The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback

In Animalia, as discussed in "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," the Gospel of Luke appears on the back of a lobster. No, not like the Judgement Tablet on the back of a cicada! It's in ordinary book form, if a bit thicker than the Gospel of Luke as we know it, but the book is supported by a lobster.

I've already written a bit about the possible significance of the Gospel of Luke, but I didn't say anything about the lobster. It's been nagging at me, though, and I finally figured out its relevance: "The Lobster-quadrille"! The G and L post prominently featured a griffin, also shown together with something representing sacred records, and the Gryphon in Alice is the one who, with the Mock-turtle, sings "The Lobster-quadrille." (That word quadrille originally meant "one of a set of four," which has obvious relevance to the Gospel of Luke.) In the song, lobsters are thrown out to sea from England, so far that they nearly reach the northern shore of France:

You can really have no notion how delightful it will be

When they take us [the whiting and the snail] up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!

. . .

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France --

Normandy is on the northern shore of France, and of course there were later Normans in England as well, so there is possible relevance to Minbad the Mailer. Besides being written correspondence, mail is also a kind of armor, and Normandy and Brittany belong to what was once known as Armorica -- so perhaps the Norman Mailer is sending "mail" (in the form of sacred writings) back to his homeland of Armorica. What was once just called mail is nowadays known as snail mail, and "The Lobster-quadrille" makes it clear that the lobsters being thrown toward France are accompanied by snails.

Where was I reading about Armorica recently? Oh, right, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Hélas, l’Evangile a passé! l’Evangile! l’Evangile. J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité. Me voici sur la plage armoricaine.

Alas! The Gospel has gone by! The Gospel! The Gospel. Greedily I await God. I am of an inferior race for all eternity. Here I am on the Breton shore.

Louise Varèse has "the Breton shore" in her translation, but the original French is clearly referring more generally to Armorica as a whole. That geographical reference was all I had remembered as possibly relevant, but when I looked it up I saw that it is juxtaposed with "The Gospel" repeated three times. The third Gospel is, of course, that of Luke.

So we have Rinbad (Rimbaud-Tolkien) waiting on the Armorican shore for the Gospel of Light to be sent over from Britain on lobsterback by Minbad the Norman Mailer. Lobsterback is 18th-century slang for a British soldier, so perhaps it is soldiers who travel from Britain with the Gospel. Or perhaps I should say from "Britain," in scare-quotes, as labels do not always mean what they seem. When I dream, I dream about books -- and one of the books I've dreamed about, back in 2020, was titled Britain as Another Planet. In "How can these books not exist?" I describe looking at some books inside a dome-shaped indigo building (supposedly a "convenience store") called Blue Harbor:

One of these was a "round book" -- that is, its pages were circular rather than rectangular -- and I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped. The others were ordinary books and didn't look very new. I perused the spines and noticed these three titles:

• Things Soon to Come
• Britain as Another Planet
• I Tried to Be Parents

Rereading that now, I was struck by the "round book," since a recent dream has featured Plates (sacred records) in the form of a round disc.And "I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped" -- what is that but another way of saying, "I cannot read a sealed book"?

This idea that a "round book" of plates has something to do with the "Gospel of Luke" received minor but interesting synchronistic confirmation today. I was, for complex psychological reasons, praying the Rosary while lying supine on a tile floor. On Thursdays, one prays the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light (Luke means "light"), and as I was doing the third of these five meditations (Luke is the third Gospel), a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor -- a little metal disc.

Stink Gorilla More

This morning, I woke up with the phrase "Stink Gorilla More" in my head. For those who slept through Art History, that's the name of one of the most famous paintings ever produced by a gorilla, probably second only to "Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink." Michael and Koko, the gorilla artists behind these two pieces had, apparently, adapted the sign for "stink" to mean "flower."

In the context of the previous morning's dream about "A Sasquatch-eating party every week," I thought "Stink Gorilla" was suggestive of the "skunk ape," a Sasquatch-like creature also known as the "Florida Bigfoot." Actually, this second name also matches up with "Stink Gorilla," since Florida means "flowery," and Michael used stink to refer to flowers.

