Sweet Baby James

I've been reading Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers rather slowly. Today I came to Frankley's poem about Saint Brendan, with its interesting rhyme scheme:

We sailed for a year and a day and hailed

no field nor coast of men;

no boat nor bird saw we ever afloat

for forty days and ten.

As you can see, in the first and third lines of every quatrain, the first foot (not the second as in limericks) rhymes with the fourth. Sometimes this is done in a very clever way which would not have been possible if rhymes came only at the ends of lines:

We turned away, and we left astern

the rumbling and the gloom;

then the smoking cloud asunder broke,

and we saw that Tower of Doom:

What this made me think of, oddly, was the James Taylor song "Sweet Baby James." In my 2019 post "The rhyme burden of various poetic forms," I had noted the song's rhyme scheme as being slightly more challenging to write in than the ottava rima of Byron's Don Juan. (By the metric used in that post, the rhyme burden of ottava rima is 0.35, while "Sweet Baby James" is 0.357. Frankley's poem is 0.429, the same as a Spenserian sonnet.) 

These thoughts led me to listen to "Sweet Baby James," and some of the lyrics hit differently than they had in the past -- "Good night, you moonlight ladies," for instance. What really got my attention was this verse, though:

There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway

A song that they sing when they take to the sea

A song that they sing of their home in the sky

Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to see

But singing seems to work fine for me

In "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy," I wrote about the song the ransomed sing as they return via a "highway" which is actually the sea. And of course this "sea" may in fact be a figurative reference to outer space, hence the song "of their home in the sky." In that post, the ransomed are portrayed as singing yaks, tying in with the cattle-herding theme of "Sweet Baby James."

The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback

In Animalia, as discussed in "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," the Gospel of Luke appears on the back of a lobster. No, not like the Judgement Tablet on the back of a cicada! It's in ordinary book form, if a bit thicker than the Gospel of Luke as we know it, but the book is supported by a lobster.

I've already written a bit about the possible significance of the Gospel of Luke, but I didn't say anything about the lobster. It's been nagging at me, though, and I finally figured out its relevance: "The Lobster-quadrille"! The G and L post prominently featured a griffin, also shown together with something representing sacred records, and the Gryphon in Alice is the one who, with the Mock-turtle, sings "The Lobster-quadrille." (That word quadrille originally meant "one of a set of four," which has obvious relevance to the Gospel of Luke.) In the song, lobsters are thrown out to sea from England, so far that they nearly reach the northern shore of France:

You can really have no notion how delightful it will be

When they take us [the whiting and the snail] up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!

. . .

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France --

Normandy is on the northern shore of France, and of course there were later Normans in England as well, so there is possible relevance to Minbad the Mailer. Besides being written correspondence, mail is also a kind of armor, and Normandy and Brittany belong to what was once known as Armorica -- so perhaps the Norman Mailer is sending "mail" (in the form of sacred writings) back to his homeland of Armorica. What was once just called mail is nowadays known as snail mail, and "The Lobster-quadrille" makes it clear that the lobsters being thrown toward France are accompanied by snails.

Where was I reading about Armorica recently? Oh, right, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Hélas, l’Evangile a passé! l’Evangile! l’Evangile. J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité. Me voici sur la plage armoricaine.

Alas! The Gospel has gone by! The Gospel! The Gospel. Greedily I await God. I am of an inferior race for all eternity. Here I am on the Breton shore.

Louise Varèse has "the Breton shore" in her translation, but the original French is clearly referring more generally to Armorica as a whole. That geographical reference was all I had remembered as possibly relevant, but when I looked it up I saw that it is juxtaposed with "The Gospel" repeated three times. The third Gospel is, of course, that of Luke.

So we have Rinbad (Rimbaud-Tolkien) waiting on the Armorican shore for the Gospel of Light to be sent over from Britain on lobsterback by Minbad the Norman Mailer. Lobsterback is 18th-century slang for a British soldier, so perhaps it is soldiers who travel from Britain with the Gospel. Or perhaps I should say from "Britain," in scare-quotes, as labels do not always mean what they seem. When I dream, I dream about books -- and one of the books I've dreamed about, back in 2020, was titled Britain as Another Planet. In "How can these books not exist?" I describe looking at some books inside a dome-shaped indigo building (supposedly a "convenience store") called Blue Harbor:

One of these was a "round book" -- that is, its pages were circular rather than rectangular -- and I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped. The others were ordinary books and didn't look very new. I perused the spines and noticed these three titles:

• Things Soon to Come
• Britain as Another Planet
• I Tried to Be Parents

Rereading that now, I was struck by the "round book," since a recent dream has featured Plates (sacred records) in the form of a round disc.And "I wanted to look through it but couldn't because it was shrink-wrapped" -- what is that but another way of saying, "I cannot read a sealed book"?

This idea that a "round book" of plates has something to do with the "Gospel of Luke" received minor but interesting synchronistic confirmation today. I was, for complex psychological reasons, praying the Rosary while lying supine on a tile floor. On Thursdays, one prays the Luminous Mysteries, or Mysteries of Light (Luke means "light"), and as I was doing the third of these five meditations (Luke is the third Gospel), a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor -- a little metal disc.

