Second star to the right, and straight on till morning

In a comment on "The Menelmacar mudra resurfaces," Bill brings up a book called Turn Left at Orion. The title -- street directions in form, interstellar in content -- made me think of the line "second star to the right and straight on till morning."

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" came up on "The King of Pop." When I was a missionary, one of my associates used to sing "If You Could Hie to Kolob" to the tune of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." When he got to the spoken part -- "Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea" -- he replaced it with "Kolob, that is, second star to the right and straight on till morning." I knew that as a line spoken by Kirk near the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I didn't realize until I looked it up today that Kirk was also quoting. The line, it turns out, was originally spoken by Peter Pan, giving directions to Neverland. (I must have known that before but forgotten it, since "Working out with Bones, and Colonel West" links to a post by Bill that makes the Pan-Trek link.)

Neverland is of course also name of the former home of Michael Jackson, so the link to a post called "The King of Pop" is interesting. (The other meaning of pop is also potentially relevant; one of Bill's old posts linked Coca-Cola to Kokob-Kolob.)

When I looked up Michael Jackson's Neverland on Wikipedia just now, I found this comparison:

Following Jackson's death, press reports during June 28–29, 2009, claimed that his family intended to bury him at the Neverland Ranch, eventually turning it into a place of pilgrimage for his fans, similar to how Graceland has become a destination for fans of Elvis Presley.

Paul Simon's song "Graceland," about a pilgrimage to that site, recently came up in the comments on "Fourth experiment ruined by haste."

The video about The Wind in the Willows discussed in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships" mentions Peter Pan:

Writers from C. S. Lewis to J. M. Barrie echoed Pan's goat-legged form in their creations, from fauns and satyrs to the very name Peter Pan itself.

The play also appears in "With?" just after the Hinbad and Rinbad couplets:

Hinbad the Hailer traveled far

By riding in a yellow car.

Rinbad the Railer, in a sleeper,

Traveled just as far, and cheaper.

Dinbad the Kailer was the man

Who wrote the script for Peter Pan.

I had Barrie as "Dinbad the Kailer" because of his association with Edinburgh (Din Eidyn) and with the Kailyard school of Scottish literature.

On the road yesterday I passed a breakfast shop with a sign that, presumably due to a misprint, synched with the star-morning connection in the Peter Pan line.

Dinbad Kailer (J. M. Barrie) is juxtaposed in "With?" with Rinbad, who traveled by train "in a sleeper" but went just as far as Hinbad (Elijah) in his yellow car (chariot of fire). This, together with the idea of "morning" as a destination ("straight on till morning"), put me in mind of the song "Morningtown Ride."

I strongly associate that song with a dream of Whitley Strieber's, reported in his book Transformation, in which he sings it to his wife and son as the world is ending:

I looked up at the sky and saw gigantic boulders sailing in perfect silence off the edge of the moon. A realization came over me: The moon is exploding. Then I thought, Oh, this is the end of the world. . . .

In my dream I took Anne and Andrew to a certain place I know in the forest. We hugged each other as the crashes got louder and the flashes of moon-generated meteors got brighter, and I sang the Malvina Reynolds song "Morningtown Ride" For us this was how the world ended. And so did the vision.

In a comment on my "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" post, Bill mentioned dreaming the phrase "Everton Aim." He interpreted Everton as Ever-ton, "the Eternal City." That name obviously bears a certain similarity to Neverland and Morningtown. (Morning and eternity are often associated, as in the Spanish expresion ¡Siempre mañana! or Blake's "eternity's sunrise.")

In another comment on the same post, Bill associates the three ships on the Three of Wands card with a dream he had of small groups of people walking (in a similar staggered formation to that of the ships), going forth, he was told, to "thrash the mighty and strong." Thrash is a variant of thresh, of which the original sense was "men or oxen treading out wheat." This "treading" link, together with the "straight on till morning" concept made me think of the title of the C. S. Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. One problem with any such link is that Bill specifically thought of the people in his dream as going west, and thus not toward the morning.