Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan

As regular readers will know, reading in restaurants is something I like to do. Sometimes total silence is best, but sometimes background noise is a must. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Unless I happen to be reading a big hardback that's bulky enough to stay open on its own, it's not convenient to read a physical codex while actually eating. What I usually do is read a book while I wait for my order, switch to reading something on my phone while I eat, and then switch back to the book after I finish. Today the book I brought was William Weaver's English translation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I read this before my meal:

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox (pp. 36-37).

Hidden Treasures (the breakfast cereal) have come up on this blog before, so that got my attention. I also thought it a bit surprising that wolf was the first item on the list, a list of words presumably chosen because they reflect universal experience and would evoke some memory or other in just about everyone. Do you have any tales of wolves to tell, reader? Neither do I. But I suppose things were different in the 13th century, when Invisible Cities is set.

When my food arrived, I switched to reading the Book of Isaiah on my phone. I read this:

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations (Isa. 61:4).

At that moment, I happened to glance up at the television on the wall, and the screen was filled with the phrase "RAISED BY WOLVES" repeated many times. Since I had just read about wolves in Calvino and raising-up in Isaiah, this caught my attention. There followed a rapid series of wolf- and moon-related images, interspersed with images of basketball players, and it became apparent that the whole thing was about an NBA team called the Minnesota Timberwolves. At one point, there was a city skyline along the bottom of the screen, an upside-down version of the same skyline at the top, and a full moon suspended in the sky between them. The whole thing then rotated 180 degrees, with the moon remaining stationary, until the city and its gravity-defying inversion had traded places.

The idea of being "raised by wolves" synched in a general way with something I had read the night before in Colin Wilson's Spider World novel The Magician, about how "Human babies were taken from their parents and brought up as spiders." This idea of being raised by animals other than wolves made me think of Raised by Swans, a rock band prominently featured in a not-very-good Liam Neeson movie I had seen some years ago. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, so I looked it up. It's called Chloe.

After I'd finished eating, I went back to the Calvino book, only to find myself reading, "In Chloe, the great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. . ." (p. 51). Then, just two pages later:

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake . . . . Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside-down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror . . . (p. 53).

The name Chloe, juxtaposed with the mirrored-city imagery seen in the "Raised by Wolves" spot, made me think again about Raised by Swans. I remembered that I had mentioned swans recently, in "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes." I had mentioned that Alph, the name of the "sacred river" in Kubla Khan, is also an Elvish word meaning "swan," and that I remembered this from childhood without having to look it up. Kublai Khan is one of the two main characters in Invisible Cities, and I mention that at the end of the post.

This restaurant is located near a used bookstore, and I rarely patronize the one without visiting the other. The synchronistic context described above made me pick up a book that would not otherwise have interested me at all: a very long novel called Swan Song by Robert McCammon. The teaser on the back cover begins "In a wasteland born of rage and fear," echoing the Isaiah passage quoted above, and it introduces a character called Swan and another called Sister. Sister, you will recall, comes right after wolf in Calvino's list.

Just now, as I was writing this post, I ran a search for timberwolves raised by wolves and clicked on the first result. I was greeted by this image:

I suppose that's a reference to the "alpha" as the leader of a pack of wolves, but it's also pretty close to the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the Elvish for "swan."

Note added: Just after posting this, I checked a few blogs. A recent Vox Day post mentions Minnesota and High Elves and links a site called Alpha News.

Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes

In my January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," instead of using a common expression like "full circle," I instead appropriated a famous line from Finnegans Wake and wrote of how something "brings us by a commodious [sic] vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon." For those of my readers who have never attempted this self-described "usylessly unreadable" book, here is its iconic first "sentence," James Joyce's answer to "Call me Ishmael":

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The recentness of this random allusion on my part made me sit up and take notice when yesterday's post by William Wright, "Key-Stones and the Hill-Murray Pioneer," happened to mention how he and his wife had taken "the River Run Gondola" at a ski resort.

In the same post, William mentions Kubla Khan (referencing one of my own posts). When I looked up the first sentence in Finnegans Wake so I could paste it into this post above, I got it from this site, where mousing over the word riverrun causes a lengthy note to pop up, which includes this:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea."

Actually, William made a mistake and wrote "Kubla Kahn," which made me think of Alfie Kahn, a Jewish education theorist in whom my mother used to put a lot of stock. Looking him up just now, though, I found that I had made a mistake, too, as his name is actually Alfie Kohn. Anyway, Alfie is a link to Alph. Alph, by the way, is a bit of Elvish I know without having to look it up, remembering it from my childhood reading of Tolkien: It means "swan" and is derived from the root ALAK, meaning "rushing." Do swans rush? Maybe the incongruity is what made it memorable.

William Wright's post also mentions "White Holes" (opposite counterparts to black holes). This synched with dayhole, a word from my childhood which I had suddenly thought of a few days before. This was a word invented by my brother when we were kids. Since a bedside table was called a nightstand, he decided that the gap between a bed and a wall, if there is no furniture in it, should be called a nighthole. The space between a church pew and the wall was then dubbed a dayhole. If you happened to be sitting far from the aisle, you could get out of the chapel more quickly at the end of the service by "escaping through the dayhole." All this was brought back to mind a few days ago when I ran across a reference to one Chad Daybell, a fringe Mormon and accused murderer, dayhole being similar to his surname and also associated with Mormon churches. Later I found myself singing Harry Belafonte's famous calypso song, but with "Day-O" changed to "dayhole." Some of the lyrics tie in with the "banana spider" urban legend, which I mentioned in my December 19 post "RV and preparation."

A beautiful bunch of ripe banana

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

Hide the deadly black tarantula

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

On the road this morning, I had Finnegans Wake on my mind. I'm not sure why my train of thought went the way it did, but I ended up thinking about the name Mamalujo -- generally agreed to come from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- and wondering what the Old Testament equivalent would be. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers -- Geln? For the sake of euphony, we might need to throw in a few second letters, as Joyce did -- Gelen? Gelnu? Gelenu?

I had breakfast at an American-style diner in Taichung and stayed there for some time drinking coffee and reading. There was a TV on, showing some sportsball something-or-other, and a loudspeaker playing some extremely profane and sexually explicit rap, the sort of thing that would never fly as a background music in a family-friendly restaurant in the US but is fine in a place where most people don't know much English. I thought: These lyrics are like if Arnold had had leave the Demiurge's Reality Temple early, after replacing only 25% of the words in the English language with nigger.

In certain moods, though, I actually like having lots of background noise as I read.

Since I had just been thinking about "riverrun past Eve and Adam's," the rap on the loudspeaker got my attention when it mentioned those two names:

Adam, Eve with the fruit

Why we need new new?

Only got two seats, why we need new coupe?

Only got two feet, why we need new shoes?

Papa need new shoes, baby need new shoes, Imma need new shoes . . .

At this point, I glanced up at the TV and saw a commercial for, appropriately enough, shoes. Shoes called GEL-NIMBUS:

The reason the "new shoes" rap had gotten my attention was that it mentioned Adam and Eve, like the opening of Finnegans Wake. Earlier, on the road, I had been thinking about how to make a Mamajulo-like abbreviation out of Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers. Now here's a shoe called GEL followed by a word very similar to Numbers.

After breakfast, I looked through the small English section of a used bookstore in Taichung. One of the books they had was John Man's Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East. A week earlier, on a visit to the same store, I had picked up a copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which consists largely of a fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.