In my October 23 post "Jesus is my librarian," I describe what brought Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil to my attention:
One of the other books on the shelf caught my eye, though: The Philosopher's Pupil, a book I bought right around the time I was outgrowing Iris Murdoch and never ended up reading. It made me think of the ending of a poem that features in the Eridanus videos:
Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!
It's a little surprising, given that the author's name is Iris and all, that I'd never thought of the ocular sense of pupil in connection with Murdoch's book; I'd always assumed it referred to a philosopher's student and never considered any other possible meaning. Seeing the title printed on a black background, though, with that poem in the back of my mind, I made the connection. Now I suppose I'll have to read it to see if Murdoch does the same.
I've very nearly finished The Philosopher's Pupil, and, no, the "pupil" as part of the eye never comes up. The original synchronistic context, though, was of the dark "pupil" at the center of a solar eclipse. This is the "pupil" image from the Galahad Eridanus video:
This image has no relevance for the vast majority of Murdoch's novel, but right near the end it shows up:
Only the sun, blazing through the misty light, had changed or was changing. It was no longer round but was becoming shaped like a star with long jagged mobile points which kept flowing in and out, and each time they flowed they became of a dazzling burning intensity. The star was very near, too near. It went on flaming and burning, a vast catastrophic conflagration in the evening sky, emitting its long jets of flame. And as it burnt with dazzling pointed rays a dark circle began to grow in its center, making the star look like a sunflower. George thought, I'll look at the dark part, then I shall be all right. As he watched, the dark part was growing so that now it almost covered the central orb of the sun, leaving only the long burning petals of flame which were darting out on every side. The dark part was black, black, and the petals were a painful shimmering electric gold (pp. 556-557).
This hallucinatory episode, which also includes a flying saucer, ends with George losing consciousness. When he comes to, he asks, "Was there an eclipse of the sun?" and is told that there was not.
The parallels with Galahad Eridanus's "eclipse" -- which was also a hallucinatory vision rather than a literal astronomical event -- are quite close.
The sunflower angle is interesting, too, as that flower has been in the sync-stream recently, particularly in some of William Wright's recent posts. I had not previously made the connection that if a sunflower resembles a solar disc, it is an eclipsed solar disk, a dark circle surrounded by a fiery corona.
Note added 1:50 p.m.: Looking back at the "Jesus is my librarian" post, I see it had a photo of Murdoch's book on my shelf, very close to an English translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Here is Odilon Redon's illustration for the latter book:
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.
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.'
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.
"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!
I had another talking dream last night, though I have no sense of who the speaker was or what language he was speaking. It was a discussion about the meaning of the numbers one and forty-four. I've forgotten almost all of the content, but I remember the gist was that 1 represents the Sun and the Living; 44 represents the Moon and the Dead; and when 1 and 44 are combined, that is the Universal Eclipse. (This last bit at least was in French, I think: l'éclipse universelle, which is a line from "Le Flying Saucer Hat.") Many examples were given in the dream of the numbers 1 and 44 turning up in contexts suggestive of these meanings, and I awoke with a sense that this was an incredible web of synchronicities -- but of course they existed only in the dream. The only specific one I can remember was a quote from Heber J. Grant (president of the Mormon Church from 1918 to 1945) that mentioned "forty-four ancestors" -- a sync because our ancestors are among the Dead. I saw a visual image of this quote -- President Grant's photo on the left, the quote in white text on a black background on the right -- but can't remember anything about it other than the phrase "forty-four ancestors."
In The Philosopher's Pupil, the title character, George McCaffrey, is 44 years old and keeps seeing the number 44 everywhere, which fills him with a sense of foreboding. One of the things Tim said in my first Tim dream was that George was me, that I was to see this character as representing myself -- not very flattering, as George is portrayed as a spiteful putz with no real redeeming qualities. My attention was first attracted to The Philosopher's Pupil because of the Galahad Eridanus video "Contact 2020," in which an eclipse was compared to the pupil of an eye.
In my November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," the Chrysler Building (which I wouldn't have been able to pick out of a police lineup a month ago) entered the sync-stream. I looked up the etymology of Chrysler and found that it came from the German word for a spinning top, which in turn made me think of a line from Twelfth Night: "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." It also made me think of Calvin's reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building":
Whirligig isn't a word you see everyday, so it jumped out at me when I found it on p. 177 of The Philosopher's Pupil a day or two ago:
"There's Alex!"
"Where?"
"There."
