Silver in the ears

Here’s a random sync. Earlier today I needed, for something I was writing, an example of a historical figure known for his cruelty. Not wanting to draw from the hackneyed 20th-century rogues' gallery of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and company, I briefly considered Vlad the Impaler and then thought, What about Genghis Khan? Didn't he use to execute prisoners by pouring molten silver into their ears? For whatever reason, that was the first specific example of historical cruelty that came to mind.

This train of thought was interrupted by my wife asking me to take, Scipio, one of our cats, to the vet for an ear infection, so I did that. The ear drops we'd been using before hadn't been effective, so the vet recommended a different kind. "This one doesn't use antibiotics," he explained. "It uses silver particles to kill the bacteria."

The timing, together with the extremely specific parallel of putting silver, in liquid form, into someone's ears, makes this a highly improbable sync.

Later I looked up the Genghis Khan thing. It turns out only one prisoner, Inalchuq, is said to have been executed in that manner. The silver is supposed to have been poured into his eyes as well as his ears, but for some reason I had only remembered the ears. I wonder if my cruelty brainstorming could have been influenced by a subconscious precognition of what the vet was going to prescribe.

Don't go back abed

This morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm, with a simple melodic motif in my head as if left over from a dream. Wanting to jot it down before it evaporated but not being musical enough to write out a tune by ear, I tapped it out on a piano app and scribbled down the names of the notes: D G B A B E D.

I immediately recognized this as a message -- presumably from Claire, as she has used this musical spelling method before (see "More on Joan and Claire"). DGB stands for "don't go back," and the remaining notes are a word, "abed." This is clearly related to the Rumi poem in "WaGon," with its repeated line, "Don't go back to sleep."

Changing "to sleep" to "abed" was necessitated by the constraint of having an alphabet that only goes up to G, but "abed" is also a word that has come up recently. In "Turnum outknaves all three," I linked to an old post from 2013, "Poems cut short by death," because one such poem is the Aeneid, which ends abruptly with the death of Turnus. But one of the other poems in that post is the one I wrote in 2009 and reposted earlier this year, "I worry so for dear old Bill," in which Bill has us worried because he has been "so long abed."

Obviously after that I couldn't very well just go back to sleep! So far nothing out of the ordinary has resulted from my getting up an hour earlier than planned.

Three kings in a rug

Thinking about "Rub-a-dub-dub" made me think of a bit of doggerel I wrote when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. It was inspired by a 12th-century carving that was supposed to represent an angel appearing to the three wise men in a dream but actually looked as if the angel was rolling them up in a rug. Here's a photo of the carving; it was surprisingly easy to track down online.

The rhyme I wrote was this:

Rub-a-dub-dub,

Three kings in a rug,

And who do you think they be?

Robert Bruce, Charlemagne,

And Juan Carlos of Spain.

Roll them up, Gabe, all three.

As I read this now, the ending leads into "Roll up! Roll up for the mystery tour, roll up!" which in turn leads, for complex psychological reasons, into Rufus T. Firefly saying, "You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle."

A completely random chain of associations? But the fact that the above clip from Duck Soup opens with a head of state waking up under an eight-pointed star, like the kings in that old carving, suggests that there is synchromystical method in't.

Update: Wikipedia informs me that "Magical Mystery Tour" is used in the latest Indiana Jones film, where, appropriately, it wakes Indy up. Also in the teaser trailer for the Minecraft movie.

WaGon

“Turnum outknaves all three” sent me back to my 2023 dream post “Narrative Reasoning,” which begins with a quote from Turnus and ends with a green book that I at first took for a Quran. As I reread that post and its comments, my attention was arrested by a comment from WanderingGondola that said (ellipsis in the original), “Green as with, say . . . a door?”

The beginning of each part of her handle seemed to jump out, and I saw WaGon. Wagon, I thought, Are there any poems about wagons? I bet someone’s written a poem about a wagon. William Carlos Williams? No, that’s a wheelbarrow. Why such a train of thought should have been triggered by seeing a name I see virtually every day, I don’t know, but it happened very quickly and spontaneously, and before I knew it I was typing wagon poem into the Google search bar, with no idea what to expect.