Lassie Come Home

Lassie Come Home is, symbolically, the title of the book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew. This book is also called "the book of the Lamb of God" (1 Ne. 13:38). A nod to this second designation is just visible on the edge of the page in Animalia:

I think that's a very semantically dense title, conveying multiple meanings simultaneously. First there’s the literal meaning of lassie: a girl or young woman. Second, there’s the character Lassie in the book: a sheepdog, specifically a Rough Collie, who travels a great distance to be reunited with someone she loves. Finally there’s the Elvish lassi, which even the casual Tolkien reader may recognize from the poem Namárië: It means -- quelle coïncidence! -- "leaves."

If we take Lassie as a literal lassie, any number of female figures could be intended. My immediate hunch, and I tend to trust such things, was that it has something to do with the Woman of Revelation 12, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1). Threatened by the Dragon, the Woman is given wings and flies away to "her place" (perhaps off-planet?), prepared for her by God, where she stays for three and a half years (Rev. 12:6, 14) -- and that's the last we hear of her. After the three and a half years, during which the Beast rules in her absence (Rev. 13:5), does Lassie come home? John never tells us.

Considered as a sheepdog, Lassie would be expected to come home with the sheep, bringing them back to the fold. "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd" (John 10:16). If the Shepherd is Christ, the Sheepdog would be a servant of Christ who helps him tend the sheep. The most obvious biblical candidate for this role would be Simon Peter, who in John 21 is given a special charge to "feed my sheep" and "feed my lambs." Interestingly, this same language of feeding is found in John's account of the Woman: While she is hiding in the wilderness, "they should feed her there" (Rev. 12:6) and "she is nourished" (Rev. 12:14).

Those who have been following William Wright's blog will know of his theory that Peter was the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor -- which brings us to Lassie as a collie. The etymology of that word is uncertain, but Etymonline suggests "Possibly from dialectal coaly 'coal-black,' the color of some breeds." As portrayed on the cover of the book from the Lion's mouth, Lassie appears to be golden in color, not black, so perhaps whatever about her is "coal-black" is not visible on the surface. Pharazôn was called "the Golden," and as his story has been expanded by Daymon "Doug" Smith and William Wright, he went to great lengths so to appear, dressing all in gold and even covering his face with some kind of gold makeup. However, in "It's as dark a tale as was ever told," I have read the song "Shiver My Timbers" as referring to Pharazôn:

Shiver my timbers, shiver my soul -- Yo ho, heave ho!

There are men whose hearts are as black as coal --Yo ho, heave ho!

And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue

A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew

It's as dark a tale as was ever told

Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold

Also in that post, I mention the line about "secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones" and tie that in with the Monkees song about Davy Jones waking and rising -- a song which also prominently references a "homecoming queen," i.e. a lassie come home. Pharazôn and his men ended up in a watery grave -- "Davy Jones' locker" -- and it may be their secrets that sleep there. The surname Jones means "son of John," though the h has been lost and the vowel sound has changed from a short 'o' to a long one. Everything I have just said about Jones is also true of Barjona, the original surname of Simon Peter.

Finally, we have lassi as the Elvish word for "leaves." Golden leaves as a reference to Golden Plates (and Lassie is gold on the book cover) have been a major theme in these parts recently, beginning with "Leaves of gold unnumbered" -- a post in which I quote the first two lines of the poem Namárië. Here they are in the original Quenya:

Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,

yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!

Ah, like gold fall the leaves in the wind! Lassi, come home!

Every tribe of Israel, we are told in 2 Nephi 29, has its own sacred records -- its own "leaves of gold" -- and when Lassie brings the scattered sheep home, the leaves will be gathered home as well:

And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. . . .

And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the lands of their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one (2 Ne. 29:8, 13-14).

And this brings us back to the vision or waking dream -- for I, like Davy Jones, am a daydream believer -- recounted in "Étude brute?" In the vision, I was told that a particular book was the Cherubim -- "not the book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves." What can that possibly mean?

Ezekiel portrays the Cherubim as chimerical creatures -- part man, part lion, part bull, and part eagle -- and as far back as my 2018 post "The Throne and the World," I had made the case that this imagery "very like symbolizes, by means of four representative members, both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac." See that post for all the details underlying that assertion; here I will simply take it as proven. Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.

I have more to say on this topic, but I think this is a good place to end the current post.

It's as dark a tale as was ever told

In his June 12 post "Knowing to what purpose the Dark People came West," William Wright interprets "And now my tale is done" from "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus" as referring to a "dark tale" about Ar-Pharazôn, called "the Golden," sailing with his fleet to Valinor to attack it:

"And now my Tale is Dark", is one interpretation of William's response to Claire, which is of course an interesting response given that Claire's name means, among other things, Light.  William is saying, in the dream, that his story is Dark here at the outset, and actually uses the word "now" in front of this.  Meaning now, or at this time, his story, or the story of the person he is speaking as in this dream, is Dark.  Claire responds that this is 'well said', meaning what he said is true - his Tale is Dark, or understood in that way.   But Claire also responds that she has a True Song of a Wandering Aengus, which is the Being I guess at being Pharazon.  And my guess is that Claire's True Song sheds some Light on the Tale, which will no longer be Dark after what she knows is revealed.

