The ox of the starry heavens

I found this little guy -- or rather, by insect standards, this very large guy -- in front of the maintenance shed, right in front of a old-fashioned "besom" broom.

It's a citrus long-horned beetle (Anoplophora chinensis), known more poetically in Chinese as 星天牛, the ox of the starry heavens. I had never seen one before and wasn't at all familiar with the species. Despite what I can now see is its clearly herbivorous anatomy, I was at first misled by its very superficial resemblance to an oversized tiger beetle and assumed it was a predator.

The phrase "the besom of destruction" (Isaiah) popped into my head, conveying the idea that the beetle was in danger and that I should save it, which I rationalized as a concern that, since some people see all large arthropods as cockroaches, the maintenance man might kill it. Wary of its powerful-looking mandibles, I didn't want to pick it up directly, so I held a pair of pruning shears in front of it. It very cooperatively climbed onto them, and I transferred it to a branch of a nearby frangipani tree.

An hour or so later, I realized that this had been the anticipated second appearance -- as an arthropod rather than an apparition -- of the entity I'd dubbed Cary Yale. ("We'll see if 'Cary' ever shows up again," I had written, "or if it was just a one-off anomaly.") Here, for your reference, is my description of the original apparition:

What I saw was something like a spotted bobcat (white spots on fur of a dark indeterminate color). It had a large pair of horns, which protruded out to the sides and then curved up and in, for a somewhat heart-like effect. It looked down at me from the stairs, communicated with great telepathic clarity the two words "I'm Cary," and then ran upstairs in the direction of the chapel.

I immediately thought, That's a yale. That's a heraldic beast called a yale. He's saying he's Cary Yale.

Both creatures were dark with white spots and long, curved horns protruding out to the sides. In each case I originally thought of the creature as "feline" (bobcat, tiger beetle) and then decided it was an "ungulate" (yale, ox).  I had worried about the beetle's sharp mandibles, even though it turned out to be an herbivore. The yale is also an herbivore which looks like it could deliver a nasty bite.

The yale's most distinctive trait is its swiveling horns, which it can turn to point in different directions. No real ungulate's horns can do that, but the antennae of the ox of the starry heavens can.

Just as the Cary apparition began near the bottom of a staircase and then ran upstairs, the beetle began on the ground and ended up in a tree.

The Cowboy Bebop syncs may also be relevant, since “oxen of the starry heavens” sound like what a space cowboy would herd.

Do what is Wright, let the consequence follow

Last night, Bill Wright left a comment ending thus:

Anyway, I wrote all of the above before reading your latest post [this one] with that message. I don't particularly view it as a positive thing, but let's see what we can do. It sounds like some people still aren't too convinced about you.

I found that I was annoyed by that "let's see what we can do" -- meaning what, "let's try to finesse it into something positive"? God forbid. What? shall we receive good at the hand of sync, and shall we not receive evil? A line from a Mormon hymn came forcefully to my mind: "Do what is right, let the consequence follow" -- Fiat justitia ruat caelum -- meaning, in this context, do your best to find the right (i.e. true or correct) interpretation, regardless of whether that seems superficially "good" or "bad" for "you," and trust the justice of God. (Note: I assume Bill would agree with this and don’t mean to imply otherwise. I’m just recording my immediate reaction to what he wrote.)

Then at noon today, I found a new comment from Bill discussing a sync in which he saw a poster advertising a play called "Do What's Wright."

Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen

This morning, a preschooler dropped a case of alphabet stamps. These had been in alphabetical order, but when he picked them up, he paid no attention to that but just put them back in the case in a mixed-up order that was essentially random. In a seemingly impossible coincidence, this new order happened to spell out not just one word but three consecutive English words, consisting of half the letters in the alphabet:

There was zero chance that this was done on purpose. The kid is three years old and Chinese, and I'm sure he doesn't know how to spell words like dry and stolen, or anything really, beyond his own name. He does have a teacher who is called Jack, so he might conceivably know how to spell that, but I doubt it.