"You mean the girl in the green costume who's kicking up the water and twirling round and round like a corkscrew?"
"Yes. She likes doing that."
"She reminds me of something I saw once in a pool in the west of Ireland."
"Well, I'm going swimming now. Be good."
Tom dived in and swam towards Alex. Like Adam, he felt easier with her in the water. She had stopped her whirligig and waved to him.
So far, Scarlett-Taylor hasn't explain what he saw in the pool in the west of Ireland; perhaps it will come into the story later. For now, all we know is that it was a something, not a someone.
Two pages later, Tom is discussing gastropods with Adam. Asked to come up with a good line for a pop song, the latter suggests "It's only me," and then explains:
"Yes. There's two snails on a leaf, one on each side. Then one comes round the leaf and says to the other one, 'It's only me.'"
"Must they be snails?" said Tom after a moment's though.
"I see them as snails," Adam said firmly.
"I think it's brilliant," said Tom.
I had actually encountered that line about the two snails before, as Jorn Barger (who introduced me to Murdoch's work lo these many years ago) used to quote it. So this is where it's from.
⁂
Last night, after my staff had gone home, I was doing some final paperwork and such before closing up the school for the night. I had YouTube Music playing on my phone, using the "tuner" function, so that music was chosen for me by an algorithm. I wasn't paying much attention to the background music until I heard the line "no more counting dollars" while I was literally counting a stack of banknotes. This made me stop and look at the video, which was "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic, a group I'm unfamiliar with:
In the video, the band is playing downstairs, while upstairs there's some kind of charismatic revival meeting going on, with people jumping around and dancing and being "slain by the Spirit" and that sort of thing. One and only one of them twirls round and round like a corkscrew: a girl in a green costume.
Near the end of the video, one of the holy rollers, like Rumpelstiltskin, stamps too hard and falls through the floor. We then look down through the hole in the floor and see five men standing there looking up.
This syncs with the "Little Talks" video, where five men fall through the ice they are walking on into the sea, where they are menaced by a gigantic sea monster before it is zapped by their fairy protectress.
⁂
Today during my lunch break (which is several hours on Thursdays), I read a little more in The Philosopher's Pupil. On p. 194 there is mention of a Stonehenge-style monument which has been restored in modern times:
The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist.
After reading, I was in my study when a book inexplicably caught my eye. It was on a shelf with a lot of other short paperbacks, mostly children's literature, which my wife had picked up somewhere at a flea market or something. One of these was World Famous Strange but True by Colin, Damon, and Rowan Wilson. Colin Wilson is a writer I know and like, but I'd never paid any attention to this book before because it was on a shelf I rarely looked at and anyway appeared too tabloidish to be worth reading -- like a side-gig potboiler, not a serious part of Wilson's oeuvre. Today, though, I felt a strong nudge to take it down from the shelf, something I had never done before. I looked at the table of contents, which had summaries for each chapter. The summary for Chapter Six began "The monster of Lough Nahooin. The Loch Ness monster. UFOs and monster: Ted Holiday's theory. . . ." That seemed relevant, given the recent water-monster syncs, so I read that chapter -- only 10 pages, not counting the full-page photo of Nessie.
Here's how it begins, on p. 58:
Lough Nahooin is a small brown-coloured lake in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland.
A monster is spotted in the lake by Stephen Coyne and his family:
Describing it later to an investigator, F. W. Holiday, the Coynes said the monster was about twelve feet long. It had no eyes, but there were two horns like those of a snail on top of its head.
Holiday was the author of a book on the famous Loch Ness monster, which he believed to be some kind of giant slug. From the description of the Coyne family, he had no doubt that this Lough Nahooin monster was another member of the same species. Since Lough Nahooin is a mere 100 yards long -- compared with the twenty-four miles of Loch Ness -- there seemed a reasonable chance of catching the Irish lake monster.
A mere hundred yards long -- so really more of a pool than a lake. In the west of Ireland. Inhabited by "some kind of giant slug." The monster had "two horns like those of a snail" -- or of a giraffe.
Later in the chapter, on p. 64, we are introduced to T. C. Lethbridge and his theory about Stonehenge:
Lethbridge's starting point is the mystery of ancient stone monuments like Stonehenge and the Merry Maidens. . . . Lethbridge became convinced that the power that apparently emanates from such monoliths is a form of energy that comes from living creatures. He calls it bio-energy, or bio-electricity. He believes that such energy can be generated by the frenzied kind of dancing that forms part of many ancient religious rituals.