The first result was part of a poem by the Muslim poet Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks under the title “A Great Wagon”:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

“The door is round and open.” The comment that led me to this poem was about a green door, and round green doors have been a sync theme. See for example “The Wizard at the green door.”

The repeated line “Don’t go back to sleep” reminded me of an email I received from WG last month that said, among a great many other things, “It’s time to wake up, Mr. Tychonievich. Wake up and smell the May flowers” — followed by a parenthetical acknowledgment that it was actually June at the time, not May. And that made me think of something from the previous June, posted in “Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window”:

Joan: Look out the window.

Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.

Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.

Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.

October is the wrong time of year for snow, just as June is the wrong month for May flowers.

Don’t worry, Rumi, or Joan. I have no intention of going back to sleep.

Turnum outknaves all three

As I was contemplating "Rub-a-dub-dub" this morning, I spontaneously reinterpreted the last line, "Turn 'em out, knaves all three," as "Turnum outknaves all three" -- meaning that Turnum (accusative of Turnus, the Rutulian king whose death brings the Aeneid to an abrupt end) is even more of a knave than the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. (The accusative is not grammatical here, but puns must be allowed a certain poetic license.)

Turnus was quoted in my 2023 "Narrative Reasoning" dream, so this character is possibly relevant.

The fourth Knave

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to puzzle out the meaning of "The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk," followed by an asterisk and then the italicized word or name Gloria. (See my post "Gloria.") I read that on a page that was itself marked with an asterisk, but I quickly decided that that obvious, self-referential reading was misdirection. The three "pages" are Tarot cards, the Page being equivalent to the Jack or Knave of the poker deck.

This thought soon led me to two rhymes, one featuring three Jacks (or the name Jack repeated three times) and the other three Knaves. (That's where that last post came from.)

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,

Jack jump over the candlestick.

and

Rub-a-dub-dub,

Three men in a tub,

And who do you think they be?

The butcher, the baker,

The candlestick maker.

Turn them out, knaves all three.

Oddly, both rhymes feature a candlestick, which I thought might be significant. The candlestick (menorah) mentioned in the Bible is a representation of the Tree of Life, which could be a clue as to the identity of the "plant" with which the three Jacks/knaves/pages are identified. (As an aside, that Plant/Page juxtaposition could also be a Led Zeppelin reference.)

Finally I realized the obvious significance of "Rub-a-dub-dub": three Jacks in a tub. Bill recently had this to say about the Tub Man:

When I looked at the book image, the first book that actually jumped out at me was the Harriet Tubman book. When I saw the name, my mind did that weird thing where I saw the name as Harriet Tub Man. As in, a Man associated with a Tub. I mean, I saw it instantly.

Tubs have been a symbol representing Baptism (e.g., Pigeon Needs a Bath, by one of your favorite authors), and so I saw Tub Man as representing this in multiple ways - a Man who is in the Tub getting baptized, but also offering a Tub.

There are three Jacks in a tub, getting baptized, but a deck of cards has four Jacks. Where is the fourth? Well, obviously he's the dry Jack, the unbaptized one, who first came up in "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen." Which Jack is the dry one? The inclusion of the word stolen in the message makes it almost too easy. Who could he possibly be but the Jack of Hearts?

The Queen of Hearts,

She made some tarts,

All on a summer's day.

The Knave of Hearts,

He stole those tarts

And took them clean away.

The King of Hearts

Called for the tarts

And beat the knave full sore.

The Knave of Hearts

Brought back the tarts

And vowed he'd steal no more.

This is absolutely definitive, as far as I'm concerned. There's no arguing with it. In my original post about the dry Jack, I even identified him with a character, played by myself in a script I co-wrote, who stole a pumpkin pie baked by his mother. The Queen is, conceptually, the "mother" of the Jack.

Get this. Technically, a pumpkin pie is not a pie but a tart. A pie sensu stricto must have a top crust, which a pumpkin pie does not.

Another early thought about the dry Jack message was that it must have something to do with Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I was reading at the time for sync-prompted reasons. I noted that the main character, Scott Crane, is "a Jack." Well, he's not just any Jack. The novel identifies him again and again with one specific card: the Jack of Hearts.