This made me think of the song "Shiver My Timbers" from Muppet Treasure Island:

And they sailed their ship 'cross the ocean blue
A bloodthirsty captain and a cutthroat crew
It's as dark a tale as was ever told
Of the lust for treasure and the love of gold

Another line from the song is, "There are secrets that sleep with old Davy Jones." Besides being the sailors' devil, symbol of a watery grave (which claimed Pharazôn and his followers), Davy Jones was one of the Monkees -- yes, monkeys again -- and one of the songs he sang, "Daydream Believer," is about Davy Jones waking and rising -- presumably bringing his secrets with him. The mention of a "homecoming queen" in the chorus also ties in with Lassie Come Home.

I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis

That's an anagram of my full name, created by one of my fellow missionaries in 1998 or 1999. He explained that Chim-Chim is the name of a chimpanzee character in Speed Racer (which I knew nothing about) and that "an Elvis" must refer to someone of that name other than the King himself -- perhaps Elvis Costello or figure skater Elvis Stojko. It occurs to me now, though, that there is a kind of sandwich called an Elvis -- peanut butter, banana, and bacon, a favorite of Presley's -- and that that reading makes much more sense. Apparently the character Chim-Chim is known for his appetite and his sweet tooth, much like Elvis himself, and of course a banana sandwich is exactly what you would expect a cartoon chimp to eat.

Peanut butter and banana sandwiches (without bacon) were one of my own favorites as a child, part of my Banana Man persona. My other nickname from that time, besides Banana Man, was in fact Elvis, because of my hairstyle. (I insisted, despite my father's objections, on growing out the hair in front of my ears to look like sideburns.) At that time I knew essentially nothing about Elvis except that he was apparently a singer who had sideburns, and I certainly didn't know that Elvis and Banana Man had such similar taste in sandwiches. The weird thing is that the guy who created the anagram knew none of this about me. He was just trying to come up with something tolerably grammatical that used all the letters in my hard-to-anagram name, and he ended up hitting on something related to monkeys, bananas, and Elvis.

If you look at my photo in the sidebar, you might even detect a hint of incipient "jowliness," I suppose. Jowls are drooping cheeks, so what a "jowly" chimp makes me think of is Cheekey the Monkey. This is character from a Mormon parenting book my mom had when I was tiny. At first I couldn't find any trace of him online because I'd been searching for Cheeky without the extra e. (My exposure to the story was well before I had learned to read.) After racking my brain a bit, though, I came up with the title of the book -- Teaching Children Joy (1980) by Linda and Richard Eyre -- and was able to find it online.

Cheekey was a baby monkey. He lived with his sister and his mother and father in a tree. Their tree was in the jungle. In the jungle were some laws. They were called Jungle Laws. Do you know what laws are? (Things that you must do right or else you get punishment.)

Do you know what punishment is? (Something sad that happens when you break a law.)

There were two laws in Cheekey's jungle. One was that whenever you were in a tree, you had to hold on with your hand, or your foot, or your tail. What do you think the punishment was if you broke the law? (You would fall!)

The other jungle law was that if you saw a lion coming, you had to quickly climb up a tree. What do you think the punishment was if you broke that law? (You would get eaten up!)

In Cheekey's own family tree, there were two family laws. One law was that you couldn't go out of the tree without asking. Why do you think they had that law? (So Cheekey wouldn't get lost.)

Why didn't his mother and father want him to get lost? (Because they loved him.)

What do you think the punishment was if Cheekey went out of his tree without asking? (His mother gave him a little swat with her tail right on his bottom.)

Why did his mother do that? (So he wouldn't go out of the tree again.)

Why didn't she want him to do it again? (Because she loved him and didn't want him to get lost.)

The other monkey family law was to never drop your banana peels on limbs of the family tree. Why do you think they had that law? (So no one would slip on them and fall out of the tree.)

Why did the monkey family decide to have a law like that? (Because they loved each other and didn't want anyone in their family to get hurt.)

The story follows Cheekey through his day as he makes various choices, and in each case the children have to say whether there's a law to tell him what to do or whether he's free to do what he likes. I heard the story many times from an extremely young age, and even now I have vivid memories of my mental images of Cheekey climbing a tree to get away from a lion, choosing whether to wear his red hat or his green one, and so on. Not sure what specific relevance it has, but I suppose the sync fairies never bring anything up without a reason.

Coming back to "an Elvis," what's the plural of Elvis? This question comes up sometimes when people have occasion to refer to "parachuting Elvises" and such, and common incorrect suggestions include Elvi and Elvii (which are properly the plurals of Elvus and Elvius, respectively.) By analogy with other singular nouns ending in -is, the correct plural would be Elves -- spelled, though not pronounced, exactly the same as the plural of elf. "An Elvis" is one of the Elves.

This idea of eating an elf made me think of a story one of my brothers wrote as a child. These stories were written to be read aloud at our local literary club, and one of the things my brother liked to do (we were pretty avant-garde for little kids) was include "intermissions" -- where the story would be unexpectedly interrupted by a short poem and then resume where it had left off. In one of these stories, a character says, "It has eaten green moss," and then there's an intermission. After the intermission, the story continues with "the elf" -- revealing that the intermission had come in the middle of a sentence, and that what had been eaten was not green moss but rather an elf named Green Moss.

I still have copies of lots of these old stories, so I looked it up. Here's how it begins:

One upon a time there lived a gnome named Fuloo. Fuloo lived by himself in the Buck Horn Forest.

