The New Jeru

A recent mention of the New Jerusalem in the comments brought back a random memory. Many years ago — very unsure of the date, maybe mid-2000s — I had a dream in which I heard a woman’s voice saying (to someone else, I thought, not to me), “This is the real deal, Neil: the New Jeru!” I understood this to be a self-consciously hep way of referring to the New Jerusalem.

The day after the dream, I searched the Internet for “New Jeru” and found a page called “New Jeru Rappers,” apparently referring to New Jersey. There were some rap lyrics on the page, of which only this couplet stuck in my memory:

Wiggity-wiggity, New Jeru

Will kick your ass with your own shoe

I don’t think it actually said “wiggity-wiggity.” I added that later to pad out the meter because I’d forgotten the rest of the line. The rest of it is verbatim, though.

Except that there’s no trace of it on the Internet now. Zero hits for “New Jeru Rappers.” Just one hit for “kick your ass with your own shoe,” and it’s a podcast transcript from 2020, much too recent (about a fight at a hockey game in the 1970s where someone was literally beaten with his own shoe; includes random references to Lucky Charms and Lord of the Rings).

Did I hallucinate the whole thing? Was the web searching part of the dream, too, and I misremembered it as a waking experience? Did it fall victim to the Mandrill Effect? Or is it just that, as Hugh Nibley once observed, “People underestimate the capacity of things to disappear”?

Apparently the work of the New Jeru Rappers, like that of the pre-Socratic philosophers, is fated to survive only in fragmentary quotations in the writings of others, like myself. At least I’ve rescued a line and a half from oblivion.