In a climactic scene in the novel, Scott is participating in a fateful game organized by his evil father, played with a very special deck of Tarot cards. For magical reasons, Scott needs to replace the deck with another one without anyone noticing. As a distraction, he spills his soda water on the table. This causes the expected commotion, with his father angrily reiterating that "these are hand-painted cards and must not get wet!" Scott successfully swaps the deck while everyone is cleaning up the water and notes that the deck he has stolen -- the same one his father just insisted "must not get wet!" -- is "the one with the Jack of Cups card that had split his eye forty-two years earlier" (making him a "one-eyed Jack" himself). This is the dry Jack, and getting it wet would spell disaster for the wicked.

Cups is the Italian and Tarot equivalent of the Anglo-French suit of Hearts.

The Jack of Hearts has come up once before on this blog: In "Fourth Down," I mention that the French refer to that card by the nickname La Hire, referring to one of Joan of Arc's closest comrades. In the present context, the title of that post has another potential meaning. With three Jacks in the tub but one still dry, it's "three down, one to go." With the baptism of the final Jack, we would be able to say "fourth down."

As documented in my post "Baptism," I addressed myself as what we now know is the Jack of Hearts:

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

As that post goes on to relate, the next day, moved by a great sense of spiritual urgency, I recited my Latin translation of the prayer Alma used before he baptized himself (Mosiah 18:12-14) and immersed myself in the sea.

So did that count? Is the fourth and final Jack now baptized? I reported some feedback on that question in my next post, "After baptism." First I did a one-card Tarot read and got the Moon, which shows a crustacean emerging from the water and onto a narrow path -- corresponding to the Book of Mormon's statement that baptism in water is the way one enters the strait and narrow path. I noted that the crustacean, though it looks like a crayfish or lobster, is the way the constellation Cancer the Crab has historically been represented and was almost certainly originally intended to represent that sign (which is governed by the Moon).

Traditional astrological correspondences identify the Page of Cups (Jack of Hearts) with the sign of Cancer. It requires very little imagination to see in the Moon card a depiction of the baptism of that formerly dry Jack.

Shortly after that reading, I was given three "gifts" in which it was impossible not to see synchronistic symbolism:

First, the shining blue-green crab -- corresponding to the baptized crustacean and the Page of Cups. Second, the sign of the Holy Ghost. Third, a pink star which I was at first unable to interpret. I still don't know exactly what it means, but the cryptic sentence in the Gloria book referred to "the three pages just starred." If those three pages are the three knaves in the tub, the three already-baptized Jacks, then being "starred" seems to have something to do with having been baptized. And the day after my baptism, I, too, was "starred," or gifted with a tiny star (the etymological meaning of asterisk).

This past Sunday, I was browsing /x/, and deep in one of the threads someone happened to post, apropos of nothing, this card from Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck:

I am somewhat allergic to this particular deck and have never bothered to learn much about it. I did not know until I saw it on Sunday that one of the Cups face cards has an amber crab in his cup. I saved the image because ages ago, c. 2003, I had a blog called Bouillabaisse for the Soul, and the header image was a cropped image of a Knight of Cups from an old Marseille deck into whose cup I had photoshopped the crayfish/crab from the Moon card of the same deck. At the time I had no idea whatsoever -- I didn't find out until this past Sunday -- that Crowley had made the very same addition to the very same card. In my case, it had no deep meaning; I just thought it was a humorous way of suggesting the seafood soup from Marseille for which my blog was named. Although I used the Knight card to create the image, I cropped out the horse, so he could just as easily be a Page.

I think this post represents an important breakthrough in understanding the dry Jack message, but of course it also raises new questions. For starters, who specifically are the other three Jacks? All will become clear with time, I think.

Knaves all three

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,

Jack jump over the candlestick.

Jack be be rapid, Jack be fleet,

Jack jump over the slab of meat.

Jack be hastened, Jack be sped,

Jack jump over the loaf of bread.

Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences

When I dream, I dream about books.

