The water is blue, and the birds are awake

On December 22, I watched most of Chris Knowles's latest sync video, "SYNCHRO-CYCLONE 2025: Epstein and Ghislaine, from ATLAS to Atlantis." The thumbnail shows a cyclone consisting of yellowish and bluish concentric circles.

The video was long and rambling, and most of the syncs didn't particularly wow me, so I didn't end up finishing it. At one point Chris discusses the the 2008 opening of a Dubai resort called Atlantis, The Palm, and he connects that name to the phoenix:

So here is The Palm. Now that should be setting off bells and whistles, you know, particularly with Atlantis rising, because the palm is also known as the phoenix. Okay, the phoenix. The date palm is the phoenix. Okay, so you understand the symbolism that we're looking at here.

"Palm tree" is indeed one of several disparate meanings of the Greek word phoenix:

Atlantis, The Palm is located on the Palm Jumeirah, a group of artificial islands:

The layout is somewhat reminiscent of that of the city of Atlantis as described in Plato's Critias, with concentric rings of land and water:

On December 21, I had picked up some Dr. Seuss books in excellent condition at a used bookstore. On December 23, I was looking through one of these I wasn't very familiar with, called,  Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! This spread caught my eye:

The layout of Da-Dake incorporates both the concentric circles of Plato's Atlantis (and Chris's cyclone) and, on the right side of the picture, the "fronds" of the Palm Jumeirah. There are also actual palm trees in the picture, as well as birds. The emphasis on the fact that "the birds are awake" seems somewhat suggestive of the phoenix, a bird that rises again after a sleep-like period of death.

On Christmas Day, I was walking through an unfamiliar part of Taichung, and the lines from the Dr. Seuss book above kept running through my head:

You can think about Day,

a day in Da-Dake.

The water is blue

and the birds are awake.

As I was walking and repeating those lines in my mind, I passed this hotel:

The three phoenixes depicted on the walls of the hotel are highly suggestive of the birds of Da-Dake, with their tails curving up above their heads. There are also rings painted on the walls, and a potted palm tree at the hotel entrance.

Then I noticed something about the Chinese name of the hotel. Back in October I posted "Communion and an ancient phoenix carving," and in the comments Bill connected the phoenix carving of my title with a particular Chinese character. He wrote, in part:

An ancient 'Phoenix' carving came up for me last night, at least via connections I began making.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, I wanted to watch a movie called "Manhunter", a movie I was not even aware existed until I decided to watch it. It is from the mid-1980's, and is based on the book Red Dragon, which is in turn the prequel to the more well known Silence of the Lambs. . . .  

 

The original book gets its name from the ancient Chinese character that is on a Mahjong tile. In the West, we call the tile, and thus the symbol, the Red Dragon, but it seems (you would know better than I do) that the character on the tile itself means something like "center, middle". . . .

In my dreams, the Phoenix has taken on Dragon symbolism, for instance breathing fire to envelope the world, something a standard mythical Phoenix does not do but dragons obviously do. . . .

Anyway, it is debatable on the connection between a Red Dragon and a Phoenix (in terms of one standing in for the other), but what is most important is that I had already made that connection, and thus considered the tree carving in that light, before reading this post.

I believe both the Red Dragon and Phoenix symbols are typically paired together in Chinese imagery and symbolism . . . .

As it happens, the Chinese character Bill refers to here is the second character in the city name Taichung (台中) -- as in the Taichung Phoenix Hotel. Here is another look at that hotel, together with the mahjong tile apparently known in English as the "Red Dragon":

As it happens, the character is written in red. Just below it is the English word Phoenix. Just to the right of it is the Chinese for "phoenix," which is 鳳凰. Bill wrote that "the Red Dragon and Phoenix symbols are typically paired together in Chinese imagery," which is partly true. The dragon and phoenix are typically paired, but the dragon is not red and has nothing to do with the 中 character. Here, though, by a strange coincidence, we do have a red 中 character paired with the phoenix -- and on a building that had already caught my attention for other reasons.

The reason I was walking through an unfamiliar part of Taichung was that I wanted to go to another used bookstore, one I've only been to a few times, and not recently. When I got there, I looked through the rather small foreign-language section, which was mostly English with a smattering of French. Seeing the name Tim Powers on a spine, I took it down and found that it was a French translation of Last Call, which I read (in English) earlier this year. It's called Poker d'Âmes ("Poker of Souls"), and the cover shows a monstrous-looking Scott Crane with the one-eyed Jack of Hearts emerging from his skull.

I don't need to stress the improbability of finding this particular book -- in French! -- in a used bookstore in Taichung, Taiwan. I frequent used bookstores, and Tim Powers has been on my radar since 2020. I never found a single book by him before this one. I bought it, despite my very limited French literacy, because how could I not?

Another book I found was Sources of Indian Tradition (1958), in two volumes, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary. Wondering if it would be interesting, I picked up the first volume and opened it up, at random, to pp. 194-195, where, unexpectedly in a book on India, I found a section heading taken from the New Testament: "To the Pure All Things Are Pure." I read this excerpt from a Tantric poem (brackets and ellipsis in the original):

The mystics, pure of mind,

Dally with lovely girls,

Infatuated with the poisonous flame of passion,

That they may be set free from desire.

By his meditations the sage is his own Garuda,

Who draws out the venom [of snakebite] and drinks it.

He makes his deity innocuous,

And is not affected by the poison. . . .

Indians! Plus ça change!

A footnote explains that Garuda is "A mythical, divine bird, the enemy and slayer of snakes." Garuda just came up in "Flight of the Gargoyle," and now here he is again. The need for an explanatory footnote suggests that I just happened to open up to this book's first or only reference to that particular bird. Elsewhere in the poem, the "sage" who "is his own Garuda" is referred to as "Buddha," meaning "awakened." The birds are awake.