In the comments to "Speaking of aliens, who's representing the US at the UN?" I used the term "gestalt shift" and then Googled the term to make sure I had used it correctly. The first hit -- a "featured snippet" as Google calls it -- was to a blog post called "Gestalt Shift" by one Hana Tichá, an English teacher in the Czech Republic. When I clicked on that, I saw that Tichá's latest post on that blog was called "Let it be(e)!" Since bees have been showing up in syncs recently, I went ahead and clicked the link.
The post begins thus:
One of the things I’ve always liked to have in my life is control. It sounds a bit authoritarian but I believe it’s one of the basic human desires no matter what anybody says.
And I thought: Right, the regimented beehive, the clockwork-like lives of the social insects, the monotonous geometric pattern of a honeycomb. The bee is a symbol of Ahriman.
I thought about my 1991 dream about the red bee. This bee was flying around a city like New York, and I knew that it was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage. The Ahrimanic system is going to explode, unleashing a Sorathic bloodbath. In the dream, I had said, "Mother, this bee is very dangerous to me!" even though my mother was not present. In the song alluded to by Tichá's perfunctory pun, Paul McCartney sings, "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me." He means his own mother, Mary McCartney, but people naturally tend to assume it refers either to Mary Jane or to the Blessed Virgin. In the Sugarcubes song "Bee" (referenced in my post "No escape from coincidence"), Björk sings, "Oh, hot bee! Queen of heaven!" -- appropriating another of Mother Mary's titles. The post "No escape from coincidence" was not primarily about the Sugarcubes but about will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and near the end of the post I mention that will.i.am's mother is called Debra. Debra, of course, means "bee." I illustrated the post with the cover art for the Black Eyed Peas song "Imma Be" -- which shows a bee, making the same be/bee pun as Tichá.
(Incidentally, the post before "Let it be(e)!" is called "Better be preparred than sorry" -- a title which also doubles a letter which shouldn't be doubled, though in this case it looks more like a typo than a pun.)
As I read on, I finally found where Tichá's post mentions bees.
I’ve learned there are many situations when things can’t be controlled. And you have to accept it. When a bee flies into the classroom, there’s not much you can do to stop the disorder and confusion immediately. People feel threatened in such situations. It’s their basic instinct to start screaming and jumping around like crazy.
How about that? I'd been assuming the bee was a symbol of control, order, and regimentation, but in fact she used it as a symbol of the exact opposite: chaos, disorder, confusion, lack of control.
What do you call it when a symbol suddenly means the opposite of what you had thought it meant? Gestalt shift.