Last night (July 7-8), I dreamt that I was walking through the corridor of a Mormon church, accompanied by a girl of four or five who was wearing a fancy white dress that made me think that, even though it’s not a Mormon thing, she was there for her First Communion.

In the corridor, we first passed an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman in business wear, who nodded a greeting as she walked past. Next we encountered what I thought of as a “giant Irishman,” a very tall overweight man who somehow reminded me simultaneously of Tim Dillon and J. P. Sears.

“I’m looking for Nemo the Mormon,” he said. (In real life, Nemo the Mormon is the online handle of the recently excommunicated British Mormon agitator Douglas Stilgoe.)

“He’ll be in the kitchen,” I said and led him to the kitchen. There were several men standing around in there, and I told him which one was Nemo. “He’s the one with the ponytail and the black waistcoat.” (Not what the real Nemo looks like.)

“Great,” said the giant Irishman. “I like Nemo. My name’s Terry.” He held out his hand.

“William,” I said.

Terry changed his mind about the handshake. “Yeah, I don’t like you.”

“You don’t like me? You don’t know me.”

“What I don’t like about you,” he continued, “is that you’d rather read this than this.”

He was holding a massive book in each hand, each of which he waggled in turn with its respective this. These were children’s adaptations of classic works, each with a colorful cover and a different title from the original. Despite clearly being intended for children, the books apparently hadn’t been shortened at all. Each was as thick as a Bible.

The first book, the one Terry claimed I’d rather read, had a title along the lines of Sometimes We Fight (I can’t remember the exact wording) and had a picture of a fat lion on the cover. This was clearly a rebus for the name Leo Tolstoy (whose surname means “fat” in Russian), and I understood the book to be an adaptation of War and Peace.

The second book, which Terry would have preferred I prefer, was called The Wily Whale. The cover illustration was a closeup of a ship, showing its name: HMS Tory. This, I immediately understood, meant HM story, the initials being those of Herman Melville. The book was a version of Moby-Dick.

I was indignant. “Look, I don’t know how you think you know me, but I’ve never even read War and Peace.”

The little girl interrupted, speaking in a musical voice and adult diction that made me think she must be some supernatural being disguised as a child.

To Terry she said, “Angelina. Pleasure.” Then, turning to me, “What I think the gentleman is trying to convey is that you have a tendency to prefer an intellectual like Keats over a straight shooter like Herman Melville.”

“Keats?” I said. “That’s War and Peace! Look, it’s got a fat lion on it. And I don’t read Keats, either. And intellectual? I’d trust Melville on whales over Keats on nightingales any day!”

Upon waking, I wondered if the giant Irishman might be yet another face of Gross Gaur, who was also referred to as “the gentleman” even though his name was known. Terry as in Terry Gross, from NPR? (Terry Gross is a slim Jewish woman, not a giant Irishman, but that’s no insuperable objection. Gawr Gura is the wrong size and sex, too.)

If it turns out there’s some obscure Keats poem about a fat lion, I will be suitably impressed.

“The wily whale” is a phrase from “Fare Away,” a song from the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind. One of the verses is a bit synchy:

First mate Peter's a hardened man

Says the captain's a charlatan

Don't know tackle from futtock plates

He’ll sail us into the pearly gates

Fare away, fare away under main topsail

To the furbelow of the wily whale

Sailing to the pearly gates calls to mind the “Gloria” music video I recently posted. Like me, Gloria wades into the sea and falls to her knees. Then the waters part as for Moses, revealing that a shining door had been hidden underwater.

Countries in translation

Some of the Chinese names for Western countries are quite poetic.

The United States is called 美國, which means “the beautiful country.”

The United Kingdom is called 英國, which means “the heroic country.”

France is called 法國, which means “the country of law.”

Germany is called 德國, which means “the country of virtue.”

Italy is called 義大利, which means “the great profit of righteousness.”

Portugal is called 葡萄牙, which means “grape teeth.”

Gloria

When I dream, I dream about books.

I dreamt I was in a listening room at a company that manufactures high-end audio equipment, which in real life is owned by a family I have known and worked with for years. I put an unmarked vinyl record on the turntable, and out of speakers worth as much as a small house came what sounded like a mashup of “Black Water” by Of Monsters and Men and the Spanish version of “Gloria” by the Chinese singer G.E.M.

