No more a roving

On June 25, I did a Tarot read in which I asked about the roles various people have to play, and I drew this card with reference to myself:

There is a pretty obvious sense in which this is "my" card. My surname means "son of Tychon," a name which ultimately derives from Tyche, the Greek counterpart to the Roman goddess Fortuna, making me "Will of Fortune." When I drew it on June 25, I was struck by the central brass-colored disc covered with engravings, and by the four Cherubic creatures in the corners, each with its book. This ties in very neatly with the Round Book of Brass Plates and with the book called the Cherubim from the vision recounted in "Étude brute?" Thinking about it today, after posting about the zebra-striped flag of Brittany in "Dreaming in black and white," I noticed the zebra-striped headdress worn by the sphinx at the top of the wheel.

It was then that I realized a possible link between "Étude brute?" and the Brittany theme. I had previously taken it as a reference to the Ides of March, my birthday, but Caesar's assassin was not the only Brutus. According to a very old legend, the name Britain derives from that of the island's first king, Brutus of Troy. Since Brittany derives from the same root as Britain, it would also thus be named after this Brutus.

As I was thinking about this and making these connections,  my attention was suddenly drawn to one of the books in my study, a 1000-plus-page compilation of the major works of Byron, with the edge of a bookmark sticking out above the pages. I had a very strong impression that I should take the book down and see which page was bookmarked.

The bookmark was between pages 314 and 315. Page 314 is the last page of Manfred, which I last read in 2014. Since then, the only works I've read from that book have been short poems which didn't require moving the bookmark around, so there it still was.

Page 315 -- the page corresponding to the Ides of March, my birthday -- has this short and fairly well-known poem:

So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

Note the immediate context: I had just been thinking about "Étude brute?" as, among other things, an Ides of March reference, and about the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card in connection with myself. Do you know how the word "wheel" is written on old French cards? ROVE.

"The sword outwears its sheath" also fits the Tarot card, on which a sphinx holds an unsheathed sword. It's also a link to "Makmahod in France?" and "This sword will never be sheathed again." In the Rider-Waite version of the card, where the wheel is a Brass Plate, it stands to reason that the unsheathed sword would be that of Laban.

Then there are those moonlight references. I looked up a French translation, and sure enough:

Ainsi, nous n'irons plus vagabonder
Si tard dans la nuit,
Même si nos coeurs restent accordés
et que la lune toujours luit.

Car telle l'épée usant son fourreau,
l'âme use la poitrine à respirer.
Le coeur doit pouvoir ėtre au repos
et même l'amour se délasser.

Bien que la nuit soit faite pour s'aimer
et que l'aube ne soit qu'infortune,
Pourtant, nous n'irons plus vagabonder
La nuit, au clair de lune.

When I was searching for a French translation, autocomplete thought I might be looking for Leonard Cohen's rendition of the poem. I didn't know he had done one:

The album cover art -- a black-and-white portrait of a young woman -- caught my eye, and I wondered if there was a story behind it. Searching for that led me to this thread. Early on, one person mentions that the woman's expression reminds him of Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, and everyone picks this up and runs with it. "Joan" -- with no surname except in the first reference -- is mentioned a whopping 36 times in the thread.

After I'd played Cohen's take on Byron, YouTube queued up the next song automatically: "New Slang (When You Notice The Stripes)" by the Chins. I posted "When you notice the stripes" on May 9, connecting that line from the song with the idea of using the stars and stripes on the US flag to create a constellation. The syncs in this present post began with my noticing the stripes on the Wheel of Fortune card and connecting them with stripes on a flag.

What is being communicated by drawing my attention to that Byron poem? Is this Claire/Joan saying goodbye, or at least announcing a hiatus? Time will tell.

Étude brute?

I’m going to have to up my game as a punster if I’m going to keep up with Claire. This one is hers, received while I was in my study this afternoon (June 17) praying the third decade of the Rosary and contemplating the Nativity.

It means “raw study?” in French but is clearly punning on “Et tu, Brute?” — spoken on the Ides of March by the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This ties in with a few things William Wright has written recently. In “‘Naming’ Joan (and ‘Beware this one!)’” he writes of a being (presumably Claire) saying, “Beware this one!” and, “When I dream, I dream of books.” He thinks these were both references to me: the first because it suggests the Shakespeare line “Beware the Ides of March!” (my birthday), and the second because he thinks of me as someone who reads a lot of books. “Étude brute?” alludes to the same date in the same Shakespeare play, and “study” relates to the idea of reading a lot of books.

In “Grand-Rivière, France: Why not?” William writes of how one of my references to “my study” gave him the idea of the Brass Plates being in a “Study” — meaning a cave full of books — in France. Today I received the French word for “study” while in the very room that had given William that idea.

It is also significant that the words were received while I was doing a Rosary meditation on the Nativity. (I typically pray in my chapel, not my study, but today was an exception.) The last time I did that particular meditation, Saturday, June 15 — also in my study — I had a brief vision which I wasn’t going to write about, but I think now I should.

