no mention of the whole Tower of Babel thing. Instead, the thing that makes it horrifying to be Nimrod's son is (according to the song) that Nimrod's wife was his own mother -- something that is not even hinted at in the Bible or in any ancient tradition of which I am aware. Black Francis didn't just make it up himself, though. Apparently he was drawing on the 1835 book The Two Babylons; or, The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and his Wife by the Presbyterian theologian Alexander Hislop (who, in turn, did just make it up).

"The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod" -- this ties Peter (the first pope) to Nimrod (Pharazon), which is a link Bill made in the past, although he has since rejected the idea. The "and his Wife" part is a link to Bill's current position (see "Intercepted prayers?") that people who pray to Mary are actually praying to a demonic being, Ungoliant, who is figuratively Pharazon's "mother" (just as Hislop maintains that Nimrod's wife, Semiramis, was also his mother).

One of the synchronistic "arguments" Bill gave in support of calling Ungoliant my "mother" is that he identifies her with a character called Mommy Fortuna, who is the villain in the movie The Last Unicorn, and the etymology of my own surname suggests that I am "the son of Fortuna" (Tyche being the Greek equivalent of that Roman goddess).

I turned to the "Mother and Child" section of Hislop's book, where he argues that the Madonna and Child theme in Catholicism and various other religions represents Semiramis and her son/husband Nimrod. One of the pagan examples he gives, on p. 20, is "Fortuna and Jupiter-puer, or Jupiter, the boy." Fortuna was normally thought of as the daughter of Jupiter, not his mother, but apparently there is one place in Cicero (Latin text) where he mentions a statue of "the child Jupiter, sitting with Juno in the lap of Fortuna and reaching for her breast."

I can only hope that as I continue to follow the syncs, things will start to make some kind of sense. In the meantime, you're welcome, Bill.

The more "the more, the merrier," the merrier

The boar, the barrier:

The core, the carrier:

The door, the derriere:

The whore, the hairier:

The score, the scarier:

The war, the warier:

The more, the merrier

Ulysses wasn't long enough.

These verses add some other stuff,

As sung and strummed by that great playler,

Ukinbad the Ukuleler.

Flinbad the Flailer was a sort

Of Gnoll, quite strong but rather short.

(That couplet was the only choice.

Old Gary Gygax knew his Joyce.)

Frinbad the Frailer isn't stronger

Than the others any longer.

Grinbad the Grailer found the Cup

And, posing with it, hammed it up.

Ginbad the Gaeler stands for Scotch.

No Limey liquor on his watch!

Strinbad the Stralier knows his place:

Upon the planet's nether face.

Sninbad the Snailer used his bill

To crack the shells and eat his fill.

Stinbad the Staler felt quite jealous

Of that band the Young Fresh Fellas.

Winbad the Wailer wondered why

Succeeding made her want to cry.

Trinbad the Trailer oft was seen

Before the feature on the screen.

Quinbad the Veiler used disguise

To marry off old Tender Eyes.

Yinbad the Layler, she was apt

To dance and sing while Eric clapped.

How many Ailers have you counted?

To what have all these lines amounted?

The first sixteen, and then those two,

And now eleven more for you.

We're well along the rocky road

To doublin' what old Séamus wrote.

Arms and legs

These army men and leggy girls

With weaponry and flaxen curls,

Respectively, are plastic toys,

One kind for girls, one kind for boys.

And when the kids are in the shop,

Accompanied by mom and pop,

Each for their favored plaything begs,

The boys for arms, the girls for legs.

But mothers dream potential harms

If anyone should play with arms,

While fathers for their part think twice

When girls inform them of the price.

Varda ambigram

Those few who have been following me for a really long time will remember that there was a period of time where ambigrams took over this blog, much as syncs have done now, and accounted for the bulk of my posts. I haven't done any in a long time, but my recent post "Varda Elentári" said:

Given the recent theme of writing things backwards or upside down, I thought it was potentially significant that the student wrote the name “backwards” in a sense, but in such a way that the final result was the same as if it had been written in the ordinary way.