I sat on a wooden chair in the center of the room, listened to the music, and thought about Hurricane Gloria, which had hit New Hampshire when I was living there in 1985, and how years later Gloria had provided the mental imagery for me when I first read about Marduk battling the fierce winds unleashed by Tiamat.

Presently I became aware that there was a large coffee table book on my lap. I opened it to the first page, which said only this:

The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk.

*

Gloria

The first thing I heard when I woke up was that a typhoon was coming toward Taiwan and that everything would be closed tomorrow, making the hurricane memories in my dream mildly precognitive.

After baptism

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses came up recently in a highly unlikely coincidence, as described in my last post, "Baptism" (which you should read before proceeding, if you haven't yet). Late last night, I checked /x/, mostly to keep tabs on any new Roy Jay developments, and to my surprise found a thread soliciting opinions on the Satanic Verses -- not the Rushdie novel, but the deleted Quran verses from which it takes its name. In Rushdie’s translation, Muhammad recites, naming three goddesses then revered in Mecca:

Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?… They are exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.

How differently the course of history may have flowed had Muhammad not convinced himself that these verses were a satanic imposture! Anyway, the thread is not very interesting, but it is interesting how that book keeps coming up.

⁂

This morning I woke up a couple of hours before my alarm, went to my chapel, and prayed the Rosary for the first time in over a month. Then, while shuffling my Rider-Waite deck, I recited some more prayers and then said essentially, "So I got baptized. What happens now?"

I drew a card, laid it face down in front of me and, as is my custom, tried to perceive it psychically before turning it over. My clairvoyance is spotty at best, but it still seems worthwhile to keep it in good working order, such as it is, through regular exercise.

My first psychic impression was of golden radiance hovering above a distant mountain on the horizon, and I thought, "Oh, it's Temperance again." I've been getting that card a lot lately. But as I checked this tendency to jump to conclusions, and let more impressions gradually surface, I began to have a sense of a pale, impassive face in profile, looking down, and then a very vague sense of symmetry in the other elements of the scene -- something on the left and something corresponding on the right, but with no clear idea of what these matching elements were. In my notebook, next to where I had scribbled "Temperance," I now added, "-- or the Moon?" and then after a moment underscored the word Moon several times, making that my final answer.

I turned the card over. It was the Moon.

I immediately saw the relevance of this card to the question I had asked. The central figure -- usually called a crayfish or lobster but historically representing the constellation of the Crab -- emerges from the water -- always understood to be salt water, like that in which I baptized myself -- and ahead of it a long, narrow path stretches away into the distance. What does Nephi say in the chapter I quoted in my last post?

For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which leads to eternal life . . . (2 Ne. 31:17-18).

After baptism by water, the strait and narrow path (And in my case, as noted in the last post, the water, too was a Strait.) The path leads to eternal life, which brings us to my initial "wrong" perception of the card as Temperance. I've learned to take note even of such "incorrect" perceptions, as they often shed interpretive light on the reading. Here's what the Temperance card looks like. All I perceived of it was the bit in the background, below the angel's right wing.

Here's what A. E. Waite, the designer of the card, has to say about this element in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot:

A direct path goes up to certain heights on the verge of the horizon, and above there is a great light, through which a crown is seen vaguely. Hereof is some part of the Secret of Eternal Life, as it is possible to man in his incarnation. All the conventional emblems are renounced herein.

So this card, too, shows a narrow path leading from the water's edge to the horizon, and in this case the destination is explicitly Eternal Life, or some part thereof.

Coming back to the Moon card itself, it is notable for being the only one of the Major Arcana to show no human or angelic figure. At my baptism, it was also notable that the entire beach was deserted, so that the event was witnessed only by the shorebirds.

My last post discussed the scene in Last Call where two of the characters encounter Isis in vision and are told to be baptized. Isis is described in a way that very obviously and deliberately evokes the imagery of the Moon card:

Diana strained her eyes, trying to keep the approaching woman in focus. The cold and inhumanly beautiful face was above Diana now, and seemed to be a feature of the night sky. Dogs or perhaps wolves were howling somewhere, and surf crashed on rocks. Fine salt spray dewed Diana's parted lips.

