Still "From the Narrow Desert"

A few weeks ago I discovered and started listening to a second Vampire Weekend song, "Step":

This is the chorus:

The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones
I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone

Given the immediate context, I don't think "the wisdom teeth are out" refers to routine dental surgery. It means "the snake has bared its fangs," snakes being a metonym for wisdom ("wise as serpents"). The third line reinforces this reading with its (probably unintentional) nod to Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Listening to "Step" now, I naturally think of Narrow Brain, "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one," the malevolent spirit in Time and Mr. Bass. In the post I've just linked, I noted with concern the link between Narrow Brain and my blog title From the Narrow Desert. It's a line from a poem by George MacDonald in Phantastes. The complete couplet is:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,
Come into the house, so high and wide.

I've been thinking of the implications of that last line because of the recent syncs relating to the Wise Men: "And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him" (Matt. 2:11).

And what does the chorus of "Step" say? "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

I started to think that maybe it was time to retire the name From the Narrow Desert. I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview. And, I thought, haven't I done that? I made it -- right, guys? Whatever else you might say about me, I'm not a narrow materialist anymore. I've made it into the house. Maybe I should change the blog name to High and Wide.

When I played "Step" just now, YouTube queued up after it an unfamiliar song by an unfamiliar band: "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco:

The video shows Brendon Urie walking up the side of a skyscraper in Los Angeles until he reaches the roof, where he performs with his band. At first I took this as confirmation -- it's a house that's very high -- but almost immediately I realized that this interpretation didn't sit well with me. Urie (a lapsed Mormon, incidentally, and not in a good way) never actually goes into the building. He stays on the outside, never entering its heart, and uses it to realize his "high hopes" -- which turn out to be no higher than some vapid dream of being a famous pop star. This isn't the imagery of the Wise Men bowing down to the infant Christ, but of the people who wanted "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven," an idea planted in their hearts by the same being who plotted with Gadianton (Hel. 6:28).

Returning to "Step," "Such a modest mouse!" now seems like a sarcastic response to "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

In 2002, They Might Be Giants released their first children's album, No!, and these lines from "The House at the Top of the Tree" startled me:

There's a plan to eat the house
In the mind of a mouse in the woods.

Back when I lived in Maryland, more than a decade before this song was released, we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. The tree was down in a ravine, so the tree house could be entered by a ramp connecting it to higher ground, without the need for a ladder. One time my sister and I went into the tree house only to find two large snakes coiled around the radio. They looked like colubrids of some kind, and therefore non-venomous, but they still scared us enough that we turned tail and ran back down the ramp.

A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house. I could feel its presence and its thoughts, like those of the nightmare toad. Although I thought of it as a "mouse," my mental image was of a very large animal almost like a rodent grizzly bear. When I saw the illustration associated with the TMBG song, it startled me even more:

Where do mental images come from? Why would we get the same one like that?

I've been reading the Psalms, a few a day, and today these two passages jumped out at me:

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me (Ps. 131:1).

Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob; Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house . . . until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob (Ps. 132:1-5).

So no, I'm not going to rename the blog. High hopes to one side, these posts remain dispatches from the narrow desert.

Golden light, and going "overseas"

On November 18, I went back to the coffee shop that has a framed photo of the Empire State Building and noticed something else on a wall there, this inscription:

In a serener bright

In a more golden light

I see

Each little doubt and fear

Each little discord here Removed

The lines (misprinted slightly) are from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Here's the whole thing:

I have a Bird in spring

Which for myself doth sing –

The spring decoys.

And as the summer nears –

And as the Rose appears,

Robin is gone.

Yet do I not repine

Knowing that Bird of mine

Though flown –

Learneth beyond the sea

Melody new for me

And will return.

Fast in safer hand

Held in a truer Land

Are mine –

And though they now depart,

Tell I my doubting heart

They're thine.

In a serener Bright,

In a more golden light

I see

Each little doubt and fear,

Each little discord here

Removed.

Then will I not repine,

Knowing that Bird of mine

Though flown

Shall in distant tree

Bright melody for me

Return.

Five months earlier, on June 18, when I wasn't blogging, I recorded a sync related to "golden light." I was on a long walk and stopped for a short break in a coffee shop I had never been to before, called Golden Lumière -- the latter word being the French for "light." Its logo was an hourglass in the form of a double crystal, with a total of 34 facets. The upper chamber of the hourglass was full of coffee beans, with liquid coffee dripping down into the lower chamber -- perhaps an allusion to the hourglass-shaped vacuum coffee makers that are still popular in Taiwan.

At that time I had just started reading Joshua Cutchin's very long book Ecology of Souls. I read some of it there in Golden Lumière, including this passage about near-death experiences:

"I didn't ever see a person in this light, but to me the light was a Christ-consciousness, a oneness with all things, a perfect love," an NDEr told Moody. "I think that Jesus meant it literally when he said he was the light of the world." For another survivor, Jesus "was not in a body, but was a being of light in the brightest white, golden light, it did not hurt my eyes."

I read that reference to "golden light" during my first and so far only visit to a coffee shop called Golden Lumière.

In my sync notes taken at the time, I connected the juxtaposition of the word golden and a double crystal with something else I had recently read, in Pleiadians on Autism by Sigal Alexandra Porat:

These days Alexandrit's energy appears in my mind's eye as a triangle composed of three gold bars, with a Rutilated Quartz crystal, or sometimes a pearl at its center. The gold bars are the energetic tools I used to work with in the temples of Ancient Egypt. Working with these golden instruments once again touches the depth of my soul, awakening my knowledge and the ancient memory. The Herkimer diamond, which also appears in the picture at the start of this chapter, helps me connect with Alexandrit.

A footnote at this point explains, "A Herkimer diamond is a double-pointed transparent quartz crystal." The text continues:

Alexandrit reminded me of a significant experience I had when I was 12, following my first trip overseas (a Bat Mitzvah gift from my grandmother). I was not as excited about the flight itself as I was about the encounter awaiting me "there," overseas. At 12 I was still so innocent. There was only one channel on Israeli TV (in black-and-white, and we couldn't even imagine the Internet back then), and I was exposed to very little of the outside world, as I was dreamy and detached by nature. In my naïveté, I was certain that "overseas," (which in Hebrew literally translates into "out of Earth") actually meant a place outside of planet Earth. These days it seems utterly unrealistic for a 12-year-old girl to think that. I was supposed to know something about geography, but I was really detached.

This latter paragraph, about the author's misunderstanding of "overseas," didn't mean anything to me in June. Now, though, it syncs with Dickinson's poem about the Bird that goes "beyond the sea" -- implicitly to another world, not just "overseas" in the ordinary sense -- and with William Wright's speculation, mentioned in my November 18 post "Little Skinny Planet," that "the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages." Migrating birds that fly to other planets also appear in The Little Prince.

Big Bird and the Blue Sun

I found this out randonauting tonight:

It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."

This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.

This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)

One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers --

That perches in the soul --

And sings the tune without the words --

And never stops -- at all --

The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."

If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."

The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!

Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.

How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)

Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"

So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.