Ruby Blue and Róisín

I mentioned in my post "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," that I had scrolled through all the poems in the Commentarius Coccineus to see if the one with Dloo was in there. It wasn't, but I did run across this, which I wrote in 1995:

Way down beneath the Vatican

My lips released a howl.

What was the source of my distress?

A dried and shriveled owl.

This attracted my attention because it was inspired what I now understand to have been a misreading of Whitley Strieber's memoir Transformation. As I wrote in 2020 in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl":

In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

So I rediscovered that bit of doggerel in doing research for a sync post about the band Ruby Blue, and it caught my eye because I now know that the dried and shriveled owl was not beneath the Vatican at all but (as an autobiographical scene in Strieber's novel Cat Magic makes clear) jammed into the suitcase of a woman called Róisín. Róisín, by the way, means "little rose" (in Gaelic, natch). One of the names that figured in the syncs in the Ruby Blue post was Ruby Rose.

Tonight I wanted to listen to "Primitive Man" by Ruby Blue again, but when I put ruby blue into the YouTube Music search bar, I discovered that besides being the name of a band, it is also the title track on an album by an Irish singer called Róisín Murphy.

Unfortunately, she was born to late to have been the "Irish magical Róisín" who spooked Whit back in 1968 with "the terrible rubble of a dead owl" in her luggage. Still quite a sync, though. Róisín's not exactly the most common name in the world.