Frenzied dancing as part of a religious ritual appears in the "Counting Stars" video.
On p. 65, we even get a reference to modern renovations of Stonehenge:
When modern engineers set about replacing one of the giant lintels at Stonehenge, they had the full benefit of modern cranes and lifting equipment, and the operation was still a difficult and costly one.
On p. 66, another theory of Lethbridge's is discussed:
Lethbridge also points out that if these other levels are characterized by a higher vibrational rate of energy, then creatures from these levels could actually be walking among us now -- completely invisible to us.
In a July 2021 comment on "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- the post I recently revisited because it contains the word slug -- I write:
"Aliens" (or whatever the hell they are!) walk our streets undetected.
This post is a good illustration of what makes it so hard for me to get a handle on synchronicity or what it means. That I should be "prompted" to read a relevant book by some spiritual agency -- God, Tim, the sync fairies, my own psychic subconscious, whatever -- is an understandable hypothesis, and we can ask who or what did it and why. But something much more involved than that seems to be going on.
Both The Philosopher's Pupil and World Famous Strange but True were, let us say, brought to my attention by the sync fairies. But how to account for the fact that in an 18-page section of the former book and a 9-page section of the latter, we find references to (a) a lake or pool specified as being in the west of Ireland, (b) snails, and (c) an ancient circle of standing stones in England being repaired in modern times. These three things have no logical connection whatsoever. The books were written in 1983 and 1994, respectively, and belong to entirely different genres. Are we to suppose that the sync fairies were feeding ideas to one of both of these writers, setting up my little syncs decades in advance? Or that they travel back in time and edit the past to keep the sync-stream going? Colin Wilson and Iris Murdoch knew and liked each other -- she offered to get him a scholarship at Oxford, which he declined -- but is that a possible mundane explanation (Wilson being unconsciously influenced by his friend's novel of a decade before), or is it just another improbable coincidence to add to the list? The unconscious-influence theory would be more believable if it went the other direction, from the nonfiction writer to the novelist. After all, Wilson didn't choose for a snail-horned monster to be seen in a lake in the west of Ireland; that happened in 1968. And of course the links between these two texts are just a tiny part of the vast interconnected web of syncs in which they are embedded. How does it all get set up, and by whom, and why? Even if we postulate that syncs are the work of an omnipotent God (and something pretty close to omnipotence seems to be called for), it's still hard to make sense of what exactly he is doing and how and why. And hypothesizing that sync is instead a naturally-occurring phenomenon, or something my own mind is doing, doesn't make it any more comprehensible -- au contraire. It's starting to feel more and more as if there must be some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans involved.
And for what? All these borderline-impossible coincidences painstakingly orchestrated for what? What's the point of having me experience all this?
The rainbow is another link to 42, since a rainbow has a radius of 42 degrees.
At 10:50, William Wright left this comment (quoted only in part here):
While in the process of playing hymn #172 "In Humility Our Savior", I suddenly realized that the hymnbook was green. Based on your dream, I became curious what the lettering on the spine was like. Sure enough, gold lettering "Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" running down the spine.
[. . .]
Lastly, blue does come into this as well. Hymn #172 is also the tune for a song that was my daughter's favorite for awhile - the song is called "Blue Boat Home" arranged by Peter Mayer (original by Rowland Pritchard back in the 1800s), which likens the Earth to a boat flying through space with all of us as passengers.
I looked up and listened to "Blue Boat Home," which is apparently a Unitarian Universalist hymn. (UUs have a thing for space. I remember them reciting some thing about "the womb of stars" the handful of times I attended their services in Columbus, Ohio.)
It's funny how the same melody can have a completely different feel when the lyrics and instrumentation are changed. "In Humility, Our Savior" is a "sacrament hymn" and thus brings back the smell of white bread and chlorine. Funny how chlorine -- not incense or whatever, but chlorine -- should be a "churchy" smell for me, but sacrament and baptisms were almost the only times I had any exposure to chlorinated water growing up. "Blue Boat Home" evokes no such memories, and I rather like it. Here's the first stanza:
Though below me, I feel no motion standing on these mountains and plains.
Far away from the rolling ocean still my dry land heart can say:
I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known.
The wide universe is the ocean I travel and the earth is my blue boat home.