That’s the concept of the ambigram (or some kinds anyway): You write something so that it reads the same upside down or backwards as it does read in the ordinary way. Then I realized that the name Varda is virtually a naturally occurring ambigram, requiring very little ingenuity on the part of the artist:

Don’t be fooled by fake yellow flowers

Very early this morning, while in a hypnopompic state, my mind latched onto the word rail. Bill had been railing against me, I thought, and I had been railroaded — summarily declared guilty before even being informed of the charges. From there, my train (heh) of thought wandered to Rinbad the Railer, and before I knew it I had, still in the hypnopompic state, composed two new couplets for “With?” — going beyond the list of names given in Ulysses but continuing the pattern:

Brinbad the Brailler, lacking sight,

By touch alone could read aright.

Skinbad the Scaler wasn’t much

Like Brinbad. He had lost his touch.

In the morning, I was outdoors supervising younger preschoolers while their older classmates were having graduation photos taken.

A four-year-old boy whose English is precociously good brought me something and said, “Look, I found an octopus!”

It was a tiny yellow flower, less than a centimeter in diameter, with six long, thin petals.

“Are you sure it’s an octopus?” I said. “It doesn’t have eight arms.”

“It has six arms,” he said. “This octopus has six arms.”

It has already been established that the six-armed octopus (as in the Hydra logo) is symbolically interchangeable with the six-legged spider, and that both represent Ungoliant trying to disguise herself as someone Good.

Looking more closely at the “octopus,” I saw that it wasn’t actually a flower at all but a piece of yellow plastic. A fake flower.

This matches up most uncannily with an experience Bill reports in the comments on “The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion.” Having decided that the dandelion (a yellow flower) was a Good symbol, he watched what he thought was the official music video for a song called “Dandelions” but was thrown for a loop when the video turned out to include scenes from a Spider-Man movie. Spiders are an evil symbol, so how could he understand this juxtaposition? Then he figured out that he was actually watching a fake music video for “Dandelion,” dishonestly pretending to be the official one. The spider was thus connected not with dandelions but with fake dandelions.

In the same way, I thought at first that Ungoliant symbolism was being tied to a yellow flower, but upon closer inspection I discovered that it was a fake yellow flower.

Just before beginning this post, I checked one of my email accounts, and it said I had one unread message, from the YouTuber Ceiling Fan Man. I had emailed him, remember, after discovering that he had started his channel on exactly the same day that my own ceiling fan had been destroyed by a poltergeist. Since my wife had perceived the geist as a gigantic spider, this seemed very relevant to the Ungoliant theme. Incidentally, the Chinese for “ceiling” is literally “heavenly flower.”

When I clicked, I found it wasn’t a new message at all but one I’d received and read on April 8, which for some reason was now marked as unread. The message said:

Wow, there are no coincidences. I am glad you found my channel. I thank you for sharing your story.  When we had poltergeist incidents here, we called on Jesus and it stopped.  I hope yours have stopped too.  God bless.

My best guess is that I’m being prepared for some future manifestation of Ungoliant under false colors, and that CFM’s advice will prove useful.

Although I seem to be “lacking sight” to see the big picture clearly, I’m hoping I can successfully feel my way through all this by touch alone, like Brinbad.

Or maybe I’m Skinbad. Who knows.

They did carry with them swarms of bees

The "swarms of bees" with which the Jaredites traveled (Ether 2:3) have come up on this blog many times. It thus got my attention when I saw "The Life of a Busy Bee (and Beekeeper)" on Synlogos and found that it included this:

When her mother asked Lucia of Fatima what she would like as a gift when she made her profession, she asked for a beehive. Can you imagine what it was like riding on the train with a hive? Perhaps her mother had an entire railway carriage "alone" with 25,000 bees.

Train, schmain, imagine it on a submarine!

The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion

In "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," I related a dream in which I saw a picture of a ladybird and under it the word WOW written in black. I associated both of these with Our Lady, but Bill proposed instead that they referred to Ungoliant, the main clue being that WOW is MOM written upside down, and in black, suggesting a dark inversion of the Holy Mother. This take was based entirely on the WOW element; nothing about the ladybird itself suggested Ungoliant.

