Nephi's vision prominently features a book that "proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew" (1 Ne. 13). Mormons almost universally understand this to be the Bible, even though that doesn't really make any sense. The Bible was written by lots of different people, some of whom were Jews (though such important authors as Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Paul were not), but the book Nephi saw is repeatedly described as coming out of the mouth of one Jew. It's not the Bible.
I was just thinking about this mysterious book the other day because of its possible relevance to one of the couplets in "With?"
Minbad the Mailer was a Jew
And wrote a lot of novels, too.
Norman Mailer, obviously. It's oddly worded, though, making him first and foremost a Jew, with the fact that he was a novelist mentioned only as a sort of afterthought. As soon as I started reading "With?" seriously, I suspected that Minbad was "the Jew" from Nephi's vision.
This checks out:
Thou hast beheld that the book proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew; and when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord (1 Ne. 13:22).
A "Norman mailer" could be someone sending out messages from Normandy, France. Mailer's real name was actually Nachem, meaning "comforter."
Jews are members of the Tribe of Judah, whose symbol is the Lion, just as the Bull is the symbol of the House of Joseph. In my last post, I discussed a picture of two lions in a library and focused on one of the books, The Gospel of Luke, which is symbolized by the Bull. I somehow missed the very conspicuous fact that there's another book literally proceeding forth from the mouth of a Lion!
Lassie Come Home -- that is, symbolically, the title of the Book from the Mouth of the Jew. I have a lot to say about the significance of that title, but it will have to wait until I have time. For now, I just want to get it out there with this quick post.
So far, we know that Ninbad the Nailer is Trent Reznor, Hinbad the Hailer is Elijah, and Rinbad the Railer is both Arthur Rimbaud and J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien was born just 54 days after Rimbaud died, leaving open the weird but interesting possibility of a literal reincarnation. Speaking of Tolkien's possible past lives, William Wright believes one of them was Elijah, so perhaps Hinbad and Rinbad are the same dude.
Whinbad and Pinbad, I have just decided, are also the same dude.
Whinbad the Whaler was delish
And not unlike Filet-O-Fish.
This is pretty obviously just a throwaway joke. While everyone else in the poem is a person, Whinbad turns out to be a fish sandwich formerly sold by Burger King. Can't be much hidden meaning in that, right?
O ye of little faith!
Leaving fish sandwiches to one side, who's the most famous whaler of all time? I think we can all agree that Captain Ahab has no rivals in that department, right? Captain Ahab was named after a king, and a king who was delicious -- or at least his blood was, to dogs -- as is explicitly pointed out in Moby-Dick.
". . . Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?"
Not just a king but a crowned king. Burger King, of course, emphasizes crowns in their branding and gives customers paper crowns to wear.
And what's Filet-O-Fish, besides a sandwich? Well, if delish is short for delicious, o-fish can be short for official. One of the meanings of fillet is a headband or circlet. A circlet as a mark of office is what is commonly known as a crown -- which brings us to Whinbad's alter ego, Pinbad:
Pinbad the Pailer was the bloke
Who had a crown, but then it broke.
This was intended as an allusion to a well-known nursery rhyme:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
Pinbad is Jack. In Australia, Burger King is known as Hungry Jack's, so Pinbad is the same as Whinbad the Whaler with his fillet of office -- i.e., King Ahab. Jill, then is pretty clearly a contraction of Jezebel, Ahab's queen. Shortly after the death of Ahab, "Jill came tumbling after," being thrown to her death from a window by her servants. The pail of water on the hilltop is a pretty clear reference to the best known event from the reign of Ahab and Jezebel: the showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal at the top of Mt. Carmel, with Elijah famously dousing his sacrifice with barrels of water before calling down fire from heaven to ignite it. Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water -- as if to duplicate Elijah's miracle -- means they did not accept Elijah's victory, and the failure of the prophets of Baal, as final but still thought they could best him.
This is such an obvious "esoteric" reading of this nursery rhyme that I can hardly believe Aleister Crowley didn't beat me to it. Of course he didn't have Whinbad the Whaler to jump-start the train of associations.
On the night of August 26, 2023, as documented in "Phoenix syncs," I dreamed that I was with my brother (I'm not sure which brother it was) in "a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves," and that we were searching the place, "trying to find 'plates' -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced."