Googling the lyrics led me to a blog called Blue Boat Home, and one of the recent posts there caught my eye: "One Night in Cleveland," because of its first paragraph:
In 1996, my sister and her boyfriend had just moved into a new apartment in Pittsburgh, and they invited my family to join them for Christmas. I decided to take the bus there from my college in Grinnell, Iowa, which meant I had layovers in Des Moines, Chicago, and Cleveland. As I recall, the Cleveland layover was from roughly 11pm to 2am.
The year 1996 was an important year in my own life, and I was living in the Cleveland area at that time. (Seeing that year made me think "When will be the next 1996?" -- meaning the next year to have the same calendar. Next year, it turns out.) The mention of "college in Grinnell" also jumped out at me, as I did first grade at Grinnell Elementary School when I lived in New Hampshire.
The post is an anecdote. At the bus terminal in Cleveland, the author met a scruffy-looking man who gave him "a drinking glass that had clearly been stolen from a restaurant." Later, in Oakland, the author runs into a similar-looking person on the sidewalk:
It was a different guy but seemed cut from the same cloth. I opened my backpack and took out the drinking glass. I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I met a friend of yours this morning in Cleveland. He'd want you to have this." I gave him the glass and walked off.
That's the end of the story. I'm not sure what relevance it has, but I have a hunch that it will turn out to have some, so I'm documenting it for future reference. (Tim made Strieber drink something from a glass he had taken from the hotel bathroom, but that's a rather tenuous connection.)
Now for the real syncs.
Shortly after 4:00 this afternoon, I went out for early dinner, as I have classes from 6:00 to 9:30 with no breaks. The Alice Merton song "No Roots" was playing in the restaurant:
The chorus is "I've got no roots, but my home was never on the ground," repeated many times. Compare this to "Blue Boat Home": Although I feel as if I'm on solid ground, in fact "I’ve been sailing all my life now, never harbor or port have I known."
As soon as that song was over, the next song that came on was "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men:
In this song, the repeated line is "Though the truth may vary, this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore" -- a very strong sync with "Blue Boat Home," since both imply that it is only in death that we reach the shore.
I was not familiar with either of these songs before. I made a note of the lyrics I was hearing and looked them up later.
After I'd finished eating, I sat in the restaurant for a while reading The Philosopher's Pupil, by Iris (literally "Rainbow") Murdoch. I turned to page 172 and thought, "Hey, that's the hymn number William Wright mentioned," the hymn that has the same tune as "Blue Boat Home." This is what I read on that page:
His bath was a large boat-shaped affair made of white tiles with blunt ends. . . . the steaming water fell from the taps at a controlled temperature of forty-two degrees Centigrade.
The very first sentence on the next page, 173, is this:
He had not been there [the Methodist church in his hometown] for a long time and felt a weird shock when he recognised the numbers of the hymns.
In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess me name," I linked Tim, a being who appeared to me in the dreams related in the November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's book The Key and with a character called Tim in an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about a man named William Alizio. You may recall that my second Tim dream occurred in unusual circumstances: I was reading Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil when I felt an overpowering urge to sleep, accompanied by a mental singsong chanting a poem by James Joyce ("Sleep now, O sleep now . . ."). I lay down on the floor to sleep, and Tim appeared immediately.
Yesterday's post "Narrative Reasoning" recounts another dream. In the dream, I was in my study and heard a line from the Aeneid in which Turnus addresses the goddess Iris (who is the rainbow) and asks who brought her down to him. In the dream, I thought this referred to the Iris Murdoch book and, looking up at where it had been on my shelf, I found that its place had been taken by a green leather book that said Narrative Reasoning in gold lettering on its spine. Later I went through all the books in my house (which is a lot of books) and found only one that in any way resembled the one in my dream: a big green (though not leather) book with gold lettering, containing Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Chamber Music in a single volume. The poem which had called me to "sleep now" while I was reading Iris Murdoch is from Chamber Music.
⁂
Today I was emailed what I guess would be considered "channeled" material, written by someone not known to me personally in June 2019. This material is supposed to have been supernaturally received and to recount true events. It is unpublished, but by a vanishingly unlikely coincidence, one of the few people with whom it had been shared is a reader of this blog and noticed its parallels with the William Alizio story.