I replied:

This morning, I was teaching some very young children the "short u" sound, using a little book that had several words with that sound, each with an example sentence and an illustration. For the word "bug," the sentence was "A bug has six legs." The illustration was of two insects: a ladybird, and a generic black bug with a roundish body, perhaps meant to be some sort of beetle.

"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.

"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."

So that would seem to be a clear "no" from the sync fairies to the theory that the ladybird and the black WOW represent Ungoliant rather than Our Lady.'

Here's a photo of the page I was talking about. As you can see, the black "bug" really does look a lot like a six-legged spider:

Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy:

I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.

At first, like Bill, I lumped the ladybird and the WOW together, thinking that if one represented Ungoliant, both did. Later, as discussed in "Intercepted prayers?," I decided they probably represented two separate beings. The black WOW corresponds to the black "bug" which is actually a six-legged spider, and the ladybird corresponds to the ladybird, which in no way suggests a spider.

The book with the "bug" illustration is not mine but is at Diego's school. I was there this morning and took the opportunity to photograph the "bug" page. While I was doing so, a child brought me another book, which had been damaged, and asked me if I could fix it. I opened it up and found this illustration:

That's a ladybird -- again, nothing spider-like about it -- sitting on the seed head of a dandelion. Just last week, I had posted "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees." Here we have a dandelion and a ladybird juxtaposed again.

Intercepted prayers?

Bill has proposed (in comments on Leo's blog here) that when I pray the Hail Mary, my prayers are heard not by their intended recipient but by the Black Madonna, who is Ungoliant. His reasoning is that Jesus said to pray to the Father in his name, making any other form of prayer hazardous and likely to be intercepted by demons.

I actually had a dream once in which my Rosary prayers were absorbed by a black spaceship and prevented from reaching Heaven. The prayers were the Lord's Prayer, though, which is addressed to the Father, undercutting Bill's suggestion that praying to Mary is the issue. The dream is recounted in my 2023 post "Milkommen":

I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.

So in the dream, the prayers were intercepted not just despite but because of the fact that they were addressed to "Our Father." This implies that the form of the prayer is not the issue, or not the only issue.

Something similar happens in the Mormon temple drama, where Adam prays to "God" and is answered by Satan, who claims the right to do so because he is "the god of this world." Is the problem that Adam addressed a generic "God" rather than saying something more specific like "Our Father in Heaven"? Apparently not, because initiates are later instructed to address the true God, in the True Order of Prayer, by repeating Adam’s prayer word for word.

One interpretation of this is as evidence that the temple ceremony we have today (of which it is not clear how much comes from Joseph Smith) is Satanic. (There is some other evidence of this; for example, initiates are instructed to wear something which Satan had earlier called "an emblem of my power and priesthoods.") Another interpretation, consistent with the black ship dream, is that even properly addressed prayers may be received and answered by demons.

Deciding to try a bit of stichomancy, I asked if any of my prayers were being intercepted by demons and got this randomly selected Bible verse:

Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God is terrible majesty (Job 37:22).

That seemed vaguely positive, but the specific meaning was not very clear. Looking at the immediate context, I found this:

Teach us what we shall say unto him; for we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness.

Shall it be told him that I speak? if a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up (Job 37:19-20).

This is more on point. "Teach us what we shall say unto him" calls to mind "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1), a request which Jesus answers by teaching the Lord's Prayer, addressed to the Father. If we experiment with other forms of prayer on our own, we are liable, "by reason of darkness," to go astray.

"Shall it be told him that I speak?" -- Will he know that my prayer is addressed to him? Or might someone else receive it instead?

"If a man speak, surely, he shall be swallowed up" -- Change he to it, and we have a good description of the black ship dream, with "the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship."

Anyway, the upshot is that I am suspending my practice of the Rosary and restricting myself to more conventional Mormon prayer, at least for now, as I think things over. I'm not at all sure the Rosary is the culprit -- it, like the Lord's Prayer, is a revealed form of prayer, one "taught" by a heavenly messenger (or conceivably, I suppose, by an impostor) -- but I'm going to stop for a while anyway and see if it makes any observable difference.