One night Fuloo was sitting by his fire, making rope, when suddenly he heard what sounded like 900 deer stampeding through the forest. Fuloo poked his head out of his hole to see what was scaring the deer like that. . . . A gigantic griffin was soaring through the forest, gulping down deer left and right.

The grffin thing is totally plagiarized from a very similar scene in The Tinleys, The guy sitting by the fire making rope is also ripped off, from one of my other brother's yarns. But don't worry, it's about to get a lot more original. Here's Fuloo's friend Will summarizing the damage done by the griffin -- interrupted by an intermission -- after which a rather singular character makes his appearance:

"Well," said Will, "it has eaten Green Moss

INTERMISSION: The Snowflake

Small and light, beautiful white is the snowflake falling down. Whirling, twirling on the breeze, it keeps on twirling round and round and then it softly comes falling to the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

the elf, Romut the gnome, 463 deer, and 47 wolves."

"Wow," said Fuloo. "It must have been hungry."

"Yep," said Will, "it certainly wh--"

Suddenly they were interrupted by Soto the monkey-elf. "What is a monkey-elf?" you're probably asking right now, so I'll tell you: It is a half-monkey, half-elf creature, and unfortunately they didn't get much of the human intelligence, so they were mostly messengers, and this one was doing that, and it had carefully dropped a message right into Will's mouth.

A monkey-elf! I'd forgotten about that, but what led me to look this old story up was the idea of a chimp eating an elf. Recent posts here have featured apes as stars and apes as angels. In Tolkien, Elves are Eldar, literally "Star-folk." The story says that monkey-elves were "mostly messengers" -- which is the literal meaning of the word angel.

Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window

In my last post, "Every man and every woman is an ape," I used a line from "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- "when what to my wondering eyes should appear" -- for no particular reason. It just popped into my head as I was writing. In "Stars in Animal Skins," William Wright points out that in the poem, this line comes just after the narrator goes to the window:

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,

Gave a lustre of midday to objects below,

When what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,

William thought this might have been intentional on my part, a reference to recent "go to the window" syncs, but it wasn't.  So that's yet another "go to the window" sync! As I read this excerpt, my thought was that it was also a Cherubim reference. The Hebrew cherub is believed to derive from the Akkadian karibu, which I assume would be a near-homophone of caribou, another name for the reindeer.

Looking up the poem now, I find that other parts of it are also synchronistically interesting:

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up to the housetop the coursers they flew

With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

"To the top of the wall" ties in with the Humpty Dumpty theme. Dry leaves blowing away in the wind appear in my June 13 post "Plates among the dead leaves."

My most recent "go to the window" reference was "Go to the window; it's dark but clear," which refers to Lowdham going to the window in The Notion Club Papers. In his post, William mentions that this is only the first time Lowdham goes to the window, and that "the second time he will begin to re-enact events surrounding the Fall of Numenor." I didn't know that because this is my first time reading The Notion Club Papers.

Today I read a few chapters in 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon. This verse in particular stood out to me:

And there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land (3 Ne. 8:22).

I took special notice of this because the language reminded me of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus." The poem mentions stars disappearing -- "moth-like stars were flickering out" -- and the appearance of a "glimmering girl." It ends with "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun." Thus I noticed the word glimmer -- which appears nowhere else in the scriptures -- juxtaposed with the sun, the moon, and disappearing stars.

After reading that, I turned to The Notion Club Papers and soon came to Lowdham's second time going to the window. Guess what word Tolkien just happens to throw in at that moment?

He strode to the window and flung it open.

The early summer night was still and glimmering, warmer than usual for the time of year.

Then several other club members join Lowdham at the window, where they see great mists of darkness causing the stars to disappear:

We were all startled. Several of us went to the window and stood behind Lowdham, looking out. A great cloud, coming up slowly out of the West, was eating up the stars. As it approached it opened two vast sable wings, spreading north and south.

After that, I checked the blog of Bruce Charlton -- who has made The Notion Club Papers an object of special study -- and found that his latest post quotes a Rupert Brooke poem that mentions the night before Christmas:

And things are done you’d not believe 

At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

Go to the window; it’s dark but clear

In a period of just a few days, the following things happened:

On May 30, William Wright proposed that the beings I know as Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) and Claire Delune are one and the same.

On June 1, I wrote about “Joan” saying “Look out the window” and “Come over to the window,” also bringing in the variant “Go to the window.”

On June 2 or 3, I began reading Tolkien’s Notion Club Papers.

Tonight, all of the above came together in a single paragraph. I read this in The Notion Club Papers:

He broke off and went to the window. It was dark but clear as glass in the sky, and there were many white stars.

He went to the window (as “Joan” has repeatedly requested), and it was simultaneously dark (d’Arc) and clear (Claire). How perfect is that?

Crescent waxing

The sync fairies have a way of dredging up my juvenilia -- which is somewhat embarrassing, but if you want to ride with the sync fairies, embarrassment is one of the first things you have to give up. Today I suddenly remembered these two stanzas from an unfinished poem I wrote as a student. I no longer have the manuscript, but the Olentangy River reference dates it to 2001-2002.