In the comments on "The randomness is working well today" -- of which there are a lot, with a lot of sync content, so don't miss them -- I summarized the script of a play in which the main characters (one of whom was played by me) steal a pumpkin pie that was baked for Elvis Presley. I then connected this with a nursery-rhyme variant created by one of my siblings at a very young age:

Jack and Jumph went up the glumph

To fetch a pumpkin pie.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And he began to cry.

Thus Jack and stolen were both associated with a pumpkin pie. I'm not entirely sure where dry fits in, but in the original nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water, and I guess someone who needs water would be "dry." More directly relevant may be "There's a Hole in My Bucket," which has come up here before (e.g. "Je suis Charlie Bucket"), where the reason they need a pail of water is that "the stone is too dry." Here are the lyrics, with the repetition cut out for your reading convenience:

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza.

Then mend it, dear Henry.

With what shall I mend it, dear Liza?

With straw, dear Henry.

The straw is too long, dear Liza.

Then cut it, dear Henry.

With what shall I cut it, dear Liza?

With a knife, dear Henry?

The knife is too dull, dear Liza.

Then sharpen it, dear Henry.

With what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza?

With a stone, dear Henry.

The stone is too dry, dear Liza.

Then wet it, dear Henry.

With what shall I wet it, dear Liza?

With water, dear Henry.

In what shall I fetch it, dear Liza?

In a bucket, dear Henry.

But there's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza.

Carry that weight

On June 11, I posted "The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams," followed the next day by "Cary Yale." In a comment on the latter post, Debbie connected this sequence of posts with "Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight" medley from the Beatles album Abbey Road.

The next day, June 13, I received an email from a reader who had noticed and photographed some graffiti on a wall on August 30, 2022:

Later, on February 21, 2023, this reader again photographed the same wall. The "carry that weight" tag had been painted over with this much larger piece:

The reader identified the figure in the bottom left, who is pointing his finger and saying "bang," as Spike Spiegel, a character from the anime Cowboy Bebop. Researching that anime led the reader to a review -- published exactly one year earlier, June 13, 2024 --"See you later, space cowboy," by Christian Yeung. Here's the final paragraph of the review:

It’s an emotional rollercoaster, which ends with the final words ‘You will carry that weight’. What is that weight, you ask? Well, there’s only one way to find out! So buckle up and please, you don’t need to love anime, but just appreciate a good story to enjoy the masterpiece that is Cowboy Bebop.

The email ends with, "That makes a probable link between Spike and the tag... and I had no idea for, what, almost three years?"

Very early this morning, June 17, I published "Caroline, times never had the effect you'd expect," which discusses two different "Caroline" songs and notes that, since Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, there may be a link to the "Cary Yale" post. In a comment there, Debbie again brought up the Abbey Road medley:

Also the word/name Carrie as a nickname or diminutive

of Caroline as in "Carry" that Weight,

which has been in the sync stream of late along with

Golden Slumbers. Which, weren't you 'slumbering' when

you had the Carrie dream?

When I read the above comment, I was in a coffee shop, and the music playing in the background was "Calling Out For You" by L. M. Styles. Here's the chorus:

Restless heart

Please find your home

Back to the start

Where I’m calling out for you

You don’t have to

Carry that weight

My every part is

Is calling out for you

This last one isn't directly about "carry that weight," but in the "Caroline" post I noted that both the "Caroline" songs included references to hand-holding -- "hands touching hands" and "hand in hand." At 4:00 p.m. today, I noticed a Junior Ganymede post in my blogroll called "Handholds." It's a poem about the hands of his father, his mother, and Jesus Christ. Posts on that blog don't have specific timestamps, just dates, but my blogroll said it was posted "14 hours ago" -- so around 2:00 this morning Taiwan time. My own "Caroline" post was published at 2:38. Assuming that my blogroll would have rounded anything after 2:30 to "13 hours ago," the JG post must have been published just before my own post.

The "Handholds" poem ends with these lines:

My Savior’s hands are run right through.

Times are when reaches down and grabs mine, pulling me

from the rough chaos of the water

into light and air.

