Malcolm the Tenth

My August 14 post "Death to the natural man" emphasizes the Roman numeral X on the Ten of Swords card and the fact that it, like the swords, has the form of a cross.

Last night I had a music-based dream that I don't remember very clearly, but someone was doing a performance in which they played a karaoke track for the Dead South song "In Hell I'll Be in Good Company" -- the whistling, the pizzicato cello, the finger snaps, the plodding banjo lick, everything but the vocals -- but sang to this accompaniment an entirely different song, which I think was a sort of medley of "Lemon Tree" by Fools Garden and "Cactus" by the Pixies, with the melody slightly adjusted to mesh better with the Dead South track. Despite the fact that the performance was introduced with "Hey! Watch this!" the visual component of this dream was negligible, and I couldn't really tell you who was performing the song or what they looked like. Maybe it was in a dark room, or maybe it just wasn't a very visual dream. Anyway, upon waking I had a hunch that it might have been the Background Brethren again (see "Some say the world will end in fire").

In my first Background Brethren dream, they had sung about "Malcolm X" but placed him in the future, suggesting that the name was being used to refer to someone or something else. That, together with the recent focus on the Roman numeral X, made me think of a time years ago when one of my students, reading aloud, came to a reference to the Black revolutionary and, obviously proud of herself for knowing how to recognize and read Roman numerals, read his name as "Malcolm the Tenth."

As far as I know, only Scotland has had monarchs named Malcolm, four of them, so Malcolm the Tenth could be some future king of Scotland. This would at least place "Malcolm X" in the future, as the song requires. Idi Amin is precedent for a Black leader doing double duty as a king of Scotland. Note also that the saltire, or X shape -- Saint Andrew's cross -- is a symbol of Scotland.

I realized I'd never bothered to look up the etymology of Malcolm. Here's what I found:

Malcolm, Malcom, Máel Coluim, or Maol Choluim is a Scottish Gaelic given name meaning "devotee of Saint Columba". Maol "shavenhead" is Scottish Gaelic for monk.

That "shavenhead" caught my eye since, as noted in "Hymns, and forgiveness for murdering a bird," I had just revisited my post "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus." In the dream recounted there, I had my head shaved by someone who may have represented Guanyin and felt "as if I were symbolically entering monastic life."

Saint Columba is literally "Holy Dove," suggesting the Holy Ghost and specifically the "hole-y dove" symbol featured in "After baptism."

Another random thought: In the dream, Tessa had quoted Isaiah as she shaved my head: "Though your sins be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." The other half of that couplet is "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isa. 1:18). The Zamn Fragment, the William Alizio story, and all the other Tychonievich juvenilia featured on this blog are preserved in a collection known as The Scarlet Notebook. Originally, it was a three-ring binder with a scarlet cover, but as more and more documents were added to the collection, it outgrew its original binding and had to be transferred to a much larger binder with a white cover. Despite having been white for a very long time now, it has never been called anything other than The Scarlet Notebook.

Note added: Here are the songs from the dream, for your convenience: