Another novel with Tyco and mushroom people

A few months ago, on a whim, I picked up a secondhand copy of Timelock by Koté Adler, an apparently self-published novel by an author on whom I have no information other than that he obviously didn't have a copyeditor. I go back and forth on whether or not he's a native speaker of English. The summary in the back cover is as follows:

On board a vast and lonely starship hurdling through space at relativistic speeds, Alik Likiaksa pushes the limits of his consciousness to unlock the secrets of an alien messenger.

Through the lens of the hallucinogenic mushroom, this psychedelic journey into the future carves out a new footprint for a fresh and exciting sub-genre of psychedelic science fiction.

Timelock is the first installment of an epic science fiction adventure that seeks to define man's ultimate place within the Cosmos and unravel the mystery's of mind.

I bought it because it was cheap, because it looked like something I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, and because I read a fair bit about psychedelics and about fringe theories of time.

At the time I bought Timelock, I had no knowledge of the existence of Eleanor Cameron or her Mushroom Planet novels. I discovered these after Kevin McCall mentioned them in a comment on one of my Little Skinny Planet posts, the connection being that the Mushroom Planet is very small and orbits the Earth. I've since read the whole series and posted quite a lot about it. Regular readers will be aware that one of the main characters is a Mushroom Person called Tyco Mycetes Bass. Mushroom People appear human-like but are actually fungus-based organisms.

Since Timelock features space travel and mushrooms, it seemed natural to read it after finishing Cameron's series. I was expecting mushrooms to appear only as a hallucinogen, but in fact this novel, too, features extraterrestrials who appear humanoid but are actually fungi. The main "mushroom person" character is called Myco, suggesting both the first and middle names of Mr. Bass. Of course it's not all that surprising for two different fictional mushroom people to have names suggesting the scientific prefix myco-, meaning "mushroom." More striking is the fact that the human characters in Timelock use a currency called the tyco. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or an homage -- perhaps Adler had read Cameron's books -- but it certainly is a coincidence that I bought Timelock and then, shortly later and for unrelated reasons, had the Mushroom Planet novels brought to my attention.

The sad death of a dog fox and a vixen

Just a minor sync note:

I read Time and Mr. Bass (1967) by Eleanor Cameron while I was also reading The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) by Iris Murdoch. These are completely different novels -- a sci-fi yarn for children written by a Canadian living in California, and a psychological novel written by an Irishwoman living in England -- but each features two wild foxes which are always referred to with gendered terms: dog fox for the male and she-fox (Cameron) or vixen (Murdoch) for the female. (Was vixen perhaps considered a slightly improper word for children in the '60s?) In each novel both foxes are eventually killed, causing distress to a character who had thought of them as "my" foxes.

Here's page 32 of Time and Mr. Bass:

"Oh!" said Mr. Bass sadly. "No, Chuck, it's my lovely dog fox, and he's dead. Now, that's a shame. I thought he and I had come to an agreement that he'd let our hens be, but someone's gone and shot him -- Towyn, I expect -- and so I take it he did not let our hens be. . . . Tchk! This is bad -- this is very, very bad."

Later (p. 171) the vixen, too, is killed:

"Poor beast," said Mr. Theo softly, and he knelt and took the slim muzzle in his hand and lifted her head. "Poor beast, she died of the most extreme terror." Gently, he closed her eyes.

Here's p. 534 of The Philosopher's Pupil:

'The foxes -- they are dead. The men came and killed them -- here in the garden -- I showed them where.'

Alex screamed out, her lips wet with a foam of rage -- 'You what, you let them do it? You showed them? You devil -- without telling me -- you let them kill my foxes -- oh I could kill you for this -- how could you do it -- let them kill my foxes -- why didn't you tell me --?'

I've read a lot of books, but only two where this happens -- and I was reading them concurrently, after each had been brought to my attention by the sync fairies. Not the best of omens.

Green and the Mushroom Planet

In Green, leprechauns kidnap Lily Green and put her in a fake rocket ship before taking her to the leprechaun realm. Once there, she finds a letter left for her by her late grandmother, written in green ink. In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Tyco Bass runs an ad in the newspaper to recruit a boy to build a spaceship to go to Basidium. Although the rest of the newspaper is black-and-white, his ad is printed in green. In Green, the green ink is understandable (they're leprechauns; all their things are green), but the Mushroom People have no special affinity for that color, and it is never explained why the ad was green.

The leprechauns in Green have hair "with the merest hint of green." Likewise, the Mycetians (Earth-based Mushroom People) have just a hint of green in their skin color -- subtle enough for them to pass as human without attracting undue attention.

Both the leprechauns and the Mushroom People deal with security breaches by administering a drink that causes forgetfulness.