Her knees were suddenly cold, and she realized she had knelt on the wet grass.

When the goddess spoke, her voice was literally musical -- like notes stroked from inorganic strings and ringing silver. This is my daughter, spoke the voice, who pleases me.

Lobsters and crabs, I should note, have been in the sync stream for a while now. Recently, Bill has seen them as spider-analogues and thus references to the demon Ungoliant and those who serve her (including, according to him, myself in past lives) -- but we have also seen the lobster in more positive roles, delivering the Gospel of Light. (See "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback.")

⁂

After this consultation with the cards, I still had a little time before my first class, so I decided to listen to an audiobook of the Bible while I did some cleaning. The recording was at the point where I had left off last time I listened to it, which was about a week ago -- somewhere in the middle of Leviticus. This isn't normally the most riveting stretch of scripture, but it certainly got my attention and made me laugh when I pressed play and immediately heard the voice actor announce:

And the man whose hair is fallen off his head, he is bald; yet is he clean (Lev. 13:40).

⁂

My morning class is for very young children. This morning, a six-year-old girl called me over and wanted to show me something before the lesson. She had a little plastic box, inside of which were dozens and dozens of tiny, confetti-size pieces of colored paper which had been cut into various shapes with some kind of punch. Of the wide variety of shapes and colors, she selected three and said that she wanted to give them to me as "gifts":

The first is a blue-green crab, made of some kind of metallic material so that it can look bright or dark depending on the angle of the light, like a Menelaus blue morpho butterfly. The second is the one that really got my attention. It's a dove, which is the symbol of the Holy Ghost, and specifically the form the Holy Ghost took when it fell upon Jesus at his baptism. Also, unlike the other two shapes, the dove is negative space -- not a piece of paper, but something cut out of the paper. It's a hole -- hole-y -- and as such is immaterial -- a ghost or spirit. It's about as perfectly concise a way of non-verbally conveying the phrase "Holy Ghost" as you could ask for. Also, it was explicitly presented to me as a "gift," using that word. As every Mormon knows, the next step after baptism is receiving what is always referred to as "the gift of the Holy Ghost."

And, uh, then there's a pink star. No obvious interpretation suggests itself, but given how much meaning is packed into the other two "gifts," I assume this one, too, will turn out to be significant.

Baptism

Yesterday morning (July 2), I breakfasted at a coffee shop where big lettering on the wall behind the front counter proclaims, "Tasting coffee, not only is a taste of the enjoyment, it is a physical and psychological baptism."

I'm pretty sure that if drinking coffee is a physical baptism for you, you're doing it wrong. Psychological, though? It can be. I vividly remember that one of the first things I did after resigning from the CJCLDS on February 14, 2002, was drink my first ever cup of coffee, doing it for no other reason than that it had been forbidden -- like Gibreel Farishta stuffing his face with dead pigs in The Satanic Verses, I thought at the time, noting the date -- and I did think of it explicitly as an "anti-baptism," as a ceremonial rite of passage into the ranks of the no-longer-Mormon.

I mailed in my resignation letter to church headquarters that day, but then when they wanted me to jump through some more hoops to finalize the thing -- meeting with the local bishop and whatnot -- I didn't bother. To this day I'm not sure whether they still consider me to be technically a member or not. Am I a "dry Mormon" -- a person who is Mormon-like in their general lifestyle and outlook but is not a member ("dry" meaning not baptized) -- or a "Jack Mormon" -- a church member who doesn't attend services or live the approved lifestyle (the equivalent of a "lapsed Catholic")? Possibly, as suggested by that "Jack dry" message, both to some degree.