On Holy Saturday night, March 30, 2024, as recorded in "Chips, clips, and the eclipse," I dreamed that I was again in "an indoor area full of dead leaves" on Annunciation Day and that I found there "a flat disc some 10 inches in diameter . . . made of some light-colored metal (color perception in this dream was poor) and . . . covered with engravings."
At the time of the dreams, I connected this place full of dead leaves with the abandoned restaurant I began exploring in July 2022 ("Owl time and cold noodles"), since that was the only such place I knew in waking life. In neither case did I say the place was that restaurant, though, only that it suggested or resembled it. Nevertheless, the dreams did leave me with a vague sense that I should keep going back to the restaurant and that I might find something of value there. Since January 22 of this year, the restaurant has been locked up ("The Green Door finally closes"), and I haven't been back inside. Such is the influence of the dreams, though, that I keep having a nagging feeling that I should go back in, even if it means picking the lock or climbing the wall.
I've been there many times, though, and explored it pretty thoroughly. The only "plates" there are ceramic and melamine dishware, and the only "discs" are some scratched-up CDs of run-of-the-mill pop music and for some reason a lot of blank CDs as well. (I brought them home and confirmed that they're all blank.) The chance of finding anything new there -- let alone some kind of ancient engravings -- is obviously exceedingly remote.
When I acquired some new Tarot cards this past May 30, I received a strong impression from Claire that I needed to get an "ark" -- her word -- to keep them in. (Readers may have noticed a passing reference to this in "More on Joan and Claire.") I know some Tarotists are finicky about where they store their cards -- they have to be wrapped in back silk or whatever -- but I've never really cared about that and generally just keep them in the box they came in. With this deck, though, Claire insisted on an "ark" and flashed me a helpful illustration, somewhat reminiscent of IKEA-style assembly instructions, showing how the cards should be placed on a bed of dried rosemary leaves in a small stone box with a lid. (This was before Simon and Garfunkel had entered the chat; now I wonder if I should add some parsley, sage, and thyme!) When I wondered where on earth I was going to get a stone box of the appropriate size, my first thought, however ridiculous, was to look for one in the abandoned restaurant! In the end I settled on a stainless steel "ark" instead (paper and plastic were definitely out of the question, and I couldn't find anything suitable in ceramic), on the understanding that this was only a temporary home for the cards until I could get something in stone.
Not until I started writing this post did it occur to me that I now had, symbolically, some "plates" in a "room" full of dead leaves.
The Golden Plates used by Joseph Smith were found in a stone box, which Don Bradley and others have compared to the Ark of the Covenant -- instead of Moses' stone scripture in a gold box, gold scripture in a stone box.
Today it finally clicked that maybe the "dead leaves" in my dreams have nothing to do with the restaurant but may be yet another "plates" reference. "Leaves of gold" -- both tree leaves and leaves of a book -- have been very much in the sync-stream recently. This started with my January 4 post "Leaves of gold unnumbered," in which golden tree-leaves in two different Tolkien poems were connected with the leaves of the Golden Plates. In the second of these poems, "Namárië," the golden leaves are also dead leaves, falling from the trees in autumn. I also included this imagery of "gold" autumnal leaves in my May 15 poem "Humpty Dumpty revisited"; this was just some whimsical punning on Humpty's "great fall," with no conscious reference to my earlier "leaves of gold" post. Then on June 10, as recorded the next day in "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," I tried to translate a passage from Rimbaud for myself because I was unhappy with Louise Varèse's failure to translate feuilles d'or literally as leaves of gold. Rimbaud's "leaves" are closer to the Golden Plates, something to write on. Then that very night, I happened to read in Richard Cavendish's The Tarot about Etteilla's claim that the original Book of Thoth had been written "on leaves of gold" near Memphis. William Wright picked up on this theme in "The Brass Leafy Plates and all roads lead to France," proposing that my "leaves of gold" syncs have to do with the Brass Plates and that these are currently in France. (If anyone wants to follow up that lead, the first place I'd look is behind the altar in the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse; let me know if you find anything.) He also brings up the idea of an "ark" (and connects it with Joan of Arc, which I had somehow failed to do!), though for him it is the plates themselves that constitute the ark.
