Turn around, bright eyes

Her eyes, and a single glance seduces,

Are merry and bright like an octopus's.

-- Unto Deep

In "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves," I recounted seeing the name Marcellus while looking for something else in Book VI of the Aeneid. In an added note, I mentioned a book I saw someone reading later that day in a café: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. The book caught my eye because seeing people reading in public is relatively rare these days ("Old Holden never guessed, I bet / How goddam phone-y life would get"), and because the cover had both English writing and a big orange octopus.

In my last post, "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," also paired an octopus with remarkable brightness -- Doctor Octopus, with one eye looking remarkably bright, talking about the power of the Sun:

Thinking about octopuses and the power of the Sun reminded me of something I read in René Guénon somewhere, about how the octopus represents Cancer and the summer solstice, while the dolphin represents Capricorn and the winter solstice. The makara is the connecting link between the dolphin and Capricorn, I think, but I don't remember the logic behind the octopus-Cancer mapping. (As it happens, the lines I quote at the beginning of this post, comparing a woman's eyes to those of an octopus, are about a woman born under the sign of Cancer. I hadn't yet read Guénon when I wrote that poem. The connection was an empirical one.)

By Guénon's logic, if the octopus corresponds to the bright Urim eye, the dolphin should be associated with the dark Thummim eye. As it happens, less than a week ago I posted this image juxtaposing dolphins with a dark eye, in "My plans for a sync experiment."

The title of this post comes from the Bonnie Tyler song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," with a weird music video showing lots of people with glowing eyes.

I was only thinking of bright eyes at first, but then I realized that total eclipse imagery is not unrelated to the spectacles syncs. My 2024 post "Turning suns into black holes" featured two photos that were stuck inside my secondhand copy of Antonin Artaud's book The Peyote Dance. One was in it when I bought it, inside a handmade envelope glued to the inside of the back cover:

The other photo was one I'd put there myself to use as a bookmark -- a photo of my own bloodshot right eye given to me by an ophthalmologist:

A red right eye fits the sync pattern. But, though it's not very clear in the photo, my irises are blue -- so the eye in the photo is simultaneously red and blue, just as the Sun in the other photo is both bright and dark.

Ophthalmology came up earlier today, in the post "Twins, twins, and more twins," which was about two professors of ophthalmology (both named Thomas, meaning "twin") who for some reason collaborated on a study of telepathy between identical twins.

The reason I posted my "black hole sun" photo was that it had a "twin" -- a very similar photo posted by Bill Wright on his since-deleted blog:

In fact, the post was itself a "twin," one of two posts with almost exactly the same title. As I wrote:

I have pinched my title (only changing the capitalization so as to conform to the FTND style guide) from William Wright's February 29 post "Turning Suns into Black Holes."

(Note: The style guide has since been updated. We capitalize Sun and Moon in most contexts now.)

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" is from this album:

This is driving me crazy, because I know I've very recently seen a very similar image, with laser's coming out of someone's ears -- a man's, I think -- but I can't for the life of  me remember where. Someone's blog? YouTube? 4chan? A dream? If anyone has any leads, drop a comment. I think it may have been some sort of AI-generated Star Wars video where a character had lightsabers coming out of the sides of his head, but I can't find anything like that in my watch history; maybe a dream.

I ran across this at my school today. One of my employees had bought some oil pastels, transferred them to a different container, and left the empty box on a shelf.

It caught my attention because one of the eyes in the spectacles looks like an octopus's.

Then I noticed that he's reading a blue book marked with the golden heart. I recently emphasized the blueness of the Book or Mormon in "The blue and scarlet books," and back in 2024 I posted, in "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," part of a poem by Theodore E. Curtis which, apostrophizing the Hill Cumorah, refers to the Book of Mormon as its "heart of gold":

And Moroni, clothed in glory

Crowns your visage old,

To reveal the ancient story

Written in your heart of gold.

The book also says "Banana" on the spine. Not sure how that fits in with the rest of the symbolism.

"Bright Eyes" is also the name of an Art Garfunkel song, which I believe came up on Bill's blog, and which was released on an interesting date.

Art Garfunkel is another AG, too.