As the vision opened, I was in a large egg-shaped cavern with no visible exits, and I understood that at the center were the Holy Family, including the newborn Jesus. They were shining so brightly that I could not look at them directly, but I knew they were there. They were attended not by the humble ox and ass of the familiar Nativity scene but by two gigantic otherworldly animals I thought of as “Bulls of Heaven” — something like an aurochs, but golden and with very large, intelligent eyes, and possibly with some sort of feathers or very large scales.

These Bulls conveyed to me telepathically that I was being given permission to walk through the back wall of the cavern. I did so, passing right through the wall as if I were a ghost, and found myself in another cavern, even larger, which was full of books. One of the Bulls was still with me and conveyed a telepathic message about one of the books: “This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves.” Before I could get any clarification of that confusing statement, the vision dissolved.

Being led into a “study,” and introduced to one of its books, by silent bulls is extremely strange. Besides “raw,” another meaning of brute is “an animal without the power of speech.”

All of this is so far over my head that I don’t even know what to say about it. For now I simply report it.

Go to the window; it’s dark but clear

In a period of just a few days, the following things happened:

On May 30, William Wright proposed that the beings I know as Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) and Claire Delune are one and the same.

On June 1, I wrote about “Joan” saying “Look out the window” and “Come over to the window,” also bringing in the variant “Go to the window.”

On June 2 or 3, I began reading Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers.

Tonight, all of the above came together in a single paragraph. I read this in The Notion Club Papers:

He broke off and went to the window. It was dark but clear as glass in the sky, and there were many white stars.

He went to the window (as “Joan” has repeatedly requested), and it was simultaneously dark (d’Arc) and clear (Claire). How perfect is that?

Plates among the dead leaves

On the night of August 26, 2023, as documented in "Phoenix syncs," I dreamed that I was with my brother (I'm not sure which brother it was) in "a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves," and that we were searching the place, "trying to find 'plates' -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced."

On Holy Saturday night, March 30, 2024, as recorded in "Chips, clips, and the eclipse," I dreamed that I was again in "an indoor area full of dead leaves" on Annunciation Day and that I found there "a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter . . . made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and . . . covered with engravings."

At the time of the dreams, I connected this place full of dead leaves with the abandoned restaurant I began exploring in July 2022 ("Owl time and cold noodles"), since that was the only such place I knew in waking life. In neither case did I say the place was that restaurant, though, only that it suggested or resembled it. Nevertheless, the dreams did leave me with a vague sense that I should keep going back to the restaurant and that I might find something of value there. Since January 22 of this year, the restaurant has been locked up ("The Green Door finally closes"), and I haven't been back inside. Such is the influence of the dreams, though, that I keep having a nagging feeling that I should go back in, even if it means picking the lock or climbing the wall.

I've been there many times, though, and explored it pretty thoroughly. The only "plates" there are ceramic and melamine dishware, and the only "discs" are some scratched-up CDs of run-of-the-mill pop music and for some reason a lot of blank CDs as well. (I brought them home and confirmed that they're all blank.) The chance of finding anything new there -- let alone some kind of ancient engravings -- is obviously exceedingly remote.

When I acquired some new Tarot cards this past May 30, I received a strong impression from Claire that I needed to get an "ark" -- her word -- to keep them in. (Readers may have noticed a passing reference to this in "More on Joan and Claire.") I know some Tarotists are finicky about where they store their cards -- they have to be wrapped in back silk or whatever -- but I've never really cared about that and generally just keep them in the box they came in. With this deck, though, Claire insisted on an "ark" and flashed me a helpful illustration, somewhat reminiscent of IKEA-style assembly instructions, showing how the cards should be placed on a bed of dried rosemary leaves in a small stone box with a lid. (This was before Simon and Garfunkel had entered the chat; now I wonder if I should add some parsley, sage, and thyme!) When I wondered where on earth I was going to get a stone box of the appropriate size, my first thought, however ridiculous, was to look for one in the abandoned restaurant! In the end I settled on a stainless steel "ark" instead (paper and plastic were definitely out of the question, and I couldn't find anything suitable in ceramic), on the understanding that this was only a temporary home for the cards until I could get something in stone.

Not until I started writing this post did it occur to me that I now had, symbolically, some "plates" in a "room" full of dead leaves.

The Golden Plates used by Joseph Smith were found in a stone box, which Don Bradley and others have compared to the Ark of the Covenant -- instead of Moses' stone scripture in a gold box, gold scripture in a stone box.

Today it finally clicked that maybe the "dead leaves" in my dreams have nothing to do with the restaurant but may be yet another "plates" reference. "Leaves of gold" -- both tree leaves and leaves of a book -- have been very much in the sync-stream recently. This started with my January 4 post "Leaves of gold unnumbered," in which golden tree-leaves in two different Tolkien poems were connected with the leaves of the Golden Plates. In the second of these poems, "Namárië," the golden leaves are also dead leaves, falling from the trees in autumn. I also included this imagery of "gold" autumnal leaves in my May 15 poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited"; this was just some whimsical punning on Humpty's "great fall," with no conscious reference to my earlier "leaves of gold" post. Then on June 10, as recorded the next day in "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," I tried to translate a passage from Rimbaud for myself because I was unhappy with Louise Varèse's failure to translate feuilles d'or literally as leaves of gold. Rimbaud's "leaves" are closer to the Golden Plates, something to write on. Then that very night, I happened to read in Richard Cavendish's The Tarot about Etteilla's claim that the original Book of Thoth had been written "on leaves of gold" near Memphis. William Wright picked up on this theme in "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," proposing that my "leaves of gold" syncs have to do with the Brass Plates and that these are currently in France. (If anyone wants to follow up that lead, the first place I'd look is behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse; let me know if you find anything.) He also brings up the idea of an "ark" (and connects it with Joan of Arc, which I had somehow failed to do!), though for him it is the plates themselves that constitute the ark.