Went to the record store and bought

Bookends because it matched my mood

Still haven’t played it (I forgot)

Stayed out all night to pace and brood

Along the Olentangy River

Crescent waxing, just a sliver

Up in a pine tree in the park

Collected works of Yeats in hand

I sit and read till it is dark

How innocent -- just like I’d planned

Won’t someone take a photograph?

Crescent waxing, almost half

Bookends is a Simon and Garfunkel album, and that duo's recent entrance into the sync stream (see "More on Joan and Claire" and "Over troubled water") is what brought the poem to mind. William Wright also recently brought up a Five for Fighting album with a very similar name, Bookmarks, in "Running with Claire."

Then the second stanza brings in Yeats, and each stanza ends with a reference to the phase of the moon. In my first dream-encounter with Claire ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she quizzed me about the phases of the moon and then gave me the "true" version of a Yeats poem. I could remember only a few details of this "True Song," and googling those details led me to a book called The Witch's Tower. The poem quoted above was apparently written when I was living in Morrill Tower, on the banks of the Olentangy in Columbus, Ohio. After Peter Jackson's The Two Towers came out, many students started calling the building -- which is one of the university's Two Towers -- Minas Morrill. This was of course a reference to Tolkien's Minas Morgul, literally "Tower of Sorcery." (If that seems like a creepy thing to call your dorm, it was an improvement over its old nickname: the Jeffrey Dahmer Building.)

Of course, there's also the obligatory dark reference.

Were all those syncs pre-arranged, lying dormant in a forgotten poem for twenty-some years until I was ready to notice them? I guess the vision that was planted in my brain all those years ago still remains. Or, as Yeats is quoted as saying in The Witch's Tower, "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

Over troubled water

At the end of my last post, I mention listening to two songs on YouTube: "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and then Emily Linge's cover of Ben E. King's "Stand by Me." Since I listened to both and gave each a thumbs-up, the algorithm figured that what I wanted to listen to today was Emily Linge singing Simon and Garfunkel, namely "Bridge over Troubled Water":

I soon as I saw the title, I figured it was synchronistically relevant. St. Peter has been in the sync-stream of late, particularly in his role as "first pope." He went by two different names, Simon and Peter, the latter meaning "stone." The name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the Latin carbunculus, meaning "reddish, bright kind of precious stone, probably comprising the ruby, carbuncle, hyacinth, garnet." Catholics consider Peter to have been the first pontiff, a title which literally means "bridge-maker." So when Simon and Garfunkel sing about a bridge, that seems likely to have something to do with Peter.

Furthermore, Peter has been associated recently with the title character of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." I figured this tied in with the "silver girl" in "Bridge over Troubled Water," and I saw that Emily was even wearing a glimmering silver dress to sing it, as if in costume as the glimmering/silver girl herself.

When I played the Emily Linge video, though, I found that she had changed the lyrics -- something she never does! -- and replaced "silver girl" with "children." Now this is unacceptable. Children don't need a bridge over troubled water, nor do they need to sail. When the water is troubled, they wade.

Since Emily had dropped the ball on the "silver girl" bit, I decided to listen to the original. When I put bridge over troubled water in the search box, though, what came up was another Emily Linge cover of the same song, uploaded just a month ago. She's wearing the same silver dress, and this time she gets the lyrics right:

A few hours after writing the above, mentioning three different ways of crossing "troubled water" -- sailing, wading, and using a bridge -- I read this in Louise Varèse's English translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Jesus walked on the troubled waters. The lantern showed him to us, erect, white, with long brown hair, on the flank of an emerald wave.

Yet another way of crossing troubled water! And of course, Jesus was one of two people to walk on water, the other being Peter. The "emerald wave" also syncs with one of Ramer's recurring dreams in The Notion Club Papers:

There is a Green Wave, whitecrested, fluted and scallop-shaped but vast, towering above green fields, often with a wood of trees, too; that has constantly appeared.

This is presumably a vision of the destruction of Númenor, which happened in the reign of its last king, Ar-Pharazôn -- whom William Wright identifies with Peter.

Ludovicus Carolus in The Notion Club Papers

In my May 29 post "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I quoted Aleister Crowley's Kabbalistic analyis of "Humpty Dumpty," in which he referred to Lewis Carroll by the Latin name Ludovicus Carolus.

In my June 4 post "Ramer on Humpty Dumpty," I noted a reference to Humpty Dumpty in Tolkien's Notion Club Papers.

Today, I read this in The Notion Club Papers:

Jeremy was an admirer of the Public-house School (as he himself had dubbed them), and soon after he became a Lecturer he gave a series of lectures with that title. Old Professor Jonathan Gow had puffed and boggled at the title; and J. had offered to change it to Lewis and Carolus, or the Oxford Looking-glass, or Jack and the Beanstalk; which did not smooth matters.

Lewis and Jack are pretty clearly references to C. S. Lewis, who has already been mentioned several times by Notion Club members. Given the Looking-glass reference immediately following, I assume Carolus must be none other than Lewis Carroll, referred to with the same Latinized name used by Crowley.

Ramer on Humpty Dumpty

In my June 2 post “Just how far did Hinbad and Rinbad travel?” I explored an alternate interpretation of Rinbad the Railer, one which reminded me of something Bruce Charlton had posted back in 2011 about “Tolkien as a Lucid Dreamer of Faery,” which was based largely on the character Ramer in “The Notion Club Papers.” That piqued my curiosity enough that I started reading the NCPs (which, oddly, I’ve never read before), where I found that the etymology Christopher Tolkien proposed for Ramer was extremely similar in meaning to railer.