As I ate my sandwich and sipped the devil's brew, I read a bit of Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I've been reading for sync-prompted reasons. Two of the female character, while physically in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, enter a visionary state in which they have an audience with the goddess Isis. The goddess accepts one of the two as "my daughter, who pleases me" (clearly alluding to the language used at Jesus' baptism), and the other, who has previously been fighting to obtain the daughter-of-Isis role for herself, renounces that claim and vows to be a true friend to the one the goddess has chosen. Immediately after this,

An idea was conveyed then, something like bathe, or cleanse or be baptize, and [there] appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

Nothing like a physical baptism occurs at that time, but the two women shortly find themselves back in Caesar's Palace, discovering that during the visionary encounter they had physically been sitting at the bar drinking quinine water which they had no memory of ordering -- suggesting that, as in the inscription at the coffee shop, their baptism somehow took the form of drinking a liquid rather than being immersed in or sprinkled with it. The second woman then proceeds to order a hamburger and a beer -- things she had abstained from before in order to qualify herself for the role of "queen" and daughter of Isis -- and explains to her at first uncomprehending friend that this is a way of cementing her vow of friendship:

I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now . . . .

So as with my own "un-baptism" on which I had just been reflecting, we have the consumption of what was formerly forbidden, precisely because it was formerly forbidden, in a way that is almost ceremonial and serves as a way of formally enacting a spiritual decision.

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could be baptized again by one of the churches -- the CJCLDS or the Catholics or, hell, even the True Jesus Church or something -- but the sentence immediately came to mind with great clarity: "That is not the way." This was followed by the mental voice of Greg Carlwood saying, as he often does at the beginning of his podcast, "This is the way, Higherside Chatters!"

At first I took this as an indication that recent episodes of that podcast might hold some synchronistic clues about the form my baptism should take, but that quickly proved to be a dead end. Instead I decided to search the Book of Mormon for the exact phrase "this is the way." It occurs exactly once, at the end of 2 Nephi 31. As it happens, this chapter has a lot to say about baptism, and specifically about the need "to be baptized, yea, even by water!" (v. 5). Baptism means baptism, immersion in actual water, not some other act of vaguely equivalent symbolism.

That night, I found myself wondering whether Lady Issit, the murdered mother of one of the characters in Last Call was a real person from history, like Bugsy Siegel. To check, I ran a web search for "issit" "bugsy" -- and the first results were etexts of The Satanic Verses, the very novel I had just referenced in connection with my coffee un-baptism. As it happens, there's a passing reference to a sitcom featuring, among many other alien characters, "Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula"; and then elsewhere in the novel, one of the characters, stuttering, says "iss iss issit" for "sit." A pretty strange coincidence.

This morning (July 3), I finished Last Call. The two women do in the end get "baptized" by bathing in Lake Mead. Supernatural beings try to prevent them from doing so, but they fight them off with, of all things, a chip. This is a poker chip from the Moulin Rouge (the short-lived Vegas casino, not its famous Parisian namesake), which was given to them by supernatural means after the meeting with Isis. The women first use the chip as a sword and finally end up eating it. (Yeah, it's kind of a strange novel.)

What does Moulin Rouge mean, anyway? I looked it up. "Red windmill."

After my morning classes, I had several hours of free time, and I began to feel an urgent need to get baptized immediately. On the road, I passed an irrigation canal with a sign that said, in English as well as Chinese, "Beware of deep water. Swimming prohibited." Beware is a word closely associated with the Ides of March, which is the date I was baptized, on my eighth birthday. And earlier I had been thinking of "baptism"-like acts consisting of doing the prohibited because it is prohibited. So while the sign looked on the surface like a warning not to get baptized, I interpreted it as the opposite. "Just follow my yellow light," I thought, quoting lyrics from Of Monsters and Men, "and ignore all those big warning signs." The coffee shop with the baptism inscription is the same place that has the Emily Dickinson lines I posted about in "Golden light, and going 'overseas'."

A few minutes later, I saw an advertisement for "Golden Ratio potato chips." The combination of golden and chips seemed potentially meaningful.

Then I passed someone wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Don't follow the wave" -- could be interpreted lots of ways -- and then another T-shirt on which was written, inside a big blue-green circle, "No place like Earth. No time like the present." In other words, it's now or never.

Not in an irrigation canal, though, obviously. I changed into shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and slides and had Google Maps take me to the nearest beach. As I approached I could see wind turbines up ahead and thought it was a pity they were all gray instead of red. No moulins rouges. Then, as I turned a corner and had almost arrived at my destination, I found myself facing one that, unlike the others, did have some red on its blades:

Un moulin en partie rouge after all.