The place to which all roads proverbially lead is of course not France but Rome, and that makes me think of Book VI of the Aeneid. There our hero visits the cave of the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess whose usual practice is to write the word of bright Phoebus on literal leaves -- oak leaves -- and leave them at the mouth of her cave, where they soon blow away in the wind. Aeneas specifically asks her not to do this with the oracle he has requested: "Only do not write your verses on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds: chant them from your own mouth." The seeress obliges -- and goes on to speak of leaves of gold!

Hidden in a dark tree is a golden bough, golden in leaves and pliant stem, sacred to Persephone, the underworld’s Juno, all the groves shroud it, and shadows enclose the secret valleys. But only one who’s taken a gold-leaved fruit from the tree is allowed to enter earth’s hidden places.

Aeneas finds this fabled golden bough hidden among the leaves of an otherwise ordinary oak tree:

Just as mistletoe, that does not form a tree of its own, grows in the woods in the cold of winter, with a foreign leaf, and surrounds a smooth trunk with yellow berries: such was the vision of this leafy gold in the dark oak-tree, so the foil tinkled in the light breeze.

(I'm away from my study at the moment and don't have access to any of my preferred translations of Virgil. The above are A. S. Kline's, taken from this site.)

With this context -- and the Aeneid, which I have read more times and in more translations than any other book outside the Bible, is very much a part of the furniture of my subconscious, likely to influence my dreams -- the dream image of golden plates hidden in an enclosed space full of dead leaves takes on another possible meaning. It's as if some devotee of far-darting Phoebus, anxious that nothing be lost, had assiduously gathered as many of the wind-scattered leaves as could be recovered and shut them up in a room lest they blow away again. Alas, leaves are but leaves, and it is not the wind that keeps them from lasting forever. They may be bright when they fall from the oak, but nothing gold can stay. Hidden among those brittle husks of desiccated prophecy, though, may be found, like mistletoe in the shadows, a few leaves from the genuine Golden Bough, enabling passage to other worlds. These at least are not ephemeral: "these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time."

So maybe the Sybil's way of doing things was right all along: Let blow away whatever can blow away; true gold will remain.

Working out what that means is going to take some time, but at least it's nice to have found a different interpretive angle and to get away from the stupid literalness of focusing on that restaurant!

⁂

One little postscript: In "What shall we do with the drunken Railer?" I mention the very unsatisfactory nature of the French translation of the Sinbad bit in Ulysses, where Joyce's tailor and jailer and whaler become the meaningless tarin and jarin and wharin. Couldn't they have found some actual French words that rhyme with marin as the English words rhyme with sailor? Well, I've been on a DIY translation kick recently, so if no one else is going to do it . . . .

I found a French rhyming dictionary online and looked up words that rhyme with marin. Pretty slim pickings, it turns out:

Pinbad le Parrain, the godfather? Not too many other possibilities here. But the very first result, after marin itself, is romarin. I looked it up, and it's the French word for rosemary, the herb. Weird coincidence.

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."

Crescent waxing

The sync fairies have a way of dredging up my juvenilia -- which is somewhat embarrassing, but if you want to ride with the sync fairies, embarrassment is one of the first things you have to give up. Today I suddenly remembered these two stanzas from an unfinished poem I wrote as a student. I no longer have the manuscript, but the Olentangy River reference dates it to 2001-2002.

Went to the record store and bought

Bookends because it matched my mood

Still haven’t played it (I forgot)

Stayed out all night to pace and brood

Along the Olentangy River

Crescent waxing, just a sliver

Up in a pine tree in the park

Collected works of Yeats in hand

I sit and read till it is dark

How innocent -- just like I’d planned

Won’t someone take a photograph?

Crescent waxing, almost half

Bookends is a Simon and Garfunkel album, and that duo's recent entrance into the sync stream (see "More on Joan and Claire" and "Over troubled water") is what brought the poem to mind. William Wright also recently brought up a Five for Fighting album with a very similar name, Bookmarks, in "Running with Claire."

Then the second stanza brings in Yeats, and each stanza ends with a reference to the phase of the moon. In my first dream-encounter with Claire ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she quizzed me about the phases of the moon and then gave me the "true" version of a Yeats poem. I could remember only a few details of this "True Song," and googling those details led me to a book called The Witch's Tower. The poem quoted above was apparently written when I was living in Morrill Tower, on the banks of the Olentangy in Columbus, Ohio. After Peter Jackson's The Two Towers came out, many students started calling the building -- which is one of the university's Two Towers -- Minas Morrill. This was of course a reference to Tolkien's Minas Morgul, literally "Tower of Sorcery." (If that seems like a creepy thing to call your dorm, it was an improvement over its old nickname: the Jeffrey Dahmer Building.)