Then my attention was drawn to the fitted sheet I had been sleeping on. Foreign languages are often used decoratively here, and the design includes words in both French and slightly garbled English:

It's obviously supposed to say "love yourself more," but it's been misprinted so that it looks like an old-fashioned spelling of Jove, from a time when j was considered a variant of i and was generally only used at the end of a word -- or, more often, of a lowercase Roman numeral. In the days of Shakespeare and Spenser, v was still used only as a word-initial variant of u, and so the latter invokes Cupid as "moſt dreaded impe of higheſt Ioue." The capital form was always V, though, so he would have written IOVE in all caps.

"Jove yourself more" is also an ungrammatical series of three words, ending in more, and so my not-quite-awake mind decided that this, too, mapped to "Stink Gorilla More." If mapping Jove to stink seems impious, remember that the latter also means "flower," and that animals were decked with flowers before being sacrificed to that god (see Acts 14:13). The second mapping is what got my attention, though:

In a comment on my last post, William Wright relates a dream in which he sees "a big, hairy beast . . . something like Bigfoot," only later to conclude, "I was seeing myself in a bit of a caricature of how these 'aliens' [Heavenly Beings] must view us." (The bracketed gloss is William's.) Bigfoot = yourself.

What can "Jove yourself more" mean, though? I've never seen Jove used as a verb, but Shakespeare does use god that way, which should give us a clue. This is from Coriolanus:

This last old man,

Whom with a crack'd heart I have sent to Rome,

Loved me above the measure of a father;

Nay, godded me, indeed.

Coriolanus first says loved and then decides godded is more appropriate. In the same way, the sheet replaces the verb love with the name Jove used as a verb. As Shakespeare uses it, to god apparently means to look on someone as a god, or to treat someone as a god. Jove, or Jupiter, is the lowercase-god par excellence -- I believe Roget's original Thesaurus uses Jupiter as the heading under which terms for polytheistic gods and idols are grouped -- and mainstream Christian theology, when it has regarded such beings as real at all, classifies them as "angels." This brings to mind Disraeli's famous question, "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- and "Jove yourself more" could mean to take, like Disraeli, the side of the angels, while still acknowledging the ape/Bigfoot/gorilla side of things. As it happens, a popular meme expresses just this synthesis:

After making the above connections, I happened to see this on one of my wife's bookcases -- on which books have to share space with various tchotchkes and knickknacks:

It's a little figurine of a gorilla raising the roof in front of a book called Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. The Egyptian Jove would be the syncretic deity "Jupiter Ammon." We've already played around with different meanings of Ammon and Ammonite in "Milkommen."

What does that gorilla's color and posture remind me of? Oh, that's right:

Night of a Thousand N-Words

In my June 2 post "What shall we do with the drinking salesman late in the morning?" I quoted a couple of paragraphs from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and then said I would refrain from quoting the next one so as to avoid causing unnecessary offense:

I’ll stop there, since the next paragraph uses the nigger word six times in four lines, and I wouldn’t want to invite the wrath of Google. I may not have much more moral sense than Rimbaud, but I at least understand that you never ever say or write the nigger word, not even when quoting a dead French poet who used the nigger word, not even if he was using it metaphorically and without reference to actual niggers. Even one nigger word would be reckless; six nigger words in one paragraph would be inviting a calamity on the scale of the Night of a Thousand Shits from South Park.

For those of my readers who ain't got no culture, that's a reference to the classic South Park episode "It Hits the Fan," in which a TV show announces in advance that someone is going to say shit in an upcoming episode. This generates so much publicity that other programs try to get in on it, and it soon spirals out of control, with new shows appearing like Must Shit TV and Night of a Thousand Shits, which basically consist of nothing but the word shit. Only too late does the world discover that it is very literally a "curse word," which brings a terrible plague and unleashes a dragon.

Yesterday, just 10 days after I'd imagined a similar scenario playing out with the nigger word instead of shit, I happened to see this Mark Dice video on YouTube, about some lady I'd never heard of getting canceled for saying (hold onto your pearls) "broke-ass nigga" on TikTok -- I mean, not even with a "hard r," and with no racial meaning. Big whoop. But I guess I take Dice's word for it that it's big news among people who like that sort of thing.

Dice's proposed solution to this kind of lunacy is -- well, basically Night of a Thousand Shits:

In reality, the Daily Wire host should start dropping that word on a daily basis. They should call it, like "N-Word Week" and just start saying it all the time. . . . Jeremy Boreing is in a position to have like an "N-Word Day" at the Daily Wire, where he tells all the hosts, "We're going to break the stigma. Everybody just start saying it."