I parked, walked down a long stretch of wet sand and barnacled rocks, and waded out into the warm olive-colored waters of the Taiwan Strait. The place was completely deserted, except for a few little egrets in the shallows and some terns or something overhead.

"You're crazy. This is a crazy thing to do," an inner voice helpfully informed me. Yeah, well, not-being-crazy is pretty low on my list of priorities these days.

The water deepened very gradually, and I had to wade pretty far out just to get waist deep. "Am I actually going to do this?" I thought. "I am. Effunde spiritum tuum, Domine, super servum tuum, ut opus hoc faciat in sanctitate cordis." I sank to my knees on the soft sand, held my breath and, pushing against my natural buoyancy in the heavy brine to get my whole body underwater, kowtowed.

Then I rose, waded slowly back to the beach, and left. In the heat of the Taiwan summer, I was mostly dry by the time I got home. I took a quick shower to rinse off the salt, changed into work clothes, and had time for an extremely late lunch before my 4:00 class.

Later I remembered that 2 Nephi 31 associates baptism with the word strait.

Does what I did today really count as "baptism" in any meaningful sense? I don't know. I'm not even sure I know what that question means. I do think it was some kind of test, though, and that I passed it by demonstrating my willingness to take physical action in response to a spiritual prompting, at a moment's notice, even though it involved doing something kind of weird. I have a very strong sense that if I had hesitated or delayed at all, if I had failed to take action immediately, some sort of opportunity would have been permanently lost. As for what exactly that means, we'll just have to see what happens. Your move, angels, ministers of grace, and sync fairies. Your -- you know what word Greg Carlwood would add here -- move.

Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five

In past comments on this blog, Bill has associated me with the character Vizzini from The Princess Bride (starring, incidentally, Cary Elwes), with particular reference to the famous scene where he has to guess which of two drinks is poisoned, not knowing that in fact both are poisoned. Bill also connected The Princess Bride (novel by William Goldman) with Lord of the Flies (by William Golding). He suggested that I was the lord of the flies and tried to connect me to various giant insect characters, such as Gregor Samsa and a character called the Bug from the movie Men in Black. All of this was in the context of Bill’s understanding that I “am” in some sense the Tolkien character Pharazon.

(Comments are not searchable. The bug comments are on the post "Can you metamorphosize?" Vizzini is mentioned in the comments on "Don't be fooled by fake yellow flowers" and probably elsewhere, too.)

In “Shem and the dry Jack,” I referred to Pharazon as being “full fathom five,” meaning in a watery grave. I had forgotten that Tolkien actually has him buried in a cave rather than underwater like his countrymen. Since I’ve been advised to spell out all allusions to poetry, that’s a phrase from Ariel’s song in The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

Last night I read a scene in Last Call where the main character, Scott Crane, is scuba diving in Lake Mead, looking for a severed head. When he finds the head, which turns out to be that of the murdered mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, he sees that some of the skull has changed to coral and that one of the eyes is now a pearl. Coral and pearls aren’t found in lakes, so this is clearly a deliberate allusion to Shakespeare. The phrase “sea change” is even used; I guess “lake change” didn’t have the same ring. (Bill recently asserted, in an unrelated context -- a comment on "The modified Book of the Lamb" -- that lake could refer to the sea.)

When Crane touches the pearl eye, he enters a mostly-hallucinatory vision in which, while his physical body is still scuba diving, he finds himself in Siegel’s casino and meets Siegel himself as he was when he was alive. Siegel shows him a gambling trick: You put two sugar cubes on a table and, before releasing a fly, place bets on which of the two it will land on first. You rig the game by treating one surface of each sugar cube with DDT. By turning one cube poison side up and the other poison side down, you can control the behavior of the fly, which will not land on the poisoned surface. But, as Siegel proceeds to demonstrate with a monstrous fly “the size of a plum,” as the fly eats the seemingly unpoisoned sugar, it eventually reaches the DDT and dies anyway. Like Vizzini, it is doomed because it does not realize that both options are poisoned.