The place to which all roads proverbially lead is of course not France but Rome, and that makes me think of Book VI of the Aeneid. There our hero visits the cave of the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess whose usual practice is to write the word of bright Phoebus on literal leaves -- oak leaves -- and leave them at the mouth of her cave, where they soon blow away in the wind. Aeneas specifically asks her not to do this with the oracle he has requested: "Only do not write your verses on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds: chant them from your own mouth." The seeress obliges -- and goes on to speak of leaves of gold!
Hidden in a dark tree is a golden bough, golden in leaves and pliant stem, sacred to Persephone, the underworld’s Juno, all the groves shroud it, and shadows enclose the secret valleys. But only one who’s taken a gold-leaved fruit from the tree is allowed to enter earth’s hidden places.
Aeneas finds this fabled golden bough hidden among the leaves of an otherwise ordinary oak tree:
Just as mistletoe, that does not form a tree of its own, grows in the woods in the cold of winter, with a foreign leaf, and surrounds a smooth trunk with yellow berries: such was the vision of this leafy gold in the dark oak-tree, so the foil tinkled in the light breeze.
(I'm away from my study at the moment and don't have access to any of my preferred translations of Virgil. The above are A. S. Kline's, taken from this site.)
With this context -- and the Aeneid, which I have read more times and in more translations than any other book outside the Bible, is very much a part of the furniture of my subconscious, likely to influence my dreams -- the dream image of golden plates hidden in an enclosed space full of dead leaves takes on another possible meaning. It's as if some devotee of far-darting Phoebus, anxious that nothing be lost, had assiduously gathered as many of the wind-scattered leaves as could be recovered and shut them up in a room lest they blow away again. Alas, leaves are but leaves, and it is not the wind that keeps them from lasting forever. They may be bright when they fall from the oak, but nothing gold can stay. Hidden among those brittle husks of desiccated prophecy, though, may be found, like mistletoe in the shadows, a few leaves from the genuine Golden Bough, enabling passage to other worlds. These at least are not ephemeral: "these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time."
So maybe the Sybil's way of doing things was right all along: Let blow away whatever can blow away; true gold will remain.
Working out what that means is going to take some time, but at least it's nice to have found a different interpretive angle and to get away from the stupid literalness of focusing on that restaurant!
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One little postscript: In "What shall we do with the drunken Railer?" I mention the very unsatisfactory nature of the French translation of the Sinbad bit in Ulysses, where Joyce's tailor and jailer and whaler become the meaningless tarin and jarin and wharin. Couldn't they have found some actual French words that rhyme with marin as the English words rhyme with sailor? Well, I've been on a DIY translation kick recently, so if no one else is going to do it . . . .
I found a French rhyming dictionary online and looked up words that rhyme with marin. Pretty slim pickings, it turns out:
Pinbad le Parrain, the godfather? Not too many other possibilities here. But the very first result, after marin itself, is romarin. I looked it up, and it's the French word for rosemary, the herb. Weird coincidence.
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:
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.
For whatever reason, that ridiculous passage in Ulysses with its interminable list of chaps whose names and titles rhyme with Sinbad the Sailor -- the one I expanded on in my May 25 post "With?" -- has been on my mind these days. After posting "Yeats, Joan, and Claire" yesterday, I even looked up the French translation to confirm my assumption that the French version of Darkinbad the Brightdayler (Dark = d'Arc) would include clair. It does. The rest of the translation is pretty uninspired. Instead of finding lots of real words that rhyme with sailor, as Joyce does, the French just sticks the first letters from the English onto Sinbad le Marin, yielding Tinbad le Tarin, Whinbad le Wharin, etc. -- pure nonsense, lacking the charm of the tailors and whalers of the original. Only two (not counting the already anomalous Darkinbad) deviate from this schema. Minbad the Mailer becomes le Malin ("the wicked" or "the clever"), and Rinbad the Railer becomes le Rabbin ("the rabbi") -- which I think has retroactively made my own verse about Rinbad (who travels by train because he's cheap) antisemitic!
Due to that context -- Rinbad, sailors, French, translation -- a small book on one of my shelves caught my eye this morning: an English translation of The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. I didn't have time to look at it, but I made a mental note to add it to my reading list.
Later, in the afternoon, I had to stop into a shop to buy something and was amazed to hear the background music they were playing: some kind of pop version of the sea shanty "Drunken Sailor." I couldn't make out most of the