The Mushroom People, both on Basidium and on Earth, use Mushroom Stones as symbolic decorations, and there is a hint that they may have used them as money in the past. These are round, flat on one side and convex on the other (like a mushroom cap), and have symbols engraved on the convex side, one of which is always a mushroom. In Green, one of the leprechauns gives Lily the gift of "a domed gold button, a four-leaf clover embossed on its shiny surface." A domed button would have the same shape as a Mushroom Stone; in fact, when I search for domed button, the very first hit is offering "Bronze Mushroom Domed Buttons" for sale. One gets the impression that Eleanor Cameron and Laura Peyton Roberts somehow received essentially the same mental image and interpreted it in the context of their respective fictional worlds.

Here's a description of a Mushroom Stone, from A Mystery for Mr. Bass:

Each amulet was exactly the same size, about an inch and a half across, and all were in the shape of mushroom heads or half-balls. Each had deep lines cut into it on the domed top which crossed at the center so that the dome was divided into pie-shaped wedges, and in each one of these wedges was a different, curious carved design or picture. On every amulet one of these pictures was always a mushroom.

It is not specified how many wedges each Mushroom Stone is divided into, but it must be an even number (since the lines cross at the center), and four to eight seems likeliest -- much more than that, and the wedges would be too narrow to contain pictures. Couldn't such a design easily be misinterpreted as a four-leaf clover, or vice versa?

Stones of obsession

I've just read the entire Mushroom Planet series by Eleanor Cameron: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Mr. Bass's Planetoid, A Mystery for Mr. Bass, and Time and Mr. Bass. (The Terrible Churnadryne, sometimes incorrectly listed as part of the series, is an unrelated novel by the same author.)

Time and Mr. Bass is unlike the rest of the series. The other four are basically sci-fi in orientation (flying to other planets in a rocket ship); there are hints that the superstitions of the Mushroom People may have some basis in realty, but only hints. In Time and Mr. Bass, the reality of the spiritual becomes explicit and central to the story -- and with it, supernatural evil. There is no evil in the first four books; such "villains" as they feature -- the word is really too harsh to apply to them -- are self-important bumblers who mean no one any real harm and whose moral shortcomings are ultimately venial. No one seriously tries to harm anyone else, and no one dies. This changes in Time and Mr. Bass.

Despite the title, it's not a time-travel story. There's a bit of paranormal precognition and retrocognition, but the "time" element isn't really central, and I'm not sure how it made it into the title. Most of the plot revolves around supernatural stones, the jewels of Basidium. As Tyco Bass explains,

I do not know how this power works I know only the results of stealing the stones, which is to deepen and strengthen any passion or obsession a person might have, and even to give it some new and strange twist.

It is only when they are stolen property that the stones exert this power. The "new and strange twist" always relates somehow to the Mushroom Planet, although the obsessed are not consciously aware of this. The stones are initially stolen by an amateur philologist who becomes obsessed with translating an ancient Mycetian scroll which he has also stolen. He makes no progress, but to finance this mad endeavor he begins selling individual stones to others, who in turn become obsessed. A doctor becomes obsessed with researching the medical properties of various mushrooms. An architect scraps plans for a church and instead begins working on "a beehive building with five frilled towers on it" -- a duplicate, unbeknownst to him, of a structure standing on Basidium. A fashion designer begins designing dresses that look like "raincoats" to the public but actually resemble the robes worn on the Mushroom Planet. A sculptor with the interesting name Sarsen Rollright, who had been known for his colossal heroic figures, begins sculpting stick-thin men and horses instead. ("All the animals are little and skinny.") Tyco tries to reason with him:

"But, my friend," said Mr. Bass, setting down his cup, "you know, you cannot go on putting together these metal sticks with knobs on the top and selling them to people as art . . . ."

"And why can I not, if you please, Mr. Tyco Bass? I shall do anything I am jolly well moved to do, because I have a vision."

"No," said Mr. Bass, "you have not got a vision. You have got a stone."

While in a sense these stolen stones are revealing truths about Basidium, their effect is wholly negative, ruining the lives and careers of those into whose hands they fall. It becomes a matter of some urgency for the protagonists to track down and buy back all the stolen stones and return them to their rightful owner.

Reading this, I of course found it impossible not to think of William Wright and his obsession with Stones. (In the novel, though, no one is obsessed with the stones, but with other things because of the stones.) The name Sarsen Rollright particularly stood out. David Topman even comments on how perfect the name is: "Mr. Rollright, how come your names are just right for you? I don't see how they could be any better." He explains that he was named after the sarsen stones of Stonehenge, and of course sar means "stone" in the Elvish languages to which William so often refers. As for the surname, the relevance of the second half of it is obvious, while the first half suggests "Good Times Roll."

The stone with which William is particularly obsessed is the one he calls the Sawtooth Stone. With this in mind, the wording used here to describe the voice of the stone-obsessed architect is interesting:

"Well?" he demanded of them in a voice that went through David like a saw blade. "What rubbish will you be selling with you?

"Selling nothing, Dada," said Rhondda. "These boys are Daffyd and Chuck and they have come to tell you that . . . they have come about the stone -- it is magic, just as I told you, but wicked magic and I don't want it any more --"

Despite what Rhondda says here, the stones themselves are not wicked, but their effect is deleterious in unauthorized hands.