In this story I was sent, Joseph, his wife Asenath, and their son -- who is a merman! -- are living on the shore, waiting and not really doing anything. The couple finds themselves "unable-unwilling entire, to do much of anything, consequential, at all," being in a state of "lassitude, loss, desuetude." It is upon this scene that "there came to these shores, two cunning wise ones 'wizards,' Blue gowned . . . who first arrived, from shores no longer evident." They enter the couple's house and make themselves at home: "these blue-dressed Ones . . . came stumbling . . . into the reedhouse" of Joseph and Asenath. They stay there for years, trying to extract a secret from Asenath: "seeing here a secret kept," they "desired to look into her mystery, but were by her . . . confounded." For ages, "these four (and a fish-boy) encamped, time being passed without enduring its passage." Finally, the secret -- a prophecy of Jesus -- is revealed to them. After this long visit, Joseph and Asenath depart, led by a rainbow: "An arching bow color-resplendent, shown away these espoused ones . . . that rainbow perceptive led them." Later we are told that Joseph, being "sickly" is carried (by the rainbow, I think; the writing isn't the clearest!) "to lands still green . . . Returned, rainbow whim, treasure following, now to rest."
Compare this to the William Alizio story: Alizio, like Joseph, is stuck in a holding pattern, unwilling to do anything consequential; he spends his time pretending to work, pretending to do yard work, and reading the TV Guide. One day he comes home to find that Tim and Patrick have made themselves at home in his house. Although they are apparently aliens ("little bald men" who arrive in a "spaceship"), Tim and Patrick are dressed as blue-gowned wizards: "blue robes and dunce caps." Just as the blue wizards in the Joseph story are there to extract a valuable secret, Tim and Patrick eat up all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" (the name of a breakfast cereal). Finally, Alizio eats a can of chicken noodle soup while the visitors are there, this being a food stereotypically consumed by "sickly" people.
In the Joseph story, the wizards' robes change from blue to white -- possibly relevant, as William Wright has connected Tim with Saruman the White.
⁂
Today I noticed a link to "these four (and a fish-boy)" on the cover of The Philosopher's Pupil. Here's the cover art on my copy (purchased by its original owner on October 30, 1984, within a stone's throw of the Empire State Building):
Starting from the foreground, we have a man, then a woman, and then a figure in shoulder-deep water who could, for all we know, be a merman. Although pretty much everything in the picture is blue, none of these three foreground figures is wearing blue clothing; only the woman has any visible clothing at all, and her bathing suit is black. Only the two figures in the background -- "these blue-dressed ones" -- appear to be fully clothed. In the story, Joseph and Asenath are on the shore -- with their merman son presumably in the water nearby -- and the two blue wizards come to them from another shore. Here, too, the couple and the blue-dressed strangers are on opposite sides of a body of water. There is also a potted plant on the couple's side, and the story mentions Asenath having "a garden."
Although William Alizio is unmarried, Tim and Patrick send him on a mission with a female partner, and the two of them have to escape danger by swimming across a small body of water.
⁂
Later today, the rainbow in the Joseph story made me wonder again about my dream, which began with Turnus's address to the rainbow goddess and ended with The Philosopher's Pupil being replaced with a mysterious green book called Narrative Reasoning.
Thinking about the green book, I wondered if there were any books titled simply Green. Well, yes, it turns out:
Remember that I'd already identified Tim with the character in this book:
From what I can gather from the Amazon page, Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns -- "snatched from her front porch and deposited with much ceremony into the world of little green men" -- just as William Alizio is kidnapped by "little men" and taken away to their planet. Leprechauns are of course closely associated with rainbows and with the name Patrick.
The first sentence of the first review on the Amazon page is:
Lilybet Green can't imagine anyone capturing a leprechaun for anything other than their Lucky Charms, but Balthazar the Leprechaun is indignant that humans want to capture his people for their gold.
Lucky Charms is a sugary breakfast cereal for children, made by General Mills, just like Hidden Treasures in the William Alizio story. Looking back at the story, I see that it is only Patrick -- the one with a leprechaun-adjacent name -- who eats the Hidden Treasures.
Clearly, finding The Key was just the beginning of this web of syncs.
Both Iris Murdoch and James Joyce were Irish, by the way.
I dreamed I was in my study and heard a voice declaiming — “like an old-fashioned actor,” I thought — “Glory of the sky, who brought you down to me, cloudborne to earth?”
It’s a line I know well, from Book IX of the Aeneid, the words of Turnus addressing the goddess Iris. Too awestruck at the sight of this heavenly messenger to wait for an answer to his very important question, Turnus rashly vows, “I’ll obey this great presage, no matter who you are who call me.” In fact, Iris has been sent by an enemy, and the presage leads Turnus to his death.