Of course, there's also the obligatory dark reference.

Were all those syncs pre-arranged, lying dormant in a forgotten poem for twenty-some years until I was ready to notice them? I guess the vision that was planted in my brain all those years ago still remains. Or, as Yeats is quoted as saying in The Witch's Tower, "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

More on Joan and Claire

As discussed in my June 6 post "What's the connection between Joan and Claire?" William Wright now believes that the beings I have interacted with under the names of Joan and Claire are in fact one and the same, an identification I have been somewhat hesitant to accept.

Well, why not ask Claire herself to mettre les choses au clair, so to speak? Yesterday, June 7, I had some free time, so I prepared for a read and said, "Okay, Claire, you've got one shot to convince me. One card. Make it count." I shuffled and cut the deck while repeating in my mind, "Joan and Claire: Are they the same or different? The same or different?" I put a single card face down in front of me and returned the rest of the deck to its ark.

When I read, it's my habit to try to engage whatever psychic faculties I may possess by trying to visualize the face of each card before I turn it over. Fairly often I am able to do this successfully: A mental image of a particular card comes to mind, and when I turn over the card in front of me, that's what it is. Sometimes a different image comes to mind, which doesn't match what's on the card but sheds light on how to interpret it. Or sometimes, of course, I just get random noise, or nothing.

When I tried to visualize this card, I got a fairly hazy image of a large metal chalice. The image was not at all detailed, and I couldn't even be sure what metal it was, but my impression was that it was supposed to be the Holy Grail. Unsurprisingly, my guess was that the card was going to be the Ace of Cups. Though this visual impression was fairly weak, it was accompanied by a much stronger and clearer aural impression: a piano playing the first three notes of a C major scale: do re mi. This seemed potentially relevant to my question, since some years ago an online friend had pointed out that Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc (now called Domrémy-la-Pucelle in her honor), is pronounced almost exactly as do re mi, the only difference being the nasalization of the first vowel.

I turned the card over. It was the Knight of Wands:

The first thing I noticed was that this was not a "new" card but one I had drawn before. This was only my fifth reading with this deck, and I rarely use more than three cards per reading, so this was the first time the same card had come up a second time. That in itself suggests an answer of "same" rather than "different" to the question I had posed. What's more, the first time I had drawn this card -- which was on June 2, in my very first reading with the deck -- it had been about Claire. My brief notes for that first reading are as follows:

2024 June 2 Sunday

First read with consecrated RWS, acquired on Joan's Day.

1. Who is CdL? 2. What is her role in my life? 3. Who am I to her?

1. Nine of Cups - very pleased, granter of wishes, full of joy

2. Knight of Wands - call to adventure, risk, Ahuric action, and yes fun

3. Four of Swords - sleeper, calm knight, deep and slow

CdL is of course Claire de Lune. I've usually written her surname as Delune -- one word, capital D -- but for whatever reason I'd abbreviated it as CdL in my notes that day.

So the Knight of Swords has already been associated with Claire. If I can see anything in it that unambiguously indicates Joan, then I'll have my answer.

Because of the do re mi impression I'd had before turning over the card, I tried to see if there was any possible way do re mi was encoded in the image. I couldn't find anything. I thought of different ways do re mi might be expressed -- C D E, for example. (Even though I don't have anything like perfect pitch, my impression had been clear that it was the beginning of a C major scale I had heard.) I noticed that the abbreviation I had used in my notes, CdL, was frustratingly close to this, but of course there is no such musical note as L.

But wait. If there were a musical note called L, which note would it be? Well, imagine if after G you just kept going instead of starting over at A. L would then be an octave above E, and would thus also be mi:

So, in a fairly straightforward way, CdL = do re mi.

Coming back to the image on the card itself, its an armored person on horseback, and in my opinion the face is even sexually ambiguous and could be seen as that of a woman. So that matches Joan in a general way. And the yellow leaves on the horse's bridle bear a certain resemblance to fleurs-de-lis. The suit of Wands has been seen as symbolizing the peasant class, so the Knight of Wands is someone from a peasant background raised to knightly status, like Joan.

Then I realized that the wooden staff resembles a stake, and that the Knight looks as if he is on fire.Those aren't actually flames on his helmet, though, but feathers -- just as a bird reportedly rose from the flames when Joan was burned. Then I noticed the black lizards printed on the Knight's outer garment -- which, I know from reading Waite, are not actually lizards but salamanders, representing the element of Fire. Wait, didn't I post something about salamanders recently, and wasn't it about Joan?

I put salamanders in the search box on this blog, and a single post came up: "The arrow through the window," dated June 2, 2024. It was an unfinished draft, last edited in 2021, but I'd decided to publish it on that day -- the same day I did that first reading and drew the Knight of Wands. The post does indeed deal with Joan, and it also mentions that story about a bird flying up out of the flames. Keep in mind the title of the post, with its reference to a window.