Today, reading a bit more in the NCPs, I unexpectedly ran into none other than the man -- or egg -- of the hour, Humpty Dumpty. The speaker is, naturally, Ramer (i.e. Rinbad the Railer):

If a haunted house were pulled to pieces, it would stop being haunted, even if it were built up as accurately as possible again. Or so I think, and so-called 'psychical' research seems to bear me out. In a way analogous to life in a body. If all the king's horses and all his men had put Humpty Dumpty together again, they’d have got, well, an egg-shell.

Update (12:45 p.m.):

About 10 hours after posting this, with its reference to Humpty as "the man -- or egg -- of the hour," I saw this on the wall of a bakery:

Just how far did Hinbad and Rinbad travel?

William Wright has persuaded me to take my recent nonsense poem “With?” more seriously than the spirit in which it was written. I mean, why not? Nonsense writing has long been recognized as a modality of inspiration.

Hinbad the Hailer traveled far

By riding in a yellow car.

I wrote this with no deeper thought in mind than that a “hailer” could be someone who hails a cab. Reading it now with my interpreter’s spectacles on, though, I can scarcely believe I wrote it without noticing a second meaning. Who traveled far in a yellow car? Who but Elijah, who ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire?

The j, pronounced as y in Hebrew, is not really a distinct sound from the adjoining i, which is why it is omitted in the Greek form of the name, Elias (which even begins with an H in Greek). Notice anything about the title Hailer? Try spelling it backwards.

Where does Hinbad the Hailer go? “Outside,” presumably, the same place Joan goes to make her snowball. Europa?

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? (Job 38:22-23)

There may also be a link to the One Mighty and Strong:

Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand (Isa. 28:2).

The ice must flow! And doesn’t “cast down to the earth with the hand” sound like throwing a snowball?

If a Hailer takes a cab, a Railer must take a train, which was all I had in mind with the next couplet:

Rinbad the Railer, in a sleeper,

Traveled just as far, and cheaper.

Doesn’t that suggest someone who goes as far as Elijah, not in a spacecraft but simply by dreaming true? Perhaps a certain “Lucid Dreamer of Faery” whose middle initials were R. R. and who put his dreams in the mouth of a character called Ramer?

There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.

The 96, the 48, and the white bull

In his May 15 post "Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross," William Wright writes that in Tolkien's writings there were originally 144 elves who were invited to Aman. Two-thirds (called the Eldar) accepted the invitation, while one-third (called the Avari) declined. (As the Babylon Bee recently complained, "every time a group of elves does something they get a new name!") Two-thirds of 144 is 96, a number which William goes on to discuss extensively. He doesn't mention the number 48, but that's how many Avari there would have been.

The number 48 is potentially interesting because of the recent emphasis on the word buy. ("'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry.") In Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) -- where you add up the value of a word by counting A as 1, B as 2, and so on -- we get these interesting equations:

• buy = 2 + 21 + 25 = 48
• sell = 19 + 5 + 12 + 12 = 48
• trade = 20 + 18 + 1 + 4 + 5 = 48

I was thinking about this as I ate my lunch today. After lunch, I went to the place where I had parked my motorcycle, only to find that a big white SUV had parked me in. Motorcycles are maneuverable, and I was able to wriggle my way out, but it took some time and was annoying.

The thought popped into my head, "Parking you in was a good way to make sure you notice this particular car." Then I realized that I hadn't really processed the car at all beyond "white SUV," so I turned and looked at it:

I noticed the number 96 first and then the word bull. (The numeral 1 looks like a lowercase l -- so if you wanted to write "BULL 96" in ABC-1234 format, this is how you'd do it.) The moon Europa has been in the sync-stream of late, and what is the Europa of mythology best known for? Being carried away by a big white bull:

This event is commonly known as the Rape of Europa. Speaking of rape, after discovering the novella Europa Affair (about the moon, not the mythical figure), I checked its Amazon page. The top review gave it one star, citing "violence against women":

For William Wright, Europa has to do with Númenor, while the number 96 has reference to elves, so I'm not sure what to make of seeing them together on that SUV, but I note it for future reference.

Note added (May 18):

The YouTube algorithm served up this video, a commentary on the symbolism of Under the Silver Lake, a 2018 movie I'd never heard of:

In Under the Silver Lake, there's a scene with a white Volkswagen Rabbit, and the video emphasizes that this is a white rabbit, as in Alice or The Matrix:

Sam's whole journey begins after Sarah disappears by trying to find her following three girls literally driving around in a white Rabbit -- you know, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette that drive a white convertible Rabbit, so he's following three women in a white Rabbit. He's following a white Rabbit.

This is conceptually very similar to my post above, where a white SUV with bull on its license plate represents the white bull of Greek myth.

The ice must flow!

Yesterday, William Wright posted "Can Pharazon repent? AND a frozen egg up high on a wall," which as I suppose you can tell by the title is largely in response to my poem about Humpty Dumpty, in which Humpty stays up on the wall all through the fall and then freezes when winter comes. Having previously connected Humpty with Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor in Tolkien's mythology, William suggests that Númenor might now be something like Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, and perhaps might even be Europa itself.