Reaching down and pulling someone up out of the water would involve carrying their weight, at least for a moment.

Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect

During a brief catnap on the sofa, I dreamed that I was sitting in a movie theater watching the credits roll. Most people had left the theater already, but I wanted to stay to the end and see if there was a post-credits scene.

During the credits, the screen showed vintage (1950s-looking) black-and-white footage of flying saucers flying around, and the 1969 Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline” was playing. This seemed to go on for a very long time, and by the time I woke up, with the credits still unfinished, the song had imperceptibly morphed into “Caroline” (2008) by Old Crow Medicine Show.

I’d never noticed how much those two songs have in common. Where one has “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good,” the other has “Oh, Caroline, heartbroken hard times never got us down.” One has “hands touching hands,” and the other has “hand in hand.”

I’m not too familiar with the lyrics of the OCMS song, and looking them up later, I was surprised to discover the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith.” The reference is apparently to a baseball player, but as it happens one of the main characters in Last Call by Tim Powers, which I am currently reading, is a poker player who is also called Ozzie Smith.

When I woke up from the dream, my wife was watching a movie on TV. The Hurt Locker, I think. The first thing I saw when I woke up was Jeremy Renner in a supermarket, with the camera focused on a shelf of Lucky Charms cereal boxes. The scene then cut to dead leaves falling. Not the first time sugary cereals have been juxtaposed with autumn leaves around these parts. See for example “Humpty Dumpty: After the Fall.”

Possibly relevant: Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, and there is a historical figure named Caroline Yale, known for her work in the field of deaf education and famous enough to have a crater on Venus named after her.

The Slough

I wrote this in 1994, at the age of 15, as pure nonsense driven more by sound than by sense. In the part of the US where I lived at the time, slough rhymes with through (not with bough as in some other dialects) and refers to a backwater swamp.

The Slough

As shades of shadow shroud the slough,

I stumble, sink in stinking goo,

Retrieve my foot and tie my shoe,

Then stumble onward through the slime.

A booming sound, resounding boom,

To smithereens breaks silent gloom.

I fight off time's impending doom,

But scalene flashes shatter time.

As Aster casts her silver sheet

In memory of time's defeat,

The slough is slain by sudden sleet.

Three-cornered demons mar the scene.

Ellipsis eyes patrol the plain.

They see with glee the slough is slain.

The freezing sleet melts into rain.

Insane's the reign of King Scalene.

But wait: A wristwatch starts to chime.

All hark! It marks returning time.

The sleet, now rain, melts snow to slime

And resurrects the slaughtered slough.

Tea-colored ice cubes turn to glop,

And sphagnum moss floats to the top.

The slough renews its former slop:

A stinking, black, organic stew.

The plot, if such there be, seems to be that a swamp is attacked by demonic beings in the form of scalene triangles who, despite the narrator's resistance, successfully "shatter time." Whatever this means, it does not mean that time itself ceases to elapse, since actions continue to happen which require the passage of time. The swamp is "killed," apparently by being frozen, though it is not clear how this relates to the shattering of time. Then a thaw occurs, time returns to normal, and the swamp is once again a swamp.

I'm posting this now because it seems to relate to several recent sync themes: a swamp or marsh, a reference to a single foot and shoe, and a place being destroyed by ice.

The randomness is working well today

It's been a while since I clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread. I tried it today just in the spirit of "Is this thing on?" and got this:

Yeah, it's on.

It doesn't get much more random than a March 19 post wishing a happy birthday to anyone whose birthday is March 15. (For those who came in late, that's my own birthday.)

The penultimate line is an acrostic for HELLO and must have been designed as such, but Orange-tip is a pretty unusual choice of words if all you want is something that begins with O. It's a kind of butterfly, naturally -- one with gray-and-amber coloration:

I'm not sure what the significance of ARIA might be.

Abyssal refers to the deepest parts of the ocean.

Note added (June 16): This morning, one of my employees found a box of A4 printer paper behind some other things in a storage room (not the one where we normally store paper) and asked me what to do with it. It must have been in there for years, as it was a brand we haven't used in a long time:

Still not sure what ARIA means, synchronistically, but it sure seems like it means something.

Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus

I dreamed that I was sitting in what I felt was a spaceship, facing an enormous screen or window in which I could see, against the black background of space, a huge many-petaled flower, mainly white with just a touch of pink, slowly opening and expanding. My first thought was that it was the Rose seen by Dante, as described in Canto 30 of the Paradiso, but then a chant began -- Om mani padme hum, endlessly repeated -- which made me think it might instead (or also) be the sacred Lotus of Buddhism. (The mantra refers to "the jewel in the lotus.")

Standing behind me was a woman I could not see, but whose name I knew was Tessa. As I contemplated the Rose or Lotus and listened to the chanted mantra, she shaved my head with an electric shaver. "Though your sins be red like crimson," she said, paraphrasing Isaiah, "they shall be as wool." Isaiah's point was that wool is white, but my understanding in the dream was that I was being shorn like a sheep -- "shorn and shriven" was the phrase that came to mind -- sin falling away like wool under the buzzing shears. (See also "Worm Jacob.")

I know baldness has been a negative symbol in the syncs, particularly on Bill's blogs, but it certainly seemed positive in this dream. The shaving combined with the Buddhist chant made it feel as if I were symbolically entering monastic life.

Who was "Tessa"? The mantra being chanted in the dream is associated particularly with Avalokiteśvara, and Tessa seems like a reasonable abbreviation of that name. Although Avalokiteśvara is considered to be male in India and Central Asia, in East Asia she is female and is known to the Chinese as Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy. ("Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens.")

In the morning, I checked the comments on this blog and found a new one from Bill:

I woke up around 3 am this morning after a series of dreams I don't remember all that well. However, the word "Tess" was running through my mind to such an extent that I was forced to get up and think about it for a little bit. The word just wouldn't let me go.

He goes on to write seven more paragraphs about possible meanings of the name Tess. One of the Elvish words he brings up is actually tessa, the same as the name in my dream, which means "maid, maiden."

Note added: Just after publishing the above, I was out running errands and passed a jewelry shop called Blossom Day. Since the dream had featured a chant about a jewel in a flower, that caught my eye. Blossom Day made me think of Bloomsday, the day on which the novel Ulysses takes place (so called after the main character, Leopold Bloom). Despite the frequent references on this blog, I've actually only read Ulysses once, more than 20 years ago, and so I wasn't sure exactly when Bloomsday is. I looked it up. It's tomorrow, June 16.

Cary Yale

On the night of June 10, while on the fourth floor of my school, I "saw" something on the stairs leading up to the fifth floor, which is not part of the school proper but serves as my "chapel" for prayer, meditation, divination, and such.

I "saw" this in the same sense that I saw the ptero in "A Pterodactylus and a globe of light," to which post the reader is referred for an attempt at describing this sort of experience. It was experienced as something "given" and externally imposed, but it was somewhat less sensory in nature than a vision or hallucination.

What I saw was something like a spotted bobcat (white spots on fur of a dark indeterminate color). It had a large pair of horns, which protruded out to the sides and then curved up and in, for a somewhat heart-like effect. It looked down at me from the stairs, communicated with great telepathic clarity the two words "I'm Cary," and then ran upstairs in the direction of the chapel.

I immediately thought, That's a yale. That's a heraldic beast called a yale. He's saying he's Cary Yale.

Cary-Yale is the standard way of referring to one of the three main partially extant Visconti-Sforza Tarot decks, the one housed in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale University (named after one Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Jr., founder of the Press of the Woolly Whale). I keep most of my cards in the chapel, but my Visconti-Sforza replica deck is an exception.

A yale is indeed a heraldic beast, but it has little in common with what I saw, beyond having spots and horns. It's a large ungulate, perhaps inspired by some sort of African antelope or buffalo, and its distinguishing trait is its ability to swivel its horns to point in any direction. Certainly it looks nothing like a bobcat.