My attention next turned to the horse on the card. Did Joan ride a brown horse? She's often shown on a white horse in art.I ran a search for joan of arc's horse, and the very first result was "Stories of Joan of Arc at Orléans," from a site called Sacred Windows. It says her horse was "dark-coated," but I was more interested in what it had to say about her banner:

It was twelve feet long, silky white, and emblazoned with the names of Jesus and Mary – a warrior’s banner. It was mounted on a tall pole for all to see, the resolute declaration of a conquering hero, like David against Goliath: "You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts" (1 Samuel 17:45).

Thus did Joan of Arc ride into battle – holding high the banner, declaring her identity as a Christian soldier. Joan knew who she was, and announced it to her friends and enemies alike. Such a bold, bright, obstinate declaration of a warrior’s character must have struck mortal fear into the hearts of every foe, as the maiden, clad in armor and fire, rode onto the battlefield bringing war to their strongholds.

It specifically mentions the "tall pole" from which the banner flew, and that Joan held it high as she rode into battle. The card doesn't show a banner, but the Knight is holding up a pole. "Clad in armor and fire" also matches our Knight pretty exactly. 

After the reading, since piano music had come up in connection with Claire, I thought I'd listen to Clair de Lune, the piano piece by Debussy. I found it on the YouTube Music app on my phone, but it had to play an ad first. The ad began with footage of people fighting with lightsabers, and a voice said in English something like "You have the weapon of a Jedi, but you are not a Jedi yet," after which it switched to Chinese. I didn't quite catch the exact quote, nor had I processed what exactly was being advertised when, a few seconds later, the ad ended and Clair de Lune began playing.

It took me a second to remember why I associated lightsabers with Joan of Arc. Then I remembered: In my January 2021 post "Darkest hour," I relate dreaming the phrase épée d'Arc ("sword of Arc") and relating it to a Babylon Bee article about Trump having "the Darksaber," which I guess must be from one of those Star Wars sequels I've never watched. Dark and d'Arc are homophones, and épée and sabre are two different (but not very different) fencing weapons.  As it turns out, it's also this post that brings up how Domrémy sounds like do re mi.

It's been decades since I fenced, and I only ever did foil. and just after typing the above, I wanted to check whether I had remembered correctly how the three weapons differ. The first search result, "Foil, Epee or Sabre? Choose Your Weapon," had mugs for sale comparing the weapons to wands.

Besides the link to the Knight of Wands, "My wand chose me" is also a link back to my post about my first two encounters with Joan, called "Can you just choose a patron saint?" The first two comments there took issue with my title, saying, "It sounds like your Saint chose you."

I really wanted to see that lightsaber ad again and get the exact quote and the context, but no amount of Googling turned up anything, so I figured all I could do was keep playing songs on YouTube Music and hope it would come up again. It never did, but the music (which I let the algorithm choose) was remarkably synchy. The second song it played was "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, which begins with these lines:

Hello, darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Since I had just been thinking about the dark/d'Arc connection, this obviously caught my attention. Then the very next song was Emily Linge singing "Stand by Me," which begins thus:

When the night has come

And the land is dark

And the moon is the only light we'll see

Another dark reference, immediately followed by a reference to moonlight -- or, in French, clair de lune.

What's the connection between Joan and Claire?

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright proposes that the beings I know as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are actually one and the same, and also the same as one of the beings he has been in contact with, one of "a group of laughing women" whom he thinks of as the Daughters of Asenath. It is strongly implied that this being may not actually have anything to do with the historical Joan of Arc even though "that is how she has allowed herself to be thought of for a few reasons." In his June 4 post "The French Connection" he refers to "Joan-Claire" as if the identity has been established.

As the person who has actually interacted with these two women, I'm still not quite sold on the idea, though I haven't ruled it out.

Basically, Joan and Claire just feel like very different presences. My first two encounters with Joan, on January 1, 2021 (see "Can you just choose a patron saint?") were absolutely overwhelming. The sense of goodness and purity was so intense that it left me trembling and in tears. I felt very much as if I'd literally been in the presence of a goddess. A year later ("Softly now"), she manifested again in a way that I wrote was "a good deal subtler" but "still unmistakably her." If William's theory is right, then I suppose that 2022 manifestation is the missing link between Joan in her glory and the much more approachable Claire.

Unlike Joan, Claire first appeared in a dream and only later in waking life. In her first appearance, on January 5, 2024 ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she didn't actually appear in visual form, but my impression was "of a blonde woman who looked as if she might burst into laughter at any moment." In that dream, although I understood that she wanted to be called Claire Delune, I knew that was not her real name, and she spoke English. Then on January 21 ("The Green Door finally closes"), I "heard" a mental voice that sounded like Claire's saying in French that the Rosary was "one of the keys." I guess this is a potential link to Joan, as she was speaking French and delivering a "Catholic" message. (I'm not sure whether the historical Joan would have known a form of the Rosary or not; the history there is a bit murky.) I didn't assume the voice was Joan, though; I assumed it was Claire. If the 2022 manifestation was "unmistakably her," the 2024 one was not. Of course, the 2022 manifestation came on the anniversary of the original two, and I was actively anticipating a repeat visit; the lack of that context in 2024 may have led to my misidentifying the voice. I don't think so, though. They're just different. With Claire, the dominant impression is exuberant playfulness, which is quite distinct from Joan's affect, and they're also just different in a directly experienced way, the way two different people have different faces and voices.