This dredged up some vague memory I had of once having read a sci-fi story set on Europa, which I tried in vain to track down. In the course of my search, though, I discovered this book which I'd never heard of:

It's called Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow (2017). The subtitle is presumably a punning reference to "The spice must flow," the well-known catchphrase from David Lynch's 1984 Dune movie, but it also happens to be uncannily relevant to William's post.

In answering the question in his title, William suggests that Ar-Pharazôn's possible redemption might involve playing a role in "the restoration of Numenor, part of the 'highway' that will come out of the depths, as the wave that covers it is rolled back." This idea of a highway from the deep comes from one of the revelations of Joseph Smith. Here is the immediate context:

And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep (D&C 133:26-27).

William didn't quote the part about the ice flowing, even though it seems relevant to his frozen-Númenor theory, but I found it just by searching for sci-fi novels with Europa in the title.

Parties within parties

I just checked William Wright’s blog, where his latest post is “Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross.” He mentions Bilbo  Baggins’s birthday party:

I believe I've mentioned before that The Lord of the Rings actually starts with symbolism regardingthe number 144.  At Bilbo' birthday/ farewell party (held on September 22), while the entire town was invited to the overall celebration, there was an invitation-only dinner party for 144 individuals comprising Bilbo and Frodo's extended family.  The party within the party.

If I heard the phrase “the party within the party” without context, I would assume it meant a political party, something like the Inner Party in 1984. Here, though, it means a party in the sense of a social event.

Immediately after reading that post, I checked AC and read this quote from football player Aaron Rodgers’s recent interview on Tucker Carlson:

I’ve seen some interesting things.. Been around some interesting parties and gatherings that are strange. Not anything like Diddy party… Even at an Oscar party seeing how some of these people act, a little strange. Parties within the party that always kind of weirded me out a little bit.

Almost exactly the same expression, and again referring to a social gathering rather than a political party.

Rodgers also mentions, “There’s a pedophile component to it as well which is really sick.” Sick? Okay, but don’t you think gross is really the mot juste here?

Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

⁂

Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

⁂

Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

⁂

Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

⁂

Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

⁂

After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

⁂

Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A new FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

⁂

In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

⁂

What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.

Balrogs, oxymorons, and secret Jew tunnels

In the course of writing yesterday's post "Thoughts on the murder of Laban," I looked up an old Corbin Volluz essay on the topic from 2013. The essay is hosted on the Rational Faiths website and prominently features this image:

A balrog is an odd choice of illustrations. The Hamlet quote in the title refers to a spirit which appears to be the prince's father but may in fact be the devil in disguise. Its relevance to the Nephi story is that the spirit that tells Nephi to kill Laban, which Nephi apparently takes to be the Spirit of the Lord, may similarly be the devil in disguise. Well, there's nothing "in disguise" about that balrog! No one's going to look at that and say, "Hmmm, upon careful consideration, I think there's a possibility that this may actually be a devil."

Since I'm not really familiar with Rational Faiths, I clicked their "About" page -- which was not written by Corbin Volluz -- while I was there. It’s a FAQ in which most of the answers are meme images, including this one:

What had reminded me of Corbin Volluz's existence was a recent Ward Radio video complaining about his "Mormon Sunday School" podcast. This led me to said podcast, of which I had been unaware, and I found that in one of the episodes he reads out his whole 2013 Nephi and Laban essay:

Oddly, this episode also includes a fairly lengthy bit about oxymorons, in which he feels it necessary to explain what an oxymoron is:

So the lesson manual itself ended up giving what I think may be the oxymoron of the year, and if this holds that would be amazing to hit oxymoron of the year when you're still in January and you're only on lesson two. We'll see if it remains oxymoron of the year in the manual. . . . As you probably know, the definition of an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, and this is what I'm talking about and referring to.

This language -- oxymoron of the year already, and it's only January -- reminded me of similar statements that appeared on /pol/ this January about the secret Jew tunnel story. Several people said that the video clip of an Orthodox Jew emerging from a sewer like a Ninja Turtle was a strong contender for meme of the year even though it was only January.

Then last night I did some reading in Courtney Brown's Remote Viewing. On page 615 I read, "Nothing is 'set in stone,' so to speak" -- very close to the oxymoron meme from Rational Faiths -- which was followed a few pages later by an oxymoron, highlighted with scare quotes, about how "a lively debate 'quietly rages' in academia."

Then this morning I checked the Babylon Bee and found this:

See, that secret Jew tunnel story is so inherently funny that even the Babylon Bee, which has a Jewish CEO, is still using it months later. And that balrog image is extremely similar to the one used in the Corbin Volluz essay.

Balrogs of course come from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. The name Tolkien -- related to the modern English dull-keen -- has the same etymological meaning as oxymoron ("sharp-stupid"), and it is for this reason that Tolkien once signed a poem with the pseudonym Oxymore.

Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels

A recent post by William Wright, "March 12 and 13 timelines: Shelob's Lair and a change in the wind," mentions both the Tolkien characters Merry and Pippin and the P. L. Travers character Mary Poppins, but without noting the similarity of the names. I had a vague memory of having posted something about that similarity and wrongly thought that it must have been a comment on William's blog or a post on my own blog inspired by something he had written -- I mean, when else have I had occasion to write about those characters? A search of my blog turns up no mentions of Pippin, and the only Mary Poppins reference is in passing, as an example of a movie I had seen that had Dik [sic] Van Dyke in it. It was on March 14 that I ran the search and found the Dik Van Dyke post. In the comments, Debbie mentions "an episode of the Twilight Zone released on March 14, 1963 called The Parallel."