Then I noticed that I was standing next to a classroom door with the Yale University coat of arms on it. Some time ago, one of my employees decided that each classroom should have a name instead of a number and that they should all be named after famous universities, so that one is the Yale classroom.

The Yale coat of arms says Urim and Thummim in Hebrew, and in a Latin translation which I have proposed (see my 2013 post "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis") influenced the design of the Mormon temple garment.

So was this just some random fantasy triggered by seeing the Yale coat of arms and influenced by my childhood interest in heraldry and my current interest in Tarot history? Maybe, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was an actual spiritual presence that chose this rather extraordinary form in which to manifest itself. And my instinct is not to be too quick to trust something that chooses to appear as a bobcat with horns. We'll see if "Cary" ever shows up again, or if it was just a one-off anomaly.

The immediate effect of Cary's appearance was to draw my attention to Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards, leading me to reread my September 2024 post "The eyeing d'Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime." Many of the details -- gangsters, a guy called Jeff, an all-gold king, and a single shoe -- fit right in with the more recent sync stream. The Visconti-Sforza deck in that post is called the Golden Tarot, so one of its cards would be the Golden Fool.

The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams

When I was 13 or 14, we used to play D&D in the Dark Sun campaign setting. This was a world, Athas, that had originally been the Standard Fantasy Setting, with Tolkienesque elves and dwarves and all that, but had suffered an environmental apocalypse caused by the irresponsible use of magic and had become a harsh desert world. All the Standard Fantasy races had adapted to this new environment and were now entirely different -- huge hairless dwarves, long-legged elves adapted to running, cannibalistic halflings, and so on.

In the handbook was a brief description of this place, with the details left for individual DMs to work out as they saw fit:

The Lake of Golden Dreams lies on the western side of the Smoking Crown [a volcano], where a thick yellowish steam constantly rises from its boiling waters. Where the yellow water is not too deep, it is possible to see that the bottom of the lake is laced with hundreds of tunnels and passageways. According to rumor, these tunnels lead to an incredible city that lies at the heart of the Smoking Crown. It is difficult to say whether there is any truth to this story, however; those who have survived the scalding waters long enough to swim into the tunnels have never returned.

As we developed this in our own gameplay, the Lake of Golden Dreams was the "official" name of this body of water, but locals generally referred to it as the Pot of Yellow Stew (sort of like how the "Lake Isle of Innisfree" about which Yeats waxed poetic was actually known to the locals as Rat Island). We decided that the tunnels under the lake led not to a city in the heart of a volcano but to a portal to a similar boiling yellow lake on an entirely different world. This was Dune Freak Lake on the island of New Athas, on another planet, so called because of a desert monster that had once emerged from it (such monsters having the best chance of surviving the scalding waters and getting through the portal alive).

New Athas was a frozen tundra, entirely different from common or garden Athas. The people there were descended from Athasians who had made it through the portal in the distant past, and they were thus tundra-adapted versions of desert-adapted versions of the original Standard Fantasy races.

And that's about it, really. We never really developed New Athas in any detail and there are no real stories associated with it. I'm posting about it here because of how it ties in with comments on "Mint and highlighters," about a pot of gold being connected with drinking from gilded lilies, and with the downfall of Numenor -- which involved an attempt to reach another "world" and (in Bill's version of the story) ended with Numenor being frozen and put "on ice."

Mint and highlighters

Dreams during a brief nap, fueled by a touch of sunstroke:

1.

"You could decorate your clock with mint," a voice said. "It would be a good way to get ready for Saint Patrick's Day." I saw an image of a large clock with little sprigs of mint stuck on it at intervals around the circumference.

Why mint? I guess it's green, but shamrocks are the usual go-to foliage for Paddy's Day. It's something of a convention among breath-mint companies to use blue for peppermint and green for spearmint, so perhaps this is another blue-green thing. In "Toothpasteomancy," I interpreted "natural mint" as a reference to a goldmine, but that reading doesn't seem to fit here.