I thought it was a bit of a coincidence, coming so soon after my post.

Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi

Did you know that there's an Art Garfunkel album called Angel Clare? Neither did I. It was released in 1973, on September 11 -- a date which we now associate with the idea of Two Towers -- and one of the tracks is in French (or Creole anyway) and emphasizes one particular French word I had been obsessing over just yesterday.

This track -- "Feuilles-Oh/Do Space Men Pass Dead Souls on Their Way to the Moon?" --  was going to be included on Bridge over Troubled Water, but that didn't end up happening, so Garfunkel did it on his own and put it on Angel Clare.

I had a day off yesterday, and I spent several hours trying to translate "Matin," a section in Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. The reason I wanted to translate it myself was that I found Louise Varèse's translation of feuilles as sheets unacceptable. Feuilles d'or means "leaves of gold," sorry. Not negotiable. Even though this is a prose section of A Season in Hell, I started translating it in verse:

Once I -- but only once -- was able

To make of life a living fable.

Heroic days of not-so-old!

A youth to write on leaves of gold!

Was none of it, then, mine to keep?

How did I fall? How fall asleep?

At this point, my Muse got distracted by the idea that I could make this simultaneously a "translation" of "Matin" and of the first canto of Dante's Comedy, and pursuing two hares, I caught neither.

Rimbaud imagines preserving his lost youth by writing it on leaves of gold. Garfunkel sings, in French, "Leaves-oh, save my life!" Both Rimbaud and Garfunkel go on to talk about being sick.

One verse of the Garfunkel song is in English:

Willie works as the garden man;

He plants trees, he burns leaves,

He makes money for himself.

Often I stop with his words on my mind.

Do spacemen pass dead souls on their way to the moon?

That's my own name, of course, and my sync-stream has for some months been entangled with that of another "Willie," William Wright.

Rimbaud has "leaves of gold," and Garfunkel has "he burns leaves." Both images are combined in "Humpty Dumpty revisited":

Observing as the leaves would turn

From green to gold, and some would burn

With orange or with scarlet hue,

And Humpty Dumpty saw that, too.

Update (10:00 p.m.): Immediately (less than 10 minutes) after posting this, I taught a small group of adult students. One was wearing a T-shirt that said "C'est la vie," with a wreath of leaves and flowers around the words. The title of this post includes la vie and the French word for "leaves." Even the word c'est has been something of a Claire calling card.

"Save my life" -- which I linked specifically to Rimbaud's wanting to preserve his childhood -- is also a link to Bookends ("Crescent waxing"), which opens, after a brief intro, with the track "Save the Life of My Child." This track also includes in the bridge two lines from "The Sound of Silence" -- the same two I quoted recently in "More on Joan and Claire."

Over troubled water

At the end of my last post, I mention listening to two songs on YouTube: "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and then Emily Linge's cover of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me." Since I listened to both and gave each a thumbs-up, the algorithm figured that what I wanted to listen to today was Emily Linge singing Simon and Garfunkel, namely "Bridge over Troubled Water":

I soon as I saw the title, I figured it was synchronistically relevant. St. Peter has been in the sync-stream of late, particularly in his role as "first pope." He went by two different names, Simon and Peter, the latter meaning "stone." The name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the Latin carbunculus, meaning "reddish, bright kind of precious stone, probably comprising the ruby, carbuncle, hyacinth, garnet." Catholics consider Peter to have been the first pontiff, a title which literally means "bridge-maker." So when Simon and Garfunkel sing about a bridge, that seems likely to have something to do with Peter.

Furthermore, Peter has been associated recently with the title character of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." I figured this tied in with the "silver girl" in "Bridge over Troubled Water," and I saw that Emily was even wearing a glimmering silver dress to sing it, as if in costume as the glimmering/silver girl herself.

When I played the Emily Linge video, though, I found that she had changed the lyrics -- something she never does! -- and replaced "silver girl" with "children." Now this is unacceptable. Children don't need a bridge over troubled water, nor do they need to sail. When the water is troubled, they wade.

Since Emily had dropped the ball on the "silver girl" bit, I decided to listen to the original. When I put bridge over troubled water in the search box, though, what came up was another Emily Linge cover of the same song, uploaded just a month ago. She's wearing the same silver dress, and this time she gets the lyrics right:

A few hours after writing the above, mentioning three different ways of crossing "troubled water" -- sailing, wading, and using a bridge -- I read this in Louise Varèse's English translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Jesus walked on the troubled waters. The lantern showed him to us, erect, white, with long brown hair, on the flank of an emerald wave.

