Fruit bats and the Primitive Man

In the hiking dream recorded in "Was I not Gil Vas?", one of the videos I looked at on my phone (not mentioned in that post) was of some tortoises with perfectly spherical shells, such that they could retract their extremities and roll like balls. I at first thought of them as turtles but then corrected myself; turtles sensu stricto cannot retract into their shells, but tortoises can. Since I have been reading a biography of Lewis Carroll, the turtle-tortoise distinction -- not commonly made in American English, which calls all Testudines turtles indiscriminately -- made me think of this scene from Alice:

"When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle -- we used to call him Tortoise --"

"Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?" Alice asked.

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: "really you are very dull!"

The pun may not be immediately obvious to American readers, but in the r-dropping accent of Carroll's England, without the cot-caught merger, tortoise and taught us are homophones.

Thinking of this made me imagine a teacher asking his class, "Do you know the Latin name for our planet?" and the students responding in chorus, "Tellus!" -- an ambiguous answer that could mean either "Yes, its Latin name is Tellus" or "No, please tell us."

Remembering that Tellus had come up on this blog before -- specifically, the line "little and thin in the roof of Tellus," from one of Jessica Nolin's poems about the Little Skinny Planet -- I did a word search and reread, among other posts, "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon." This post mentions and quotes the Moxy Früvous song "Down from Above," and so this morning that song was in my head.

I decided to give it a listen, which I haven't done in probably decades. When I put down from above in the search bar on YouTube Music, the first result that came up was an album called Down from Above by a band called Ruby Blue, which I'd never heard of. Since the band name seemed synchy, I decided to listen to that instead, The first track, "Primitive Man," was very good, so I tried to look up the lyrics. It's usually easy to find lyrics on the Internet even for obscure songs, and Ruby Blue is sufficiently well known for there to be Wikipedia articles for both the band and the lead singer, but for some reason, nothing came up. The first several results were for guitar tablature and chords, YouTube, Wikipedia, reviews of the album, and so on. No lyrics sites until the seventh result -- and that was for a different song called "Primitive Man," by a band called, of all things, Fruit Bats.

And thus we come, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to the "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, which prominently features fruit bats. That dream was about "hiking in the woods" and finding "some new trails." The Ruby Blue song includes the lines "walk in the forest like a primitive man," "we go walk and follow the trail," and for good measure, "walking in a primitive dream."

Note added: The Fruit Bats song "Primitive Man" is about someone reporting their dreams.

Further note added: I see on my blogroll that the most recent post on the Orthosphere is called "Two Types of Savage." I haven't read it yet, but the title obviously syncs with "Primitive Man."