I mentioned a supernaturally evil villain in Time and Mr. Bass. Seeing as how my name is Son of Tycho and all, I have naturally tended to identify with the benevolent character of Tyco Bass as I've read these stories, so it was a bit of a shock when the name of Tyco's demonic enemy was introduced: Narrow Brain.

Narrow is of course part of the name of this blog. It's true that it's a reference to a poem about coming out of the narrow desert and (like the Wise Men) "into the house, so high and wide." Nevertheless, narrow desert is the part I chose for my title. As for the Brain part, I wouldn't have thought anything of it had I not recently revisited the "Banana Man" period of my childhood. Shortly before moving to Ohio, I started to feel that the nickname Banana Man was too childish and that I should "upgrade" to the "edgier" moniker Banana Brain. Why exactly I thought that would be cool I have no idea, but I did. The rebranding was extremely short-lived. As soon as my father found out about it, he took me aside for a stern talking-to about how fun nicknames were fine but not at the cost of basic self-respect, and then in a few months we were in Ohio and I had left all banana branding behind. Bananas are the narrowest of fruits, and a banana-shaped brain would be a very narrow one.

Elsewhere in the novel, Narrow Brain is referred to as "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one" -- an odd expression, as snakes are not notable for their pallor. I immediately understood it, though, as one of my very earliest memories is of a dream of a many-headed snake with extremely pale, translucent skin. I will probably go into that dream in more detail later, as it also features "little men" and other possibly relevant details, but that's a subject for another post.

They are the Eggmen

In connection with my recent posts about Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet novels, both Wandering Gondola and William Wright have drawn my attention to the 2022 film Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The opening scene begins with the words "THE MUSHROOM PLANET" filling the screen, and then -- after a long sequence showing a Rube Goldberg machine used to produce "mushroom coffee" -- we see Jim Carrey in the role of the bald-headed villain, Dr. Robotnik, alias Eggman. His opening line is:

Doctor's log: It's day 243 in this Portabella Purgatory. My only companion is a rock I named Stone.

This morning I checked some blogs and found Francis Berger's latest post "No, You Are Not the Eggman, John . . . I am." Frank is the Eggman because his "henhouse is home to 24 hens that lay 18-22 eggs daily, or about 140 a week." (In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the first novel in the series, the main characters save the day by bringing a hen to the Mushroom Planet to lay eggs.)

Frank's reference is not to Sonic's nemesis but to John Lennon and "I Am the Walrus" -- a song covered by none other than Jim Carrey in 1998, 22 years before he was cast as Eggman in the first Sonic movie:

Many years ago, I decided that the line "They are the Eggmen" referred to Castor and Pollux (and, taking They as a proper noun, that They Might Be Giants were symbolically Castor and Pollux, too). In the original video for "I Am the Walrus," the Beatles portray the Eggmen by wearing white skullcaps:

Castor and Pollux are typically portrayed wearing very similar skullcaps, representing the egg from which they hatched, having been fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan:

The Dioscuri of course recently appeared in the sync-stream, in my post "Never mind the Pollux."

These distinctive caps worn by the Eggmen of Zeus were called pilos in Greek, but in English it is more common to use the Latin form pileus. That also happens to be the technical term for the cap of a mushroom:

Instead of saying mushrooms like a normal person, Merrian-Webster opts for basidiomycetes. The Mushroom Planet of Cameron's novels is called Basidium, home to the bald-headed Basidiumites, whose Earth-based cousins, known as Mycetians, all bear the middle name Mycetes.

Just after reading Frank's post and making the above connections, I picked up The Philosopher's Pupil and read this. One character is admiring some Japanese objets d'art collected by another character:

'I see you've set out the netsuke, my old friends.'

'Yes --'

'I especially like that demon hatching out of his egg.'

As a young child I labored under the misapprehension that Castor and Pollux was an obscenity, since invoking their names is characterized as "swearing" in T. H. White's The Once and Future King:

"Turn me and Kay into snakes or something."

Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.

"Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.

The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.

"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.

"I did not do it on purpose."

"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"

"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."

In Time and Mr. Bass, the final book in the Mushroom Planet series, the title character does the same thing Merlyn does in this scene: "Tyco vanished, only to reappear almost immediately." Later in the novel things take an unexpectedly Arthurian turn:

I beheld all that was left of King Arthur -- rex quondam, rexque futurus, the once and future king -- and I tell you, my friends, his bones were enormous!

I will have much more to say about Time and Mr. Bass in a future post.

The top of the city

William Wright has posted about Vizzini, a character played by Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride (all Mormons know and love that movie; there are no exceptions), which reminded me of the only other Wallace Shawn movie I’ve seen: Vanya on 42nd Street. I left a comment saying that was a link to the number 42 and the Empire State Building, but I had misremembered. It’s not the Empire State Building that’s on 42nd Street.

It’s the Chrysler Building. You know, the one that’s as big as a preternaturally big slug.

The main character in Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series is David Topman, who is based on the author's own son David. Chrysler is from Kreisel, meaning "top" (the spinning toy), so Topman is basically a translation of Chrysler.