The idea of getting ready for Saint Patrick's Day is interesting given that Bill once considered "Patrick" a potential reference to me and has been posting about that again recently in the comments. It could mean getting ready to begin acting as a "saint" -- or, given how saints' feast days are chosen, preparing for death.

Saint Patrick's Day and the wearing of the green could also link back to "Lady in Green."

2.

"Are you highlighting all the holiest passages in your scriptures?" said a voice. "Don't forget to use your black highlighter for the Holy Name. Yes, someone’s been effing with the ineffable again." The visual accompanying this showed two boys, each highlighting passages in his Bible. One had a yellow highlighter; the other, a black sharpie.

In a hypnopompic state, no longer fully dreaming, this latter scene reassembled itself into a Goofus and Gallant segment. (People of a certain age and background will remember these comic strips from the magazine Highlights for Children, exemplifying bad and good behavior with a simple "Goofus does X, Gallant does Y" formula.) "Goofus highlights all the holiest passages in his scriptures. Gallant uses his black highlighter for the Holy Name."

Redacting scripture with a sharpie doesn't seem like particularly "gallant" behavior, but in the dream I vaguely thought Gallant was behaving like the loyal sons of Noah who averted their eyes and put a blanket over the old man when he lay exposed in his tent, and that there was something indecorous in Goofus's use of the highlighter.

Amber yet again

Today I went to four different animal hospitals, none of which were able to help me. Googling for any others in the area, I found one more that I'd never heard of and went there. They had what I needed. Not until I had arrived did I find out that they had an English name in addition to the Chinese one lsited on Google:

The Chinese name means, roughly, "safety and trust." It's pronounced Anfu, and I guess they decided amber was a reasonably close phonetic approximation. (The name Amber is usually rendered in Chinese as Anbo. Baltic amber is called hupo, and ambergris is longxianxiang, literally "dragon saliva fragrance.")

Last Call, the fat man, Lady Luck, and Dyaco

So, for complex psychological reasons, I've taken a break from the Daymon Smith book I was working on to read Last Call by Tim Powers. Here's the synchronistic "logic" behind that decision.

On the morning of June 3, I received an email which (among a great many other things) linked to my 2023 post "Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!" and pointed out the potential pun on Will as a name, and also brought up the mysterious figure of Tim who appeared later that year ("Well, that didn't take long"). Putting Will Power as a name together with Tim, my mind immediately went to the novelist Tim Powers, who is probably the most famous person ever to have sent me an unsolicited email. (He wrote in 2020 to confirm my speculation that many major features of his novel On Stranger Tides were put in place for the purpose of allowing one of the characters to say, "Oh, my God, sir, he says he's going to defecate here!") Just after having that thought, I went downstairs and found that my wife was playing the Post Malone song "Losers," which begins with the line, "Last callers, last chancers." With Tim Powers as context, that made me think of his novel Last Call, which I have never read but which I know has to do with Tarot cards. As a final connection cinching the whole thing, I remembered that the mysterious stranger who visited Whitley Strieber in 1998 (and who I believe is Tim) had a hand in Whit's own book about Tarot cards, The Path.

So that same day I got an epub of Last Call and started reading it, rather slowly, due to a shortage of free time. This morning I read a reference to "the fat man in the complex plane" and guessed it must be a reference to the shape of the black hole at the center of the Mandelbrot set, though I'd never heard it called that. If I’d just read on, I would have found my guess confirmed a few pages later, but first I googled fat man mandelbrot set just to see what would come up, and the first hit was an article (most of which is behind a paywall) called "Mandelbrot's 'Fat Man': Mathematics, Space, and Randomness" by Marc Barham. The first section heading is "'Last Call' by Tim Powers (1992) and 'Dune,'" so I'm guessing the "fat man" label comes from Powers, not from Mandelbrot himself. What really got my attention, though, was the epigraph with which the article begins:

“Luck, be a lady tonight.

Luck, be a lady tonight.

Luck, if you’ve ever been a lady to begin with.

Luck, be a lady tonight.”

— Frank Sinatra, ‘Luck Be A Lady’,

That song, the reader will recall, came up in a comment on "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," which later served as a stimulus for the post "Lady in Green."