My dreaming mind understood the voice to be asking who had brought Iris Murdoch’s book down from my shelf and, symbolically, down from the Empire State Building. (The original owner of the book, which I think I bought in Virginia Beach, purchased it at Penn Station, which is like a nine-minute walk from the ESB. I like to imagine the book has been inside the building itself.)
I looked up at the empty space on my shelf where The Philosopher’s Pupil had been, only to find that it was empty no longer. In its place was a very thick book bound in green leather with gold lettering on the spine. My first impression was that it looked like a Quran, but when I read the title, it was Narrative Reasoning.
The last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike, I lasted all of two days, so I guess I should be proud of myself for making it almost a whole week this time.
I had thought the sync fairies would either respect my moratorium or ignore it. I hadn't expected them to explain themselves and make their case. Twice this week now I've had "recitation dreams" -- the kind where most or all of the usual imagery is shut off and it's just some guy talking. Well, in this case there was imagery, but it had more the feel of a PowerPoint presentation; the talking was the main thing.
The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.
I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. 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. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)
The main thrust of the lecture was that he and his colleagues were engaged in directing my attention -- the words directing your attention were displayed in English, in very large white italics -- and that this was an extremely complex and delicate operation. Its complexity was illustrated by means of a dizzyingly complicated multidimensional diagram that kept moving and changing and reassembling itself. Each attentional decision -- whether a choice of my own or a successful nudge from them -- opened up new attentional pathways and closed off others, and so the whole thing had to be played like chess, thinking several moves in advance and taking into account various contingencies. The purpose of any particular move might not become apparent until many, many moves later.
The first recitation was delivered during my ordinary sleep on Monday night. The second -- which had the same general message, though I don't think it was a repeat of the first -- was given in more unusual circumstances. I was in my study last night reading The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch. I was starting to feel a bit tired and thought I'd finish the section I was on and then go to bed. I was on page 137, and flipping ahead I saw there was a good stopping place -- five or six blank lines indicating a scene change -- on page 140, so I planned to stop there. When I reached the end of page 137, though, I suddenly felt just overpoweringly tired, like I had to stop immediately. But the page ended with the first word of a new sentence -- "There" -- and I couldn't very well stop with that! I would at least finish the sentence. As it turned out, I read the next sentence, too, which brought me to the end of a paragraph:
There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.
The urge to sleep was now overwhelming, and was accompanied by a little singsong in my mind, some lines from Joyce: "Sleep now, O sleep now, / O you unquiet heart! / A voice crying 'Sleep now' / Is heard in my heart." I couldn't even delay long enough to go into the next room to bed. I put the book down, lay down on the floor, and there was Tim again, with a "thank you for coming to my Ted talk" look on his face.
When I woke up, after the second lecture -- at around 4:00 this morning -- I opened the book and saw how the next paragraph began:
That's when I realized I'd been outsmarted. I had taunted the sync fairies with lines from Lady Gaga -- "You can call all you want, but there's no one home / And you're not gonna reach my telephone." Well, they had just summoned me as if to a telephone ("Sleep now, O sleep now"), I had answered, and they'd said their piece. Those were the words that came to mind -- "said their piece" -- which put a song in my head:
If you think it's a joke
That's all right, do what you want to do
I've said my piece
And I'll leave it all up to you
The rest of the lyrics are relevant, too:
By the way, that bit about "forty-four chalked on a wall" is a reference to this from p. 92:
As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.
This got my attention at the time because it was a general reference to the phenomenon of synchronicity. Forty-four also happens to be my age as I read this book for the first time, despite buying it many years ago, but that's a weak-sauce sync.
What's the significance of these "44" syncs in the novel? Well, obviously the only way to find out is to keep reading. If I stopped right now, refusing to read another page until I've figured out this 44 business, that would obviously be counterproductive. But that's what I'd told the sync fairies. I kind of get what Tim was saying.
I idly wondered whether this specific sync from the novel -- seeing 44 everywhere -- was going to start invading my life, as literary syncs so often do. No, not in this case. For superstitious reasons, any number ending in 4 or containing repeated 4s is avoided in Taiwan. House numbers get out of sync because one side of the street is numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, . . . while the other is 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 . . . . Forty-four is one number I'm definitely not going to see chalked on a wall or anywhere else.
With that thought, I went to bed -- in the bed this time.
*
In the morning, I taught a private English lesson. My student had brought an article which begins thus:
Have you ever heard of collage? It's art that combines different materials or parts of images together to make something new.
It was illustrated with a photo of Georges Braque -- I at first took him for Madame Blavatsky -- and his Violin and Pipe, prominently featuring what looks like a pair of sunglasses.
