"Dark" ambiguity

My tolerance for talking video is very low, but when Bruce Charlton sent me a link to a YouTube video of someone discussing his (BC's) ideas about Lucifer, Ahriman, and Sorath, I actually watched the whole thing.

And then, even more uncharacteristically, I decided to watch another talking video by the same guy, who uses the interesting moniker HeavyRain.

This second video begins (after a brief prologue) with the rhetorical strategy of applying the adjective dark to everything associated with President Trump.

One of [Robert] Cialdini's primary persuasive contributions we can see in liberal journalism today is the use of the phrase dark -- Donald Trump's dark vision of America, the dark future, the dark this -- it's the word dark, because dark lets you conjure in your own mind every image and terror that exists in your subconscious. Its engineered non-specificity allows you to project your own unconscious fears onto President Trump, and so creating negative emotion towards the man and preventing you from actually investigating his policies and performance in the real world.

The video then moves on to its main theme: the use of "ambiguous images" as a form of psychological warfare for the purpose of polarizing people. In introducing this idea, the video shows a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for "Ambiguous image" -- featuring, in addition to the familiar duck/rabbit and vase/faces, one of Gustave Verbeek's reversible drawings. 

This is the very same image that I used in my December 22 post, in which I related how my suddenly thinking of Verbeek for no reason had led me to discover the Grateful Dead's new music video for "Ripple" just two days after it had been released.

So, the word dark and ambiguous images. As regular readers will know, this blog has been dwelling of late on the homophony of dark and d'Arc and the ambiguity of the "dark rainbow" and the rainbow flag. In my post "Black crow, black rainbow" (Dec 28), I wrote

In 1978, the gay pride Rainbow Flag made its debut in San Francisco. While the colors officially represented various things (red for life, orange for healing, that kind of crap), in practice the rainbow stands for the spectrum of sexual neuroses and perversions, with the whole explicitly representing the cardinal sin of pride. Spiritually speaking, "all of the colors are black."

I then added in a comment, "Ah! How did I miss the Joan of Arc connection? Arc = rainbow, and d’Arc = dark. The black rainbow!" Two days later, my post "The first rainbow flag" discussed Joan's flag, and the rainbow on it, in detail. Then, in "In the cards" (Jan 1), I discussed how ostensibly Satanic ("dark") imagery contained hidden allusions to Joan of Arc.

Should we be thinking about a d'Arc vision of America? A d'Arc future? And should we think of that in terms of unparalleled spiritual purity and perfection -- or of a corrupt church burning all that at the stake? Talk about ambiguity!

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!

The new "Ripple" video

 A couple of days ago, on December 20, I suddenly thought of the old Gustave Verbeek comic strip The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo -- famous for its reversible pictures.

Doing an image search to find some Upside Downs I hadn't seen before took me to the Wikipedia* page for "Ambigram" -- which I don't think I had ever read before because, well, I already know a thing or two about ambigrams. There I saw it mentioned that the cover of the Grateful Dead album American Beauty featured an ambigram -- which, despite the fact that I own said album, I had never noticed. (It turns out it's a fairly weak ambigram; supposedly Beauty can also be read as Reality.)

I haven't listened to the Dead in ages, so I suddenly thought, hey, isn't "Ripple" on that album? Scrolling down to the "Track listing" section of the Wikipedia article, I saw that it was, and that "Ripple" had its own page as well. I clicked on that and found that "In December 2020, a Tarot-themed music video was released."

I went to YouTube to find this new music video and discovered that it had been released just two days previous, on December 18!

I have nothing special to say about this video, but I thought it was remarkable that a completely random train of thought led to my discovering it just two days after it was released.

* Yes, I do still use Wikipedia from time to time despite my boycott. It's more or less impossible to avoid; Infogalactic, with its much smaller pool of editors, just isn't as detailed or up to date. I still don't link to Wikipedia, though.

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Note added: The Tarot cards used in the music video are based on the Rider-Waite but differ in many ways. For example, the pillars between which the High Priestess sits are normally labeled J and B -- Jachin and Boaz -- but the music video labels them R and H instead.

I tried to think what those two letters could possibly stand for, but the explanation turns out to be a rather prosaic one: They are the initials of the late Robert Hunter, the author of "Ripple." (The pillars are also on fire, presumably because Robert Hunter's birth name was Robert Burns, the poet of that name being his great-great-grandfather.)

Why is this interesting? Because in my post Hair and pillars, and pills, I point out that the traditional J and B are the initials of Joe Biden -- so the video replaces Joe Biden with Robert Hunter. Biden's most notorious son doesn't usually use his first name, but in fact his full name is Robert Hunter Biden.

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Second note added: Shortly after writing that the pillars are on fire because Robert Hunter's birth name was Burns, I read this line in Unsong: "Brenda Burns went up in a conflagration of nominative determinism" -- that is, caught fire because her surname predestined her to do so.