It occurs to me that the 1993 Kate Bush song "Top of the City" -- reportedly inspired by the skyline as seen from her hotel room when she was in New York promoting Hounds of Love in 1985 -- could be an unintentionally specific reference to the Chrysler Building, which is the "top" of the city in two senses.

Thin, strange, secret frogs

"Like thin, strange, secret frogs" -- the bizarre and memorable simile with which T. H. White introduces the brothers Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth in his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. (This is Gawain of Green Knight fame; The Green Knight is also the title of an Iris Murdoch novel.) They live in Orkney, in the extreme north of Scotland, and speak Gaelic.

"Thin, strange, secret frogs" could also be yet another name for the "monkeys"/"bugs" of my early childhood. Thin, check. Strange, check. Secret, check. Frogs? Well, my 2013 poem "The Bugs" appropriates for its title characters the distinctive onomatopoeia from The Frogs, and in a comment I speculate that  "Aristophanes might have been acquainted with this same riffraff, whom he dubbed 'frogs' for those same 'orrible starin' eyes which led me to call them 'bugs.'" The poem also has an epigraph from another Murdoch novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and connects the bugs with the "minor presences" that haunt the character Tallis Browne. In a memorable scene, Tallis pushes a wheelbarrow around the city; "a useful wheelbarrow for putting things in" is one of the "three mysterious gifts" Tim and Patrick give William Alizio. Tallis's estranged wife is called Morgan; Morgan le Fay is the sister of Morgause, who is the mother of White's four thin, strange, secret frogs.

Basidiumites, the Mushroom People in Eleanor Cameron's novels, also have frog-like characteristics, being baldish, greenish, and big-eyed. Frogs are associated with mushrooms ("toadstools"). Mycetians -- "resident alien" Mushroom People, like Tyco Bass, who come from families that have been living on Earth for generations and who can pass as human -- consider Wales to be their Earthly homeland, and most of them have very Welsh names and speak with a Welsh accent. (Tyco eventually reveals that his original name was Tyco ap Bassyd.) This ties in with White's Celtic "frogs."

Contemporary memes (I saved this one on November 13) also associate frogs with a word suggesting Bassyd and Basidium:

Little Green Men with Celtic names are of course a link to the leprechauns that came up in "William Alizio's links to other stories." In fact, the dismissive way the news reports the story of Tyco Bass's "blowing away" reminds me of the "Crichton Leprechaun" incident. Even when a leprechaun shows up in Mobile, Alabama, it's in a neighborhood with a Scottish/Welsh name. Who all seen da leprechaun say yeeaahh!

Mushroom Planet = Little Skinny Planet = Narrow Desert

This morning I was wondering about this possible identification but hesitated because the Mushroom Planet is (as it would have to be) damp and humid and very much the opposite of a desert. They couldn't be symbolically identical -- could they?

I very rarely use public restrooms, but this morning I had occasion to do so. On a wooden shelf above the urinal was this odd little tchotchke:

In what seems like a pretty direct answer to my question, here we have mushrooms growing alongside cacti in a "desert" environment. Furthermore, the part where the mushrooms are growing is blue. In my January 21 post "The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves," I posted an image of the Three Wise Men riding through a blue desert. The image was a tall and narrow one, leading Wandering Gondola to leave the following comment:

Hee, the recent appearance of both strait/narrow and desert... You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?).

WG was alluding to the expression blue moon and more specifically to the Blue Moon Valley from the novel Lost Horizon. Oddly enough, there is a passing reference to this very valley in one of the Mushroom Planet novels. David and Chuck are on a tiny satellite (not the Mushroom Planet) and are scanning the Earth with a telescope:

And they beheld a sight they had dreamed of ever since Mrs. Topman had read them Lost Horizon: a green and lovely valley high in the Himalayas between India and Tibet.

This valley plays no role in the plot -- it's just one of several amazing sights they see while looking for something else -- but there it is nevertheless.

Only three of the inhabitants of the Mushroom Planet of Basidium are important enough to have names, and two of them, Mebe and Oru, bear the title of Wise Men. These two are mainly comic-relief characters, not wise at all, and it is clear that the only truly wise Basidiumite is the third: Ta, the king.

Mushrooms in a blue desert. Wise Men in a blue desert. Wise Men on the Mushroom Planet. It all fits together. There's also the consistent Moon motif. The Mushroom Planet is not technically a planet but a second moon of Earth; WG's comment links the Narrow Desert with the Moon; and I did a whole post called "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon."

The same restroom had this on the wall:

There obviously used to be a d there, but now it says "Have a nice ay." I assume that last word would be pronounced the same as ayy, Internet slang for an extraterrestrial. It also syncs up with two comments I left on my own post "Giraffe on the 'big fat planet'":

In Russian, the backwards R is the pronoun I, and is pronounced "ya."

Some Egyptologists identify the left wedjat eye (which looks like R) with the Eye of Horus and its mirror image with the Eye of Ra.