After the lesson and before lunch, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest: "Gordon Kor, a peaceful school bus, and Holy Places to Stand." He mentions an author called Gordon Korman, so I looked him up. His best known book appears to be one called Restart, with a broken-but-repaired pair of glasses on the cover:
Richard Arrowsmith used to talk about "strapping on the sync goggles" -- meaning tuning in to synchronicity -- so the glasses theme seemed relevant. Mr. Wright's post dealt with the Korman novel Schooled, so I looked that up on Wikipedia and read the first couple of paragraphs of the plot summary:
Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) as an eighth grader while Rain recovers.
At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.
Claverage is interesting because it suggests the Latin for "key."
Last night I checked the old Arts & Letters Daily blog, which used to be run by Denis Dutton before he died and hasn't been the same since. A link from there took me to "The 'Crispy R' and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter," which mentioned Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend as a notable "crispy r" speaker. This led to me rewatching the video for "Ya Hey," the only Vampire Weekend song I know, and noticing that, while the Chrysler Building is visible through most of the video, it ends with a long shot of the Empire State Building. (The champagne bottles are also a sync with Lady Gaga: "I'm in the club, and I'm sippin' that bubb', and you're not gonna reach my telephone.")
I only recently learned to recognize these buildings, the NYC skyline never having been one of my strong suits. (For example, I learned that the World Trade Center had been a pair of Twin Towers, and that they had been famous, on September 11, 2001, and not a day before.) I became curious about the Chrysler Building -- my one and only existing association being with a Calvin & Hobbes reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building" -- and checked a few things. I remembered that my parents used to have a Plymouth Voyager, made by Chrysler, and that the Plymouth logo used to be a picture of the Mayflower. As for the name Chrysler itself, it looks like it has something to do with the Greek for "gold," but it's actually from the German Kreisel, meaning a spinning top. This made me think of the Shakespeare line "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," which I looked up. It's from Twelfth Night, the play in which a fake love letter (cf. Schooled) induces Malvolio to go cross-gartered in yellow stockings. The immediate context caught my eye:
FOOL
. . . And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
MALVOLIO
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! [Exit.]
OLIVIA
He hath been most notoriously abused.
ORSINO
Pursue him and entreat him to a peace. [Some exit.]
He hath not told us of the Captain yet.
When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. . . .
The Fool then proceeds to sing "The rain it raineth every day."
The "whirligig of time" is juxtaposed with "golden time" -- my two interpretations of Chrysler. "The Captain" syncs with the Schooled character known as Cap, who is also notoriously abused. (The 42 trailer also has a line about "the abuse" Jackie Robinson is about to receive.)
The slug the size of the Chrysler Building made me think that I'd mentioned slugs before on this blog. A search turned up only the 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- highly relevant to the theme of "sync goggles" and directed attention.
When I went out for lunch, I saw Braque-style sunglasses on the street:
I also passed the restaurant that has a big horseshoe on its sign, which I had never noticed until synchronicities made it relevant -- another link to "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness." Noticing that, I decided to go to D&D again for lunch.
Something else I'd never noticed before: One of the interior walls there is made to look like a blackboard with D∞D written on it in chalk. (It's a printed image, not actual chalk.) D is the fourth letter, so DD = 44. The lemniscate is 8, which is 4 + 4. Yes, even in Taiwan, "he had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall."
No sooner had I sat down to eat than a woman with very large breasts and a tight T-shirt -- real subtle way of "directing my attention," sync fairies! -- came into the restaurant and sat opposite me. The T-shirt said, "No rain, no flowers." This syncs with the Rain and Flora characters in Schooled and the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. A more common form of the proverb is "April showers bring May flowers," which syncs with Plymouth. It also fits with the message that the current rain of syncs, though sometimes annoying and seemingly pointless, may be preparing the way for something to blossom later on.
So -- sigh -- reporting for duty again, sync fairies.
Today I finished Whitley Strieber’s Majestic, rereading it for the first time in 20 years, and started, a day early, Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil, which I have never read.
Yellow flowers, evening primroses, are a recurring theme in Majestic. The walls of the crashed saucer, for example, appear to be made of waxed paper with yellow flowers pressed into it. Later, the protagonist finds himself in a hall made of the same material:
We went down a hall that was more a tunnel it was so low. I could see that it was made of paper of the same type that formed the inner walls of the ship we had found. Light came through it from the outside. The yellow flowers pressed into the paper seemed almost alive, so vividly did they glow.