I read the "fat man" reference and the Sinatra epigram while waiting to see a doctor. As soon as I'd left the clinic, a man walked past me on the street wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Dyaco Taichung Marathon 2018." I had posted about a similar T-shirt in my 2024 post "Whales and narrow roads," which Bill recently brought up in the comments.

The same email that moved me to start reading Last Call also included a discussion of two different Daymon Smith characters called Dyacom and Dyacomb.

From the Narr --

Thanks to autocomplete, when I want to visit my own blog, I'm in the habit of just typing the first few letters of the URL and pressing Enter. Today, for some reason, autocomplete didn't kick in, and I ended up searching for the string narr. It turns out it means something in German:

Space travel and Humpty Dumpty

Saw this on DS the other day:

Whenever I hear an adult talking about an interest in space travel, I immediately peg him as a child in a man’s body, and I am always right. Serious adults are not interested in space travel. That is, they are not interested in it beyond the great body of science fiction works we all love. When someone talks about space travel as something that could or should happen in real life, coming at me with something like “so how long do you think it will take us to get a habitable colony on Mars?” is not different to me than if a man asks “so why didn’t the king send surgeons and scientists instead of horsemen to put Humpty Dumpty back together?”

How often do you see space travel and Humpty Dumpty juxtaposed?

Blue-green "and"

My mention of a "Buddhist text" in my last post was probably misleading, making it sound like I was poring over Mahayana scriptures in Chinese or something. In fact, the text I was trying to decipher was an extremely short one:

The character that caught my attention because of the blue-green circle it is in (暨) is the one that means "and." The whole thing reads 三昧水懺暨超拔法會, "Samadhi Water Repentance [the name of a text they're going to recite] and soul transcendence ceremony."

My post "The Blue-Green Abelard" uses the phrase "blue-green ambiguity" several times, so it is interesting that 三昧, which is meant to be a phonetic approximation of the Sanskrit word samadhi consists of the character for "three" followed by a character meaning "ambiguity." Besides "ambiguity," it can also mean "stupid, foolish," potentially linking it to "The Gorming of Jeff."

That post also included the idea of an "assembly," so it's worth noting that 法會 in isolation means "dharma assembly" -- but the first character, although it means "dharma" in a Buddhist context, can also mean "France, French." So 法國國會 (adding the character for "country" twice in the middle) means "French parliament."

I suppose Abelard (who was French, incidentally) is connected with the idea of "and," since his most famous work is titled Yes and No, a conjunction of opposites.

Bereshit bara Om

I recently spoke on the phone to a very, very Buddhist former student of mine to ask about an unfamiliar archaic Chinese word in a Buddhist text. It turned out to mean nothing more interesting than “and” in context, which made me feel kind of foolish for asking her to expound on it.

During the call, I could hear recorded mantra chants being played in the background which sounded for all the world like “Bereshit bara Om” — that is, the opening words of the Hebrew Bible, only with the holy syllable Om replacing the word Elohim. But it obviously couldn’t be that! I kept trying to hear the mantra as Sanskrit rather than Hebrew, but I just couldn’t.

Finally I said, “Excuse me, but what’s that mantra you’re playing? I can’t quite make it out.”

“Oh, that? You know it. It’s the Vajrasattva mantra.”

As soon as she said that, something clicked, a perceptual shift occurred, and I could hear the chant for what it was: “Om Vajrasattva hum” endlessly repeated. In my defense, Vajrasattva is actually pretty phonetically similar to bereshit-ba.

I record this because errors like these are always potentially meaningful, what I’ve sometimes called “Jungian slips.” In the Fourth Gospel, Moses’s famous beginning is adapted as “In the beginning was the Word . . . All things were made by him,” and this Word goes on to incarnate as a Man. “Om isn’t just a sound,” I was once told. “It’s a person.”

Since I’ve just read The Silmarillion, I thought also of the Ainulindale and of the Moody Blues’ take on the music of creation:

And to name the chord is important to some,

So they give it a word, and the word is OM.

