Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill

Hills have been in the sync-stream, and my last post, "The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah," particularly mentioned the symbolism in the Dee/Kelley vision of a whale on a hill, with the whale representing "the Spirit of God." This same symbolism recently came up in "Blubbery Hill."

This evening I put on YouTube Music while I was doing some housework, letting the algorithm create the playlist. The first song it put on was "The Fool on the Hill" by the Beatles. As it played, my phone displayed the cover art for the album it is from, Magical Mystery Tour, which prominently features a blubbery marine mammal (one of the Beatles in a walrus costume).

 

 

I also remembered that John Opsopaus, in his commentary on the Fool card of the Tarot (or rather his own version of the card, which he renames "The Idiot"), connected the word fool with spirit:

The Idiot is whistling because he represents the spirit of vitality. As is well-known, "fool" derives from the Latin word follis, which means a fool or a windbag, but originally a bellows (AHD). The Fool is thus, primarily, a source of air, of breath (spiritus), of the unfettered vital spirit, for "the wind bloweth where it listeth" (The Pythagorean Tarot, p. 33).

Although Opsopaus approaches things from a Hellenic pagan rather than a Christian perspective, he ends the paragraph with a partial quote of John 3:8, which ends with "so is every one that is born of the Spirit," implying the Spirit of God. In the very next paragraph, Opsopaus brings up both feet and a sequence of colors, both of which will be relevant:

The Idiot is barefoot . . . . The feathers [which he wears in his hair, following the Visconti-Sforza Tarot imagery] are a common sign of folly (Moakley, 115) and their seven colors represent the seven planets, and hence the seven days of the week (Gold = Sun = Sunday, Silver = Moon = Monday, Red = Mars = Tuesday, Blue = Mercury = Wednesday, Purple = Jupiter = Thursday, Black = Venus = Friday, White = Saturn = Saturday), as described by Herodotus (I.98) . . . .

As will be discussed in more detail below, Bill recently brought up a book called Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, the title character of which wears shoes that are first white, then red, then blue, then brown, and then white again. Opsopaus's sequence of colors goes from silver to red to blue, and then ends with white. Before listening to music and subsequently looking up Opsopaus's commentary, I had just been thinking about possible planetary correspondences for the different colors of Pete's shoes, thinking it might connect to my 2024 poem "Concerning shoon," in which shoes made of different metals are associated with various planets, beginning with silver for the Moon and ending with the promise that the men of Earth will one day "go barefoot / Like their Lord," meaning Adam.

After "The Fool on the Hill," the next song was "Mountain Sound" by Of Monsters and Men. That's a hill-adjacent title, and the lyrics include the repeated line "We sleep until the Sun goes down" -- cf. the repeated line "But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down."

I thought that was quite a coincidence, the the third song the algorithm chose seemed to be a commentary on that: "Accidents Never Happen" by Blondie. The Blondie song (sung by a sunglasses-wearing Debbie Harry) includes these lines:

Like the Magi on the hill
I can divinate your presence from afar

After the fool on the hill, wise men on the hill. "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor. 1:25).

Returning to Pete the Cat, Bill brought up the book in the comments on "Red and blue spectacles." That post started with a video Debbie had sent me which was a review of the 2011 movie The Ides of March. The thumbnail for the video featured glasses with a red lens for the right eye and a blue lens for the left. Then in a comment, Debbie pointed out that the same color scheme -- but for shoes rather than specs -- appears in a video of the Russian band Leonid and Friends performing "Vehicle" by the Ides of March.

(The Blondie song had made me think of Björk song "Jóga," which begins "All these accidents that happen . . . ." When I went to YouTube to get a link to the "Vehicle" video, on the front page was a video called "11 Year Old Bjork Reads Nativity Story On Icelandic Television." Its all in Icelandic, but almost the first words out of 11-year-old Björk's mouth are "Kaspar, Melchior og Baltasar" -- recognizable, even across the language barrier, as the traditional names of the Three Magi. Take a little break, sync fairies, or I'll never get this post finished!)

In the "Vehicle" video, the guitarist, Sergey Kashirin, is wearing a red shoe on his right foot and a blue shoe on his left.

This is what reminded Bill of Pete the Cat. Pete the Cat is also a guitarist.

 

Note added: Sergey's Penn State T-shirt, which is exactly the same color as Pete the Cat, has a picture of a feline (Nittany Lion) and reads "PE . . . TE." In fact, look what happens if you rearrange the parts of Penn State:

(Not quite an anagram, since one of the letters has to be broken into two pieces. I used to call such things "Chinese anagrams.")

Pete loves his white shoes, but when he steps in "a large pile of strawberries" (shown in the illustrations as Pete standing atop a veritable hill of strawberries), his shoes become red. Then he does the same thing with a hill of blueberries -- a literal Blueberry Hill (cf. "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age") -- and his shoes become blue.

Then he steps in a mud puddle, and they become brown (cf. the "shoon of miry clay" in my poem). Finally he steps in "a bucket of water" -- more like a tub -- and his shoes are washed white again. 

An illustration at the end shows Pete wearing one shoe of each color. Like the Russian guitarist, he wears the red shoe on a right foot and the blue one on a left.

The cat has the same name as St. Peter, and Bill notes that the illustrations make it look like he is walking on the water in the "bucket" rather than in it, just as Peter walks on water in the Bible. (That word "bucket" is another link to St. Peter, who has been identified with "Thomas B. Bucket") Bill compares this washing-clean of Pete's shoes to a baptism, but of course it is only Pete's feet that get wet. This is yet another link to St. Peter, who wants Jesus to wash his whole body but is told that he "needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit" (John 13:10). In the dream that prompted Debbie's Ides of March email in the first place (recounted in "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses"), some people jump into the water, while others only get their feet wet.

It's past 3:00 a.m., and tomorrow (or rather today) is a working day, so I'm going to post this first and go to bed. I'll add all the images in the afternoon (update: done!). It's Friday, and appropriately my shoes are black.