After I read William Wright's May 30 post, Claire reappeared (for the first time since January) and has done so almost every day since then. Usually this is just an intense feeling of presence with her particular "flavor" to it, but there have been a couple of verbal messages. As soon as I had read the sentence proposing that Claire was Joan, she chimed in with a French pun: "C'est clair : c'est Claire!" -- "This much is clear: It's Claire!" Then, on June 2, she said in English, "Consider the lilies." That's a line from the Sermon on the Mount, of course, but also a link to Joan, who bore a banner "whose field was sown with lilies" -- and also, more surprisingly, to Tim. Tim didn't appear under that name until November 2023 ("Well, that didn't take long"), but I quickly reached the conclusion that the anonymous man who visited Whitley Strieber in Toronto on June 6, 1998, was this same Tim ("'Tim' and The Key"). And what do you know, here I am posting this on June 6! In my 2022 post about Joan, I actually quoted this person I would later identify as Tim: "The most important thing that Christ said was 'be as the lilies of the field.' It is a message for the next millennium."

This, together with the recent sync in which Claire is Tim's assistant ("Tim, Claire, Diego"), makes me wonder if we need to reconsider William Wright's conclusion that Tim is basically the devil.

On May 30, as recounted in "Yeats, Joan, and Claire," I ended up, through a combination of hunch and serendipity, buying a secondhand Rider-Waite Tarot deck, something I would ordinarily never dream of doing. (I spent a couple of hours reconsecrating the whole deck, one card at a time, which seems to have worked. So far, no discernible influence from whoever the previous owner may have been.) In that post, the question of Yeats's possible influence on that deck came up, and I said he may have had a hand in the inclusion of roses and lilies on two of the cards: the Magician and the Ace of Pentacles. I posted a photo showing those two cards, plus the Ace of Swords, which resembles Joan's coat of arms:

As should be clear in that post, I was under the impression that those were the only two Rider-Waite cards to feature roses and lilies. That turns out to be incorrect.

This morning, since Claire seems to have had a hand in my acquiring this deck of cards, I decided to see what it had to say about her. Asking "What is Claire's role?" I drew the Hierophant. This is Waite's version of the Pope card, which he for some reason renamed while keeping the image essentially unchanged and even adding more papal symbolism!

At first this threw me for a loop. The Hierophant typically represents established authorities, formal education, codified religious doctrine, and so on -- quite out of keeping with the spirit of Claire. Then I noticed the crossed keys. This is a papal symbol, obviously, but one that does not appear on traditional Pope cards; Waite added it. It has also come up repeatedly here and on William's blog in various contexts. It definitely relates to Claire: In my first waking encounter with her, she said of the Rosary, "Yes, this is one of the keys" -- implying that there is a second key. In my May 30 post, I tentatively concluded that this very deck of cards was the second key.

Then I noticed the roses and lilies, on the vestments of the two monks in the foreground. Somehow I had never noticed that detail before. This, then, would be another card that potentially has Yeats's fingerprints on it.

Remarkably, in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" my thoughts on the two keys led me to the symbolism of roses and lilies:

I tried to think what attributes the other cross-key might have. One should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold. 

So I first thought the two keys might have something to do with roses and lilies, and then that one of the keys might be the Rider-Waite deck. Not until today did I discover that the Rider-Waite deck actually shows crossed keys juxtaposed with roses and lilies!

I still haven't worked all this out to my satisfaction, but for now my tentative conclusions are that Joan is literally Joan of Arc, that Claire is a different but allied being, and that Tim may end up being one of the good guys after all.

Tim, Claire, Diego

In his May 30 post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')," William Wright brought up Tim and Claire Delune, two beings I encountered in dreams some months back -- Tim on the night of November 6-7, and Claire on the afternoon of January 5. Then in yesterday's "Eowyn-Eve dwelling in Everlasting Burnings," he revisited another of my old dreams, from March 5, with a character named Diego. In the post, he connected Diego with Israel and with Tol Eressëa:

When I read the dream, I understood Diego to be synonymous with Israel.  Diego is the Spanish equivalent to Jacob, who was renamed Israel. . . . Who fought against Israel?  In my story, Pharazon and the Numenorean's attack on Eressea was an attack on Israel given that many of Finwe's House resided on that island. 

Today I had a meeting with the owner of another school. One of his teachers is taking a long vacation, and he had hoped I would be able to help him arrange a substitute. The owner is someone I had only met once before, some seven years ago, so I asked why he had thought to contact me.

"Tim suggested I give you a call," he said. I know Tim.  He's a sales rep for a bookstore chain, and I often order textbooks through him. Then he added, "Actually, I don't see Tim all that often these days. He's really busy, so I mostly contact him through his assistant, Claire."

I did not know Claire.

"I don't think I've met Claire," I said. "I always work with Tim and Miss Chen."