I finally found what I was looking for, not in anything connected with William Wright, but in a heretofore unpublished sync note from 2015, a time when I was not blogging. Here is the note in question:

Reluctance to reveal one’s name before the time is right (also: M-ry P-pp-n, straw is gold)

2015 Nov 18 (Wed) – I had been reading The Two Towers but took a break for a week or so to read What the Bee Knows by P. L. Travers. Today I finished the last four or five pages of Travers (I had almost finished last night) and immediately after finishing picked up Tolkien again.

This passage is from page 301 of Travers’s 303-page book:

This idea of the secrecy of the name, the taboo against making it known, goes back to man’s very early days, to the time, perhaps, when he had no name. During the war I spent two summers with the Navaho Indians and when they gave me an Indian name they warned me that it would be bad luck both for me and for the tribe if I ever disclosed it to anyone. And I never have. For one thing, I do not want to receive or give bad luck, and for another I have a strong atavistic feeling –– one, I think, that is strongly shared by unlettered people all over the world –– that to disclose one’s name, or take another’s before the time is ripe –– well, it’s dangerous. I tremble inwardly and withdraw when my Christian name is seized before I have given it, and I have the same hesitancy about using that of another person. An Indian –– or a gypsy –– would understand this very well. It is a very ancient taboo and I relate it –– though I don’t suggest that anyone else relate it –– to the earliest times when men built altars ‘To the Unknown God.’ If I were ever to build an altar, I would put that inscription above it.

When I opened up Tolkien, my bookmark was between pages 606 and 607. The very first line:

Here it is with some context from pp. 605-606:

‘Nobody else calls us hobbits; we call ourselves that,’ said Pippin.

‘Hoom, hmm! Come now! Not so hasty! You call yourselves hobbits? But you should not go telling just anybody. You’ll be letting out your own right names if you’re not careful.’

‘We aren’t careful about that,’ said Merry. ‘As a matter of fact I’m a Brandybuck, Meriadoc Brandybuck, though most people call me just Merry.’

‘And I’m a Took, Peregrin Took, but I’m generally called Pippin, or even Pip.’

‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your confidence; but you should not be too free all at once. There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain’t, as you might say. I’ll call you Merry and Pippin, if you please – nice names. For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’ A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

As a second, related sync, the next page of What the Bee Knows (i.e., page 302, the penultimate page) refers to the book Mary Poppins in the Park and the character Mary Poppins (who, of course, is P. L. Travers’s creation). The Tolkien passage features the phonetically similar “Merry and Pippin.”

As a third ancillary coincidence, the paragraph immediately before the one quoted at the beginning of this entry (beginning on page 300) tells the story of Rumpelstiltskin, beginning thus:

‘Rumpelstiltzkin’ was another of my favourites, for its meaning lay very close to me. Everyone knows the story of how the miller’s daughter, in order to become a queen, promises the little old man her first child if he will spin her straw into gold. Of course he does it. It is no problem. To him they are one and the same.

The very first words of page 622 of The Two Towers are “When straw is gold” –– from the song with the Ent and the Entwife.

The fact that two of the syncs feature the very first words of one of Tolkien’s pages is itself a noteworthy coincidence, I suppose.

I looked up this old sync note yesterday, March 14, 2024. It is part of a sync log file consisting of a series of such notes in reverse chronological order, like a blog. Immediately after the note quoted above (and therefore written immediately before it) was this brief one:

Square heads and hairy bodies

2015 Nov 16 (Mon) – Skype. Amber asked me about an alleged trend in Taiwan where people cut a dog’s fur so that its head will be a perfect square.

2015 Nov 17 (Tue) – Read in P. L. Travers’s What the Bee Knows: “the wild women of ancient Russia with square heads and hairy bodies”

This got my attention because I am currently reading Shadowland by Colin Wilson, in which there are several mentions of human beings who have been genetically engineered to have square heads. The first such reference is on p. 342:

Niall . . . blinked with astonishment, suspecting that his eyes were deceiving him. The man seemed to have a square head. Niall pointed to him.

"Is there something wrong with him?"

"No. That is one of the karvasid's experiments. He thought that a man with a different-shaped head could be made more intelligent, but he proved to be wrong. They are very stupid."

Recall that before finding these old sync notes, I had searched this blog for Mary Poppins and found an old post where the March 14, 1963 Twilight Zone episode "The Parallel" was mentioned. Since finding that on March 14 was a bit of a sync, I read the summary of that episode on Wikipedia. An astronaut returns to Earth and slowly realizes that he has slipped into a subtly different parallel universe. One of the first clues is that everyone addresses him as Colonel even though in the universe he knows, he never held that rank. Later that same day, March 14, I read this in Shadowland:

Typhon placed his mouth close to Niall's ear. "If you don't mind, I'll introduce you as Colonel Niall. Most of the men here have military rank."

People with square heads, and a non-colonel being addressed as a colonel. Two pretty specific and unusual themes!