If "ya" = Я = Eye of Ra, then it follows that "ay" = R = Eye of Horus. According to one common interpretation, the right wedjat eye ("of Ra") is the Sun, and the left ("of Horus") is, you guessed it, the Moon. (William Wright had asked where I was going with the Russian comment, and I'd said I didn't know yet. Now I know.)

Also in this restroom -- I think this is the most photos I've ever taken in a toilet! -- was this:

The caption for this wouldn't be "No smoking"; it'd be "Gravity: It's the law. Maximum fine $10,000." Cigarettes and cigars have recently entered the sync-stream, and the defiance of gravity is a link to the translation of Tyco Bass.

Tyco Mycetes Bass as a translated being

Near the end of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman, realizing that his mother doesn't really believe he has been to Basidium but is just humoring him, he determines to take her to see Mr. Bass and go to the Mushroom Planet herself. Just then they are interrupted by a voice from the radio:

"-- and here's a little item that's been giving us a great deal of amusement in the newsroom. A small boy phoned in a few minutes ago to tell us that this morning, very early, before the storm had gotten well under way, but after the big wind had already begun, he looked out of his window and saw a neighbor of his swooped up by the gale and whipped right off into the sky. Up and up he went -- so the little boy said -- turning this way and that, his coat flapping about his ears, until he finally vanished altogether, a mere speck in the clouds." Over the radio came the deep, hearty, jolly voice of the newscaster, relishing to the fullest this ridiculous story. "Well," he finished, still chuckling, "I guess there's just no telling what's going to happen around here. Some storm!"

Mrs. Topman turned, laughing.

"Isn't that funny?" she said. "Imagine!"

"No," said David. "I don't really think it's funny," and he turned and went off to his room to think . . . (p. 148).

Later they go to Mr. Bass's house and meet the boy who made the report:

"I saw him this morning," said he, "but he blew away."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

"Blew away!" burst out Cap'n Tom at last. "Great jumpin' Jehosaphat! What was that ye said -- blew away?"

"Yes, sir," said the little boy respectfully, but in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice. "My mom let me phone the radio station and I told 'em he blew away. I saw him. I looked out of my window when the wind was really getting strong, and I saw Mr. Bass go up in the air like a leaf in the sky --" here the little boy made an upward, fluttering movement of his hand -- "and that was the last of him. After it stopped raining, I came over here to look for him. I looked in his planta . . . in his observatory, and in the closets, and under the bed, and behind the curtains, and down in the cellar, and everywhere, but he's gone. He just blew away" (pp. 157-58).

Mr. Bass reappears in later books in the series, but he is different after blowing away. Most notably, he now has the power to travel by thought -- to think of a place and instantly appear there. The spaceship is no longer necessary. In Time and Mr. Bass, Chuck Masterson asks him what exactly happened that morning when he "blew away," and he explains:

You will recall I told you at the time that I knew I was about to have the most important appointment of my life. I knew somehow that the Ancient Ones had work for me to do, but I did not know what work, nor where. And so when, moved by some strange impulse, I went out into the wind and looked up into the sky, I had a feeling that I was about to leave earth and I was happy and peaceful that I had left my affairs in good order. Then -- away I went, lifted up, up, as if by the wind, but I knew it was a greater power than the wind trying to teach me something I had never experienced before.

At first I was hollow with loneliness, for it seemed to me that surely I had been cast adrift forever in the vast reaches of space. And even after I found myself in my new home on a little planet in a solar system in the galaxy of M 81 in Ursa Major, it was is if I were a blurred picture of Tyco Bass trying to become clear again. I couldn't get focused -- I couldn't get my "me" focused. And when I first used to travel by thought, it exhausted me because I was trying so hard to help my mind and my imagination (because they work together) do something they can do quite easily by themselves. But no longer -- no longer. Now I am focused very clearly and I can do whatever I have to do (p. 24-25).

The parallel to the prophet Elijah, who "went up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kgs. 2:11), is clear. As with Tyco, everyone understands that Elijah was in fact taken up by "a greater power than the wind" and that the experience changed him into something other than an ordinary mortal. In Joseph Smith's terminology, Elijah was "translated" -- a state distinct both from mortality and from the full immortality that comes with resurrection.

Tyco Bass didn't "go to heaven" in the religious sense but rather to a planet in a distant galaxy,among whose people he has some unspecified work to do for the Ancient Ones. He also makes frequent visits to Earth and to Basidium. This fits remarkably well with what Joseph Smith said of translated beings like Elijah:

Many have supposed that the doctrine of translation was a doctrine whereby men were taken immediately into the presence of God, and into an eternal fullness, but this is a mistaken idea. Their place of habitation is that of the terrestrial order, and a place prepared for such characters He held in reserve to be ministering angels unto many planets, and who as yet have not entered into so great a fullness as those who are resurrected from the dead (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 170).

The Mushroom Planet series is full of little surprises like this. Another impressive one is the invention of a "hole in space" several years before the term black hole was coined.

Now that the eyebrows have settled . . .