⁂

Ungoliant was first brought up in the comments on my post "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards" -- Bill's idea that the WOW in my dream, being an inverted MOM written in black, represents the dark inversion of the Holy Mother, and that this is Ungoliant, Mother of Abominations. In an email, another reader opined, "I don't think the ladybird and WOW are negative. I'm pretty sure you've encountered at least one W/M inversion sync in the past."

Yes, as it happens, that "W/M inversion sync" was in "Milkommen," the very post that contains the black ship dream. The title is essentially the German word Willkommen with the first letter inverted, and in the post I compare this to another such inversion on the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups. This reinforces the conclusion I had already reached, for reasons also explained in the comments on the WOW post: The black WOW is indeed negative and does indeed refer to Ungoliant.

What about the ladybird? Overall, I think it is distinct from the WOW and is itself a positive symbol, representing (as the etymology indicates) the true Madonna. One of the syncs discussed in the comments there involves a picture of a ladybird next to a black bug that looks like a six-legged spider -- i.e., a spider trying to pass itself off as an insect. (I'll try to get a photo at some point. The book it's in does not belong to me.) The ladybird next to it, though, actually is a ladybird and definitely not a spider. I think these are two different Beings.

Interestingly, though, there is even an indirect ladybird reference in "Milkommen," as it refers to people in Colin Wilson's Spider World novels who farm giant aphids like cattle, the aphids' honeydew being their main food source. Aphids are of course the main food source of the ladybird as well, so these people are in that way ladybird-like. And they are enemies to the spiders.

Varda Elentári

In a brief dream, I was training a student in the art of penmanship. The student’s identity was not clearly defined, but what he or she was writing, slowly and carefully on three-lined paper, was the name Varda Elentári. The student first wrote Elentári, leaving a large space to the left, and then went back and wrote Varda in that space. That was the entire dream.

Given the recent theme of writing things backwards or upside down, I thought it was potentially significant that the student wrote the name “backwards” in a sense, but in such a way that the final result was the same as if it had been written in the ordinary way. It could also represent discovering the goddess’s attributes first (the title Star-Queen) and only later arriving at her actual identity or name.

Varda is also called Elbereth. Anyone who grew up playing NetHack will know that writing that particular name has special significance.

Mxyzed-up newspaper names

My last post took as its title a quote from Dignan in Bottle Rocket: “They’ll never catch me, man, . . . .” This reminded Bill of my 2023 post “Mr. Mxyztplk revisited,” where Mxy says “Catch me if you can!” and even Superman can’t catch him. Bill also mentions that Mxy is associated with things written and spoken backwards.

Specifically, Mxy had a newspaper that was printed in mirror image. I discussed what the name of their newspaper, the Planet, would look like printed backwards and then added:

In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic.

On my way home tonight, I stopped at a gas station. It was a very surreal moment when I noticed one of the ads displayed on the wall next to the pump:

It’s an ad for Baumkuchen for Mother’s Day. Under the cake is a newspaper. That part of the newspaper’s name that is visible reads FNIACNIAL MIT . . . . Clearly it is the Financial Times, a major London-based paper, but the letters are in the wrong order — not backwards exactly, but still all mxyzed up. And the paper is even called the Times.

All that’s visible of the second word is MIT, which is TIM backwards. Incredibly, that 2023 post about Mxy mentions the name Tim backwards:

Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

As part of the reversal theme, Bill has interpreted the word WOW in my dream — MOM upside down — as a reference to Ungoliant, Mother of Abominations. The ad is encouraging you to get Mom a Baumkuchen, or “tree cake.” A “tree” for her to eat. Ungoliant is known for “eating” (sucking dry, which is how spiders “eat” their prey) the Two Trees of Valinor.

Bill may be on to something with this Ungoliant theme.

They’ll never catch me, man, cause I’m effin’ innocent!

Mental jukebox upon waking this morning was "2000 Man" by the Stones. For me, this song is inextricably associated with this scene in Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson's first, and best, film, released in the magical year of 1996):

Rewatching that classic scene now, I connected the yellow jumpsuits with the image of the man dressed in yellow I recently reposted in "Toothpasteomancy":

Future Man says Dignan "looks like a little banana" in his jumpsuit

“Oh daddy, proud of your planet / Oh mommy, proud of your sun.” This repeated line syncs with the recent WOW/MOM and Sun themes.