All the pebbles I have seen

As I was contemplating the Three of Pentacles, two lines of an otherwise forgotten song began playing in my mind:

All the pebbles I have seen

Precious stones for Colleen

I began to hear it in my head as a round, with two voices repeating the two lines endlessly, but staggered, so that one voice sang "All the pebbles I have seen" while the other sang "Precious stones for Colleen." The effect was quite hypnotic.

After I finished my contemplation, I looked up the song. It's "The Summer Day Reflection Song" (1965) by Donovan:

As I read through the lyrics, the second verse caught my eye:

Dragon kite in the sky

Wheel and turn, spin and fly

Attacked by rooks and never fails

To cry the sound of fairy tales

The cat is walkin' in the sun

The "kite" reference got my attention because Garuda is a kite, and in "Ahab at Ezion-Geber" I had just revisited "Flight of the Gargoyle," which discusses Garuda. The line about the cat "walkin' in the sun" also stood out because last night, in between Blue Öyster Cult and the Pixies, the YouTube Music algorithm had randomly served up that ridiculous "Monkey Brother" song:

The lyrics begin thus:

Monkey Brother, Monkey Brother

You are so grea-tuh

The Mountains of Five Elements can't hold you down

Popped up a Sun walker

That's the Chinese surname Sun, meaning Sun Wukong, the titular Monkey Brother, but it still seems synchronistically connected to "walkin' in the sun."

Later, I read this in Words of the Faithful:

And he cast before the boy, as in mockery, a handful of gems, and of crystals, and stones, scooped forth from a cauldron near him, until it was emptied, and about the boy the floor glittered.

This seemed relevant to "All the pebbles I have seen / Precious stones for Colleen." Here's the next paragraph:

The boy bent and reached for one resting before him, and held it; holding it to eye, and looking upon the king, raised high upon dais, and a golden bench, lain as one dead, and mourned by funeral-criers. As in vision, flames arose and consumed the halls, the pillars, the furniture, and all that sat or stood there, and being burned away, a behind-scene was revealed; wherein rested upon a bed stacked high with flowers, Taurin; wilted then the flowers crumbled, and the girl was suspended aloft, then her body dropped, and she dangled from a rope braided with golden threads.

And here's the fourth verse of the Donovan song:

Jeweled castles I have built

With freak feelings of guilt

And the words stab to the hilt

Pick the flower and it will wilt

Cat is shifting in the sun

I note also the description of a visionary experience in which "a behind-scene was revealed." As I wrote in "Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life":

There is a sense that the visual field "opens up," as if one is seeing behind a backdrop, and when I read Smith and Cowdery's language about a veil being taken away and the heavens opening, it seemed to me that they had to be describing the same kind of experience.