"Yes, yes, Miss Chen. Didn't you know? Her English name is Claire."

This is a Taiwanese person I was talking to. His English is extremely limited, and our whole conversation was in Chinese except for the names Tim and Claire. I've been doing business with Tim's assistant for five or six years now and never knew her by any other name than Miss Chen. The guy who doesn't speak English, though, knows her as Claire. Weird.

Later in the conversation, I asked for some information about his school's curriculum, and he said, "I'll arrange for you to meet with Diego, and he can explain it. Diego's one of our teachers. He's from Guatemala."

Curiouser and curiouser. I suppose it goes without saying that Taiwan is not blessed with an overabundance of people named Diego. And from Guatemala, too! Remember that William has connected the Diego in my dream with "Israelites" living on Eressëa. As it happens, Guatemala has come up exactly once on William's blog. In the May 20 post "Conferences in the Sawtooth Mountains," he discusses a movie about the Book of Mormon which "portrayed the events happening in the jungles of Guatemala or something... not, as we now know, on Eressea."

Looking up my Diego dream now, I find that it also features the surname Chen. Running into that name isn't that much of a coincidence -- one in every nine Taiwanese people is a Chen -- but it still counts for something.

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.”

Yeats, Joan, and Claire

Yesterday, May 30, I enjoyed "good luck" all day. Everything just went unusually smoothly, with lots of little good things just happening to happen. Therefore, when I had a few free hours in the afternoon and had a sudden hunch that I should go to a particular used bookstore, even though it meant a 40-minute drive to another city, I figured it was a good day for pursuing hunches.

When I arrived, I realized that I had brought very little cash with me and wouldn't be able to buy much, but I thought I'd look around anyway. I was immediately drawn to a small table with several Tarot decks, including two different editions of the Rider-Waite. I'd been to this store countless times, and they'd never sold Tarot cards before. I know it's basic common sense that you do not buy magical items secondhand, especially if you don't know who the previous owner was, but I'd been without a physical Rider-Waite deck for some years now, and I felt impressed to buy one. "It's okay," put in the helpful excuse-maker on my shoulder (right or left?). "You can just reconsecrate them."

I picked up one of the decks, but the price tag slightly exceeded what I had in my pocket. When I checked the second one, though, I saw that I had exactly the right amount of cash to buy it. That seemed like a sign, and I decided to get it.

Even though that decision left me with exactly zero dollars to spend on anything else, I took a brief look at the books anyway. One I would definitely have bought was W. B. Yeats and His World by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eaven Boland, which had lots of illustrations. Because of my sword vision earlier that day, my first thought was to wonder whether it included a photo of the poet's magical sword (yes, he owned one), so I flipped through the book to check. No sword pics, alas, but this cartoon caught my eye:

It shows a woman dressed in black, standing atop the globe with two books under her feet, one of which is labeled "Gregorian Chants," and looking out into space at a giant flying Koran. A female Gregory was the main thing that got my attention, as a possible link to Odessa Grigorievna. I also happened to briefly start reading the Quran just a few weeks after the Grigorievna dream. I was vaguely aware that a Lady Gregory had been one of Yeats's associates but knew essentially nothing else about her and couldn't understand what the cartoon was trying to say. Today I went to Wikipedia for a quick rundown, where I read that she had been born on March 15, 1852 -- the Ides of March. This was shortly after reading William Wright's post "'Naming' Joan (and 'Beware this one!')" -- on which much more below -- in which he interprets two things said by a female voice as referring to me: "Beware this one!" and "When I dream, I dream about books!" I was born on the Ides of March (as in "Beware the Ides of March!") and have had many dreams about books. Lady Gregory, it turns out, shares my birthday, and the cartoon looks as if it might depict her dreaming about the Quran.

Anyway, I didn't buy the Yeats book. I took the Tarot deck to the counter to pay -- and discovered to my surprise that I was eligible for a special discount! Instead of spending every bit of my cash, as I had expected, I received $99 (about three US dollars) back -- so I went right back to the bookshelves to browse some more. I found Richard Cavendish's 1975 book The Tarot -- a large hardback full of color photos and certainly far too expensive to buy with my remaining cash. When I picked it up, though, I saw the price sticker: exactly $99. That seemed like another sign, and I bought it.

Flipping through Cavendish's book later, I was surprised to discover a full-page portrait of Yeats!

The use of his full name, William Butler Yeats, is another indirect link to Odessa Grigorievna, as my post "Hey birds, here are cookies!" links her with the biblical story of the Pharaoh's butler and baker. My uncle's song "Fourth Down" directly links Yeats with butling and baking: "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."

Does Yeats really deserve a full-page portrait in a history of the Tarot? He moved in magicians' circles, yes, and knew MacGregor (MacGregor!) Mathers and Waite and Crowley, but what contribution to the Tarot iconography or interpretation did he himself make? The only possible fingerprints of his I've been able to find are on the Rider-Waite Magician and Ace of Pentacles, where his poem "The Travail of Passion" may -- this is my own personal hypothesis -- have influenced Waite to include red roses and white lilies in the imagery. (See my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician.")