I keep documenting these influence-of-adjacent-lines reading errors because I think they're interesting, and because I at least seem to make them all the time. This one is unusual because one line influenced another across a sizable gap:

I at first misread this as "But no sooner had eyebrows gotten settled," which I thought was funny and a bit poetic. Something that causes a stir is said to "raise eyebrows," but after a few minutes the eyebrows have mostly settled down again. The beginning of everyone is visually similar to the beginning of eyebrows, and I suppose the string row, together with the ascender from the final letter of solid, must have dropped down from the line above.

Of course as soon as I got to quiet my realized the error and automatically reprocessed the sentence. These errors always last just a fraction of a second, just barely long enough to ping consciousness. I assume many more of them arise and are rectified without ever breaking the surface of the unconscious, but that they may still have some subliminal effect. I wonder if they are in any way predictable -- if, for instance, any significant percentage of readers would make this particular error when reading this particular text. Hard to know, assuming most readers never become conscious of the vast majority of such split-second misreadings.

⁂

Update (November 28): The screenshot above is from p. 57 of Eleanor Cameron's A Mystery for Mr. Bass. Today I read this on p. 126 of the same work:

"Would this be the Topman residence?" inquired the little man in soft, musical tones, his thick, standing-out eyebrows going right up. At the same time all the other pairs of eyebrows went up.

Now Annabelle Topman came forward.

"I am Mrs. Topman," she said. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mistress Topman," he returned politely, and his eyebrows came down again, . . .

So that's weird enough that I guess I have to add subconscious precognition to the list of possible factors causing my misreading. How often does a book bother to mention raised eyebrows coming back down? And what are the odds that it would be this book, the same one that occasioned the misreading about eyebrows settling? A word search shows that the novel's first mention of eyebrows (lifted but not lowered) is on p. 104, so my misreading on p. 57 was not influenced by anything I had already read.

I suppose one non-paranormal explanation would be that the author subconsciously misread her own manuscript in the same way I would later do, and that this ghost text about eyebrows settling planted a seed which found expression later in the text. This seems highly unlikely, though, since the line breaks in the manuscript would be very unlikely to correspond to those on my phone's Kindle app.

Likeness in anything is likeness to him.

I had a dream last night consisting primarily of this sentence, spoken in English: "Likeness in anything is likeness to him." The word him was spoken in such a way that it sounded as if it were capitalized and meant God, but the visual accompanying it was of a different "him" -- Mr. Tyco M. Bass from the Mushroom Planet novels flying away into the sky, an image very similar to this one:

Like most people named Tychonievich (we're a rather small set), I have from time to time been known as Tycho, so this character is synchronistically interesting.

A secondary quasi-visual image associated with the sentence had something to do with nine-ness. As I tried to recall it after waking, it seemed sometimes like a table with three rows and three columns and sometimes like a long wooden rod with nine convex sections that looked as if they had been made with a lathe.

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My feeling upon waking was that "Likeness in anything is likeness to him" was deep, and that I understood what it meant, but that feeling of understanding rapidly dissipated. My interpretation, as best I can reconstruct it, was that whenever any two things are similar or correspond in any way, that is a manifestation of God -- not that God created or arranged the similarity, but that similarity and correspondence as such are aspects of God. Now I'm no longer sure that makes any sense. Perhaps the idea is that any sort of coherence at all is a reminder that we live in a created cosmos?

I have no idea what the three-by-three table, or the nine-sectioned rod, means. Immediately after waking, I had a sense that the three rows of the table corresponded to before, during, and after something or other -- and the columns? It all evaporated too fast for me to get a handle on it.

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Later in the morning, I realized that that picture of Tyco -- a short man with a big almost-bald head, wearing a suit and flying up into the sky -- reminded me of someone: Mr. Mxyztplk as he first appeared in Superman #30 in 1944. The story was even called "The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk," synching with "A Most Mysterious Disappearance":

Tyco's house, which is both a home and an observatory with a dome for a telescope, also reminds me of the similar home of Aline Carter in San Antonio, where the young Whitley Strieber attended an astronomy class.

The Drink of Forgetfulness and illegible notes: The Key, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, and Tim

I've been reading Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Eleanor Cameron's 1956 sequel to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. The titular stowaway is Horatio Q. Peabody, a self-important scientist who hopes to make  his name by publishing a description of Basidium, the Mushroom Planet, the very existence of which the boys have been keeping secret, and open it up to explorers, miners, tourists, and so on.

In order to prevent this, the Mushroom People bring out The Drink, which they present as a great honor -- "Such a person, worthy of The Drink, rarely comes to us -- he is hard to find" (p. 134). The pompous Horatio takes it for granted that he is the person they mean, and he downs The Drink. The boys are disgusted at Horatio's arrogance, but later one of the two Wise Men explains to them the true nature of The Drink:

"You see," went on Mebe, "that was The Drink of Forgetfulness. Only once or twice in a lifetime is it necessary to give some misguided person this drink, usually someone very conceited . . . . The Ancient Ones have decreed that The Drink is never to be forced on the guilty person. But it is never necessary to force him to drink. Out of vanity and pride, he always takes it eagerly and drinks it all -- every drop" (p. 137).