Today I read this on p. 6 of The Philosopher’s Pupil:
He lifted up his head. He was in his bed in his room at home, and the daylight was showing through the curtains, present in an insubstantial pattern of yellow flowers.
Whitley and Iris! Sync makes strange bedfellows indeed.
Earlier today I looked up the etymology of pupil, wondering why the aperture of the iris should have the same name as a student. Both senses come from the Latin for “small child.” The ocular sense comes from the fact that you can see a tiny reflection of yourself, as if a miniature human being, in another person’s pupil.
As it happens, I wrote about this phenomenon back in March 2021. As it happens, it was in a post about Whitley Strieber:
You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!
I saw Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil on my shelf tonight and thought to myself, "I'll most likely start reading that on Monday. I will have finished the Strieber and the Rilke by then and can put another iron in the fire."
Could I actually read it, though? I tried to reread one of her books a few years ago -- A Fairly Honourable Defeat, I think -- and just couldn't do it. All the characters seemed tiresome and obnoxious, and the authorial voice actively annoying, and I gave up after just a few pages. I used to find her books delightful. Couldn't put them down. I don't know if it was just my mood that day or some more permanent change, but it was like her spiritual wavelength and my own now differed by an augmented fourth.
With that experience in mind, I thought I'd better take down The Philosopher's Pupil now, flip to a few random pages, and see whether or not my body still rejects it.
I opened it up and found that there was a bookmark, left there by the previous owner -- a good long time ago, apparently, as when I unfolded it I found it was a receipt dated October 30, 1984:
Was I supposed to find this on Monday -- October 30, when I anticipate starting the book -- and be suitably impressed? Did I just do the synchronistic equivalent of finding one of my presents hidden in the closet a few days before Christmas?
No, synchronicities can't be spoiled "by chance," since "chance" is exactly what they ae made of. The bookmark was between pages 28 and 29, and as I type this sentence the clock in the corner of my computer screen informs me that it is precisely 12:00 midnight, the moment dividing the 28th of October from the 29th. Plus I see there's a reference to "the saucer" on p. 28, and looking back at the previous page confirms that this is indeed "an unidentified flying object, a large luminous tilted saucer." I wasn't expecting that in an Iris Murdoch novel! Curiosity status: piqued.
And now I'd better click "Publish" before it's 12:01.
Maybe it's pushback against my upbringing -- my parents literally print out little numerical labels for all their books so they can shelve them according to the Dewey decimal system -- but I adamantly refuse to impose any sort of order whatsoever on my rather extensive personal library. God makes sure I find what I need, which isn't necessarily the same as what I happen to be looking for.
Today I was pacing around my study thinking, as I often do. I was thinking of all the recent syncs relating to Galahad Eridanus videos and trying to figure out any reason why I would need to have his work brought to my attention at this time. A sentence popped into my mind as if from elsewhere: "It's because you need to assimilate his thoughts on Eros vs. Logos." Just as I thought this, my eyes fell on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and I remembered that in 2022 I had seen that book in a half-dreaming state and then, fully awake, thought, "rose is literally 'disordered' (anagrammed) eros."
Then I noticed that on that shelf I had three books, all shelved together, each of which had an anagram of eros on its spine: next to the Eco, a book by Roger Penrose and then one by Emerson.
Well, how improbable is that? There must be lots of books that have those four letters together, what with so many common surnames ending in -erson. So I started looking at every shelf, trying to find other instances. For a long time I couldn't find any at all, but finally I found a book I'd forgotten I even owned: Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.
No other instances nearby, though I suppose The Flowers of Evil is rose-adjacent, as is the name Roth (meaning "red"). (Philip is a link to the "decapitation" theme, via "Philip, the headless horseman.") One of the other books on the shelf caught my eye, though: The Philosopher's Pupil, a book I bought right around the time I was outgrowing Iris Murdoch and never ended up reading. It made me think of the ending of a poem that features in the Eridanus videos:
Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!
It's a little surprising, given that the author's name is Iris and all, that I'd never thought of the ocular sense of pupil in connection with Murdoch's book; I'd always assumed it referred to a philosopher's student and never considered any other possible meaning. Seeing the title printed on a black background, though, with that poem in the back of my mind, I made the connection. Now I suppose I'll have to read it to see if Murdoch does the same.
I suppose it's a coincidence that each of the above shelves has a Nietzsche book and a copy of the Iliad, but that's not really very improbable in my library.