The Gorming of Jeff

I dreamt that I was reading a history book, and one of the sections had the heading “The Gorming of Jeff, afterwards known as the First Gorming.”

My understanding in the dream was that this was some sort of assembly or parliament convened by a person called Jeff. Upon waking, I thought gorming might come from the same root as gormless, the first morpheme of which comes from a word meaning “notice, understanding.” Gorm is also a verb with various meanings, ranging from “stare” to “smear” to “devour” to “make a mess of.”

No idea who Jeff might be.

What color would you say most of these insects are?

I had to do a Google News search for something related to my job, and this article was there on the homepage. Of course I know Google owns Blogger and knows I've been interested in "amber" these days, but I suppose it's still a bit of a sync that an article about amber, with a focus on color, was published just now.

The insect they chose to highlight with a special illustration was a "cuckoo wasp," a modern insect with similar coloring to the prehistoric bugs preserved in the amber. Cuckoo wasps comprise the family Chrysididae. According to Wikipedia:

Chrysididae, the scientific name of the family, refers to their shiny bodies and is derived from Greek chrysis, chrysid-, "gold vessel, gold-embroidered dress", plus the familial suffix -idae.

The Frozen Man and Yellow Submarine

There’s been a lot of discussion in comments on my last post about Moby-Dick and Ahab’s missing leg. I mentioned that Herman Melville was one of the many past lives others (in this case my Uncle Bill) have proposed for me, and Bill Wright (too many Bills!) said he considered it significant that Melville wrote in the voice of Ishmael.

Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Pequod and the only one who can tell its tale, quotes the Book of Job in reference to himself: “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (Job 1:15-19). This put a song in my head: “The Frozen Man” by James Taylor:

Last thing I remember is the freezing cold

Water reaching up just to swallow me whole

Ice in the rigging and howling wind

Shock to my body as we tumbled in

Then my brothers and the others are lost at sea

I alone am returned to tell thee

Hidden in ice for a century

To walk the world again

Lord have mercy on the frozen man

Ahab was being discussed in connection with Pharazon and the downfall of Numenor. When Tolkien’s Atlantis sank beneath the green wave, its king was not there but on a ship, which also sank. Bill Wright’s theory is that after its sinking, Numenor was frozen and is currently preserved “on ice” somewhere. The song fits this narrative uncannily well. The “Lord have mercy” refrain also makes more sense if the frozen man is not some random unfortunate but the arch-criminal Pharazon.

Like Ahab, the frozen man is missing a limb and requires a peg leg:

It took a lot of money to start my heart

To peg my leg and to buy my eye

What’s the frozen man’s name? You can’t make this stuff up:

My name is William James McPhee

I was born in 1843

Raised in Liverpool by the sea

But that ain't who I am

Lord have mercy on the frozen man

McPhee means “son of the dark fairy.” Our English word fairy and the French fée (which Phee coincidentally resembles) ultimately derive from the Latin for “goddess of fate,” of which Fortuna/Tyche would be one.

I’ve never lived in Liverpool, but my grandfather — who was also called William James Tychonievich, was known for saying “Beware the Ides of March,” and died just before I was born — lived in East Liverpool, Ohio.

My Uncle Bill, who picked up from Charlie the habit of reading himself into Beatles lyrics, made much of the fact that “Yellow Submarine” was about a man who lived “in the town where I was born.” The Beatles were born in Liverpool, so clearly they were talking about him. I always thought my father was a better fit, though, since he once worked “in the land of submarines,” programming unmanned subs for Martin Marietta.

That strange phrase, “land of submarines,” makes even more sense as a reference to the now-submarine land of Atlantis, and yellow/gold was Pharazon’s trademark color. That story helps make sense of these lines, too:

So we sailed up to the Sun

Till we found the sea of green

And we lived beneath the waves

In our yellow submarine

Sailing up to the Sun fits with Pharazon’s sailing to the land of the gods, which was later removed from Earth and became a heavenly body. As I have mentioned before, Tolkien consistently emphasized the greenness of the wave that overwhelmed Numenor.