The Drink works slowly. By the time they arrive back on Earth, all the details of the journey are beginning to fade from Horatio's mind. Horatio, however, had been taking copious notes the whole time they were on Basidium, and he reassures himself that even if his memory fades he still has his notebook.

In this he is disappointed. For reasons that are never really explained, when humans visit Basidium they find themselves speaking and understanding the Mushroom People's language quite naturally, but when they return to Earth they find that they cannot remember a single word of it, but are left only with a vague sense that it was a tonal singsong language that sounded a bit like Chinese. When Horatio opens his notebook, he finds that written language has been similarly affected:

"All gone," he whispered. "All gone. Hen-tracks -- that's what it is, just hen-tracks."

Now Chuck darted over and picked up the book and opened it. Then he turned and held it out, his eyes wide with wonder.

"Sure," he breathed. "That's it. It's all in Basidiumite, of course. So now he can't read it. It's just scratchings, just gibberish. He can't remember the language, so now he can't remember how to read it. Poor old Horatio!" (p. 160).

 

Now compare this to the afterword to Whitley Strieber's The Key (2011 version). Strieber wakes up the morning after a nighttime conversation with a stranger I have identified as Tim:

As I rose from the bed, I saw my yellow notepad on the floor, covered with scrawls. It had been in my briefcase when I went to bed, so I must have pulled it out and taken notes. I grabbed it and looked at them.

They were pretty much just squiggles. They didn't seem to relate to any sort of a conversation.

Had he been real, or a dream? If you took notes in your sleep, they might look like this.

Then I remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had.

Then I thought of the Milk of Nepenthe, the drug that was mythically given to people who had visited the gods, in order that they would not suffer the anguish of remembering the pleasures of heaven when they had to return to mortal life.

I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused.

What's the connection between The Key and the Mushroom Planet novels? Tim. After my Tim dreams, I connected Tim with two other characters: the stranger from The Key and the character Tim from the William Alizio story. After posting a bit about the Little Skinny Planet from the Alizio story, and speculating that it might be connected to the Moon, I received a comment from Kevin McCall saying that The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet featured a very small planet closer to Earth than the Moon. The two books have no connection at all other than this synchronistic link with my Tim dreams -- and yet they also turn out to share these two themes: drinking a Drink of Forgetfulness, and taking copious notes that turn out to be unreadable gibberish.

The phenomenon in the Mushroom Planet stories, where people returning from Basidium can clearly remember that they have been speaking a different language but are unable to remember a single specific word of it, is also a link to my Tim dreams, of which I wrote:

I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used.

They shall take up serpents

When I got up this morning, I found that the wallpaper image on my phone had inexplicably been changed from an astronomical photograph to one of a coiled rattlesnake -- a photo I had found online and saved on October 18. I guess I must somehow have set it to wallpaper while asleep or half-asleep, but I have absolutely no hint of any memory of doing so. Changing the wallpaper would have been a multi-step process -- tapping through several screens in Settings, scrolling through to a not-so-recent photo -- and I don't see how I could possibly have done it without the benefit of full waking consciousness, but I did, obviously.

As discussed in my last post, my thoughts after waking soon turned to Jannes and Jambres, the Egyptian magicians who duplicated some of the miracles of Moses and Aaron -- including turning rods into snakes:

And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, "When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent."

And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods (Ex. 7:8-12).

This echoes an earlier miracle, the first shown to Moses after he was called by the burning bush:

And Moses answered and said, "But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee."

And the Lord said unto him, "What is that in thine hand?"

And he said, "A rod."

And he said, "Cast it on the ground."

And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

And the Lord said unto Moses, "Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail" -- and he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand -- "that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee" (Ex. 4:1-5).

Taking a snake by the tail is crazy, suicidal behavior -- but Moses did it, and it became a rod in his hand. Not until today did I think to connect this story with the strange promise in the epilogue to the Gospel of Mark:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

A few fringe groups like the Church of God with Signs Following take this as an invitation to practice ritual snake-handling as a demonstration of faith. I suppose most "normal" Christians are taught what I was: that the intended meaning was that God could miraculously protect believers from snakebite when necessary (as reportedly happened with Paul in Acts 28), not that we should "tempt God" by intentionally risking it. The Bible does say they shall actively take up serpents, though. The only biblical account of someone doing that is that of Moses -- and in his case what had been a serpent became a rod in his hand.

I think this miracle has a similar symbolic meaning to that of Jesus walking on the surface of the stormy sea: You take something slithery and treacherous, treat it as firm and solid, and it becomes so for you. This is shown in the "King and Lionheart" video, where slithery insubstantial creatures of light become solid enough to climb or run across when treated as such:

I think this may also be related to Samuel's prophecy about all things becoming slippery:

Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them (Hel. 13:34-36).

Isn't this Moses' first miracle in reverse -- or rather the first part of the two-part miracle? Lay a tool down -- a rod, say -- and it comes to life and slithers away. The difference is that the accursed "cannot hold them" again, but Moses can -- provided he has the courage to reach out and take a living snake by the tail.