Yet another way of crossing troubled water! And of course, Jesus was one of two people to walk on water, the other being Peter. The "emerald wave" also syncs with one of Ramer's recurring dreams in The Notion Club Papers:

There is a Green Wave, whitecrested, fluted and scallop-shaped but vast, towering above green fields, often with a wood of trees, too; that has constantly appeared.

This is presumably a vision of the destruction of Númenor, which happened in the reign of its last king, Ar-Pharazôn -- whom William Wright identifies with Peter.

Fourth Down

I’m not actually all that clear on what a “fourth down” is in football terms (don’t tell my Cousin Lou!), but it’s the name of one of my uncle’s songs, which I quoted recently because it name-drops William Butler Yeats:

I sent my Butler to the Land of Ire

To bring me back some Yeast

Because I needed to bake some bread

For my wedding feast.

He came back empty-handed,

And I thought my heart would break

When he told me he’d been robbed

By a bandit named Billy Blake.

That postponed my wedding,

And I had to shed a tear,

Then locked myself in the bathroom

So I could shake my spear.

And then the chorus:

Drown my head in water.

Lay it on the chopping block.

You can turn that oil up hotter

Cause I’m singing, but I ain’t gonna talk.

I had quoted the first lines earlier in connection with The Tarot by Richard Cavendish, which has a portrait of Yeats in it. Today I started reading it. On p. 15, Cavendish mentions that some packs of cards, both Tarot and ordinary playing cards, have portrayed the court cards as historical figures. The first he mentions is Shakespeare (Jack of Diamonds in an 1879 German pack), and another is “La Hire . . . a supporter of Joan of Arc,” whose name is used by the French to this day as a nickname for the Jack of Hearts.

I looked up La Hire. His nom de guerre is believed to have come from the English word ire, with reference to the wrath of God. (Note that as far back as 2016 I had connected the name Claire with the divine ire.)

“Fourth Down” references both Shakespeare (apparently as a euphemism for masturbation!) and the Land of Ire. The chorus is about how torture will make him sing but not talk. I recently quoted Rimbaud saying, just after a Joan of Arc reference, “I am of the race that sang under torture.”

What shall we do with the drunken Railer?

For whatever reason, that ridiculous passage in Ulysses with its interminable list of chaps whose names and titles rhyme with Sinbad the Sailor -- the one I expanded on in my May 25 post "With?" -- has been on my mind these days. After posting "Yeats, Joan, and Claire" yesterday, I even looked up the French translation to confirm my assumption that the French version of Darkinbad the Brightdayler (Dark = d'Arc) would include clair. It does. The rest of the translation is pretty uninspired. Instead of finding lots of real words that rhyme with sailor, as Joyce does, the French just sticks the first letters from the English onto Sinbad le Marin, yielding Tinbad le Tarin, Whinbad le Wharin, etc. -- pure nonsense, lacking the charm of the tailors and whalers of the original. Only two (not counting the already anomalous Darkinbad) deviate from this schema. Minbad the Mailer becomes le Malin ("the wicked" or "the clever"), and Rinbad the Railer becomes le Rabbin ("the rabbi") -- which I think has retroactively made my own verse about Rinbad (who travels by train because he's cheap) antisemitic!

Due to that context -- Rinbad, sailors, French, translation -- a small book on one of my shelves caught my eye this morning: an English translation of The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. I didn't have time to look at it, but I made a mental note to add it to my reading list.

Later, in the afternoon, I had to stop into a shop to buy something and was amazed to hear the background music they were playing: some kind of pop version of the sea shanty "Drunken Sailor." I couldn't make out most of the lyrics, not even enough to tell for sure what language they were in, but the tune was unmodified, and each verse still ended with the singers belting out "Ur-lie in the mor-ning!"

This obviously suggests a new way of adapting the Ulysses passage:

What shall we do with the shrunken sailor?

What shall we do with the trunken tailor?

What shall we do with the drunken jailer?

Ur-lie in the mor-ning!

What shall we do with the whunken whaler?

What shall we do with the nunken nailer?

What shall we do with the funken failer?

Ur-lie in the mor-ning!

and so on until you run out of consonants. It could be the next "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."