This made me think of my February 2 post "What's the second key?" -- the first key being the Rosary. I had written:

One [key] should be gold and the other silver, I guess, but that's not very helpful. Which is the Rosary, anyway, gold or silver? Maybe try a different tack. A rosary is literally a garland of roses, and lilies complement roses as silver complements gold.

Where did this idea come from, of there being two keys, one of which is the Rosary? See my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes":

I thought to myself [of the Rosary], "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

In William Wright's post, on which I said I would have more to say, he proposes that the beings I think of as Joan of Arc and Claire Delune are one and the same. He actually ends the post -- which was written on St. Joan's Day (i.e., May 30, the anniversary of her death) -- with "Happy Feast Day, Claire." I had forgotten that in my first encounter with Claire she had quizzed me about the "true" form of a Yeats poem, and specifically a poem about the Irish god Aengus. One of the things I learned today from skimming the Wikipedia article for Lady Gregory is that she used to publish under the pseudonym Angus Grey.

In that post, I also mention that the only keys mentioned in the Book of Mormon are those of Laban's treasury. One of Laban's greatest treasures was the sword Makmahod -- recently connected with Joan and thus perhaps also with Claire.

Now look back at the photo of the full-page portrait of Yeats. Up in the corner is the name of the chapter in which it is found: "The Universal Key."

Does that settle it? Is the Tarot -- particularly in its Yeats-adjacent Rider-Waite form -- the long-sought second key? I wasn't sure until I opened up my new cards and saw what was printed on the backs:

A rose argent. I'd already connected the two keys with the duality of red and white flowers. Symbolically, a white rose is interchangeable with a lily. I thought at first it was the Rose of York, but that should be barbed and seeded proper (i.e., with green leaves and a yellow center). This one is all white, even the leaves, suggesting that it is the blossom of an all-white tree -- with obvious implications from a Mormon or Tolkienian point of view.

Are Joan and Claire the same being, as William Wright suggests? The possibility had never crossed my mind, but my immediate inclination is to think that it may well be true. Serendipitously running into all this Claire-related content on Joan's Day  is obviously a data point in favor of the hypothesis. Another data point is the poem I published yesterday for St. Joan's Day. An earlier draft had ended with the line "And act -- however high the stakes," but then I felt something nudging me to change it to "Clear-eyed -- however high the stakes" -- even though being clear-eyed had no obvious connection with the overall theme of the poem. The French word for "clear" is clair -- or, in the feminine, claire.

Coincidence? Here's another. Last Joan's Day I wrote, but did not publish, a translation of a French poem by St. Thérèse de Lisieux. (This year, by "coincidence," I did another translation from Thérèse just five days before Joan's Day.) I was tolerably happy with it as a translation but felt that its take on Joan was not my own, and thus I never ended up posting it. It's still in my Drafts folder, dated May 30, 2023, so I looked it up. Here's the original:

A Jeanne d'Arc

Quand le Dieu des armées te donnant la victoire

Tu chassas l'étranger et fis sacrer le roi

Jeanne, ton nom devint célèbre dans l'histoire

Nos plus grands conquérants pâlirent devant toi.

Mais ce n'était encor qu'une gloire éphémère

Il fallait à ton nom l'auréole des Saints

Aussi le Bien-Aimé t'offrit sa coupe amère

Et tu fus comme Lui rejetée des humains.

Au fond d'un noir cachot, chargée de lourdes chaînes

Le cruel étranger t'abreuva de douleurs

Pas un de tes amis ne prit part à tes peines

Pas un ne s'avança pour essuyer tes pleurs.

Jeanne tu m'apparais plus brillante et plus belle

Qu'au sacre de ton roi, dans ta sombre prison.

Ce céleste reflet de la gloire éternelle

Qui donc te l'apporta ? Ce fut la trahison.

Ah ! si le Dieu d'amour en la vallée des larmes

N'était venu chercher la trahison, la mort

La souffrance pour nous aurait été sans charmes

Maintenant nous l'aimons, elle est notre trésor.

And my version:

To Joan

The God of Hosts gave thee the field --

The king was crown'd, the foe did yield --

And all the conq'rors France had known

Did pale before the name of Joan.

Yet thy name, too, had paled and died

If not by suff'ring sanctified.

The cup which caus'd our Lord to shrink,

He offer'd thee -- thou, too, didst drink.

Thou wast, like Him, rejected, left

Alone, of all thy friends bereft.

Not one did come to kiss thy chains,

To still thy tears, to share thy pains.

When Charles the Seventh took the throne,

How brightly then thy glory shone!

But brighter still that glory ray'd

In dungeons dark -- alone, betray'd.

Our Lord did, too, to this sad vale

Come down to seek out death, betray'l.

Through Him we see with clearer eyes:

Now suff'ring is our greatest prize.

A note after the poem offers this as "a more literal translation of the final stanza":

Ah! If the God of love had not come to this vale of tears

To seek betrayal and death,

Suffering would have had no appeal for us.

Now we love it; it is our treasure.

So I took some liberties with that final stanza, the chief effect of which was -- to add a reference to clearer eyes that was not in the original!