This has been a weirdly persistent theme in my dreams for the past couple of years: taking a walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs for the express purpose of “seeing the whales.” And I do see them, looking down from the cliffs, dozens of them — rights and humpbacks and others of that general type, breaching and spouting and lobtailing away.(So far as I know, there’s no place where you can actually watch whales from the shore. Something that big obviously requires deep water.)
Commenters informed me that there are in fact places where you can watch whales from the shore, and one linked to a Deseret News article, the apparent headline of which (as preserved in the text of the now-dead link) was "LDS missionary from Utah dies after fall from cliff in Australia." A second link, which still works, is to a July 24, 2018 Newsweek article identifying it as a "popular whale-watching cliff."
Revisiting that old post and the links just now, I took note of the date July 24. Yesterday's post "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" featured a photo by one Colette Saint Yves, and I had looked her up and discovered that she was born Hortense Lagrange on July 24, 1987. I suppose that it is also relevant, given the Deseret/Utah angle, that July 24 is Pioneer Day, commemorating the arrival of the Brighamite Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley.
My main whale-watching dreams were from the 2016-2018 period, but the theme has occasionally recurred since then. I recount another such dream in "Whales and narrow roads" (September 2024), in which I see -- indirectly via telepathic contact with a "professor" who is looking at it -- "the Humpback Whale," which is "the size of a railway station." In "To Tirza" (September 2025), Tirza is a lake at which I anticipate viewing whales from the shore. I later discovered, and noted in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," that "To Tirzah" is the title of a poem by William Blake.
Why am I revisiting all this now? Not because I've had another such dream, but because this morning I read about whale-watching from the shore in Remarkably Bright Creatures:
"Aye, look!" Ethan brakes slightly, gesturing to a dirt road turning off the highway. "You ever want to go whale-watching, there's a brilliant spot down there. Took a lady friend once. We saw orcas frolicking around like wee kittens. Quite a sight. . . ."
In the afternoon, I visited one of my usual used bookstores, but it was unusually hard to find a parking space, prompting me to turn down a nearby street I'd never been on in search of one. I ended up parking opposite this:
It's a big picture of a humpback whale, on the wall of a café called L. Z. DESSART. Under that name is the palindrome STRESSEDESSERTS, and then the Chinese name of the place, 無框架甜點 (wu kuangjia tiandian, "frameless desserts"). Since there is nothing beginning with L or Z in either the transliteration or the translation of the Chinese name, I'm not sure where the English name came from, but I had just posted about those two letters yesterday in "The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared."
In the old whale-watching posts I had been reviewing just before seeing the L. Z. DESSART sign, we had a Deseret News article, a post called "Whales and narrow roads" (c.f. this blog's title, From the Narrow Desert), and a William Blake poem. I think of desart is a distinctively Blakean spelling (much like tyger). Other poets of the era used it, too, of course, but their spelling tends to be modernized by editors, while Blake's does not. For example, Maolsheachlann recently posted "Favourite Poems: Ozymandias" (May 24), reproducing Shelley's poem with the spelling desert even though the original had desart. Most online poetry sites do the same.
10 comments:
So, Ms. Saint Yves was born in '87? And thus the photo was from, say, the 20-teens or later? I quite naturally assumed that this was an old photo, maybe even nineteenth century. It was obviously staged to appear so. The more we think upon the photo, the less "creepy", the less "paranormal" it seems to be, and more "artifice". Perhaps relevant to your divination, of which the photograph was the supplied answer.
Isn’t “des art” French for “of art”, thereby reinforcing the idea of the photo’s artifice?
Someone falling off a cliff while attempting to watch the whales has a certain Humpty Dumpty ring to it.
I read this last night but couldn't comment before I went to bed. Yesterday I saw a post on X by an account called DesartBright about the combat agate, a tiny stone with an exquisite carving of apparently Achilles and Hector:
https://x.com/DesartBright/status/2060727620904329667
That's an interesting one, Ben -- but I think the tweet is saying that stone was carved 250 years before Achilles and Hector and this must portray someone else.
I guess that syncs with Wade's comment about how the photo that looks old turns out to be modern. Here, the carving that looks Classical turns out to be centuries older.
"Desart bright," by the way, is a phrase from William Blake, confirming my sense that it is (or has become, with editors removing it from the works of other poets) a distinctively Blakean spelling.
Something that looks old but turns out to be modern, combined with the artifice comment, takes my mind to James Strang's Voree Plates. Unlike Joseph's Gold Plates from which the Book of Mormon came from, Strang's plates were made available for viewing by anybody. Even though they were lost around 1900, we have several accounts of their appearance, and many people who saw them were convinced they were authentic.
Many people claimed forgery, obviously (or quite literally Artifice in its multiple definitions). One former Strangite alleged he learned that they were made from a tea kettle and "when completed they [Strang and Caleb Barnes] put acid on them to corrode them and give them an ancient appearance."
James Strang also claimed to have used the Urim and Thummim to both find and translate the Voree Plates.
I read up on the Voree plates some decades ago. I don't think they're legit, but who knows.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050206005746/http://vorsoft.com/faith/rajah/index.htm
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