This connection came to me in a meditative state this afternoon while I was saying my Rosary. It struck me how like a snake the string of beads was, and how when I took it up it became as solid and reliable as the iron rod of Lehi. Then I remembered that very similar imagery had been used in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet:

And now, to the boys' amazement, Ta drew from around his neck the beautiful necklace of stones and flung it up to them -- and as it came slithering and swerving upward through the green air, it seemed almost like something alive. "You must divide the stones between you," said Ta, "and because of them, you will always remember me . . . . Those stones were taken from our Sacred Hall in the depths of the mountains, and are given only to the kings of our people" (p. 117).

Stones -- more solid and inflexible even than a rod -- slither like something alive. Despite Ta's instruction, the boys never do divide the stones between them; the necklace remains intact.

Back on Earth, the boys believe the necklace has been lost, washed away to sea, but later Chuck produces it, and it is explicitly likened to a serpent:

And like some marvelous rainbow-colored serpent the necklace of Ta poured from his fingers and hung there, swaying back and forth in the bright air (p. 168).

Asked how he had recovered it, Chuck explains:

I looked down into one of those little rock pools, and I thought, 'What a beautiful crab.' And then I thought, 'But there's never been a crab as beautiful as that!' and I got down on my knees and put my hand in the rock pool -- and pulled out Ta's necklace (p. 168).

There's an echo of Moses here, too. Reaching for a crab in a rock pool may be considerably less foolhardy than taking a serpent by the tail, but in ordinary circumstances you would still be risking a nasty nip. When he grasped the "crab," though, it became a necklace of stones in his hand.

Given all the brilliant colors of Ta's necklace, I almost think that the crustacean Chuck saw in the pool must have looked more like this:

Yellow Light and the Mushroom Planet

I posted the lyric video for "Yellow Light" by Of Monsters and Man because it synched with my post "Golden light, and going 'overseas.'" The whole video shows the same scene: low clouds stretched out horizontally, a huge planet in the sky dwarfing the sun, and people traveling from the left side of the scene to the right on the backs of dinosaur-like creatures:

The same day, I read and posted about The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the cover of which shows a very similar scene:

The same low clouds, the same giant planet in the sky, the same travelers from left to right. The Sun does not appear on the cover, but it is mentioned in the story that the Earth dwarfs the Sun in the sky of Basidium. As Basidium is only 50,000 miles from Earth, I think the Earth would have about 18 times the diameter of the Sun in its sky, roughly matching the proportions seen in the "Yellow Light" video.

I read The Wonderful Flight because Kevin McCall mentioned it as a story that features a very small planet. I watched the "Yellow Light" video because I heard a different Of Monsters and Men song in a restaurant a few days ago and looked it up, after which YouTube recommended other videos from the same channel. Unrelated, except by synchronicity.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

Thanks to Kevin McCall to tipping me off to the existence of this children's story, published in 1954 -- just before the West's discovery of psilocybin mushrooms, after which the title would have had rather different connotations!

The titular mushroom planet, called Basidium X, is extremely small, and is not actually a planet in the modern sense but a satellite of Earth, closer to us than the Moon, but invisible to the naked eye and to ordinary telescopes. It is discovered by Mr. Tyco (!) Bass, who lives on Earth but is descended from mushroom people, by putting a special filter on his telescope involving a stroboscope and polarized light. Having a telepathic sense that his people live on that planet and are in distress, he recruits two human boys to build a spaceship and fly there to save them.

When the boys arrive on Basidium, they deal primarily with two mushroom people who bear the title Wise Men. The boys have brought a hen with them on their voyage, which turns out to be the key to saving the mushroom people, who are suffering from a sulfur deficiency which can be rectified by eating egg yolks. Having never seen eggs before, the mushroom people call them "magic stones."

Parallels to Alizio and the Little Skinny Planet are extensive. I have discussed evidence that the Little Skinny Planet is a satellite of Earth. The mushroom people are short and bald, like Tim and Patrick, and are extremely thin. Tyco Bass is described as having "thin spindling arms" -- cf. the "spindle legs" of the giraffes on the Little Skinny Planet. Recall that those giraffes were optically unusual -- shimmering with impossible colors -- and that Basidium's invisibility to ordinary telescopes implies something similar.

The little bald men Tim and Patrick correspond to the two blue-clothed wizards in the Joseph story, who it is suggested are the biblical Wise Men even though there are only two of them. Mebe and Oru, the two Wise Men in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, are little bald men. In the Alizio story, Patrick eats all of Alizio's Hidden Treasures. In The Wonderful Flight, Mebe and Oru are the first to eat egg yolks and be restored to health. In one of Bilbo's riddles in The Hobbit, egg yolk is called a hidden treasure:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Of course William Wright will appreciate the "magic stone" angle. (Note also that the author's name is Eleanor.)

One other possible link: Prior to my Tim dreams, my only experience dreaming in Latin had been under the influence of nutmeg, when I had a conversation in that language with a mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimps are famous for their ability to see many more colors than we can, and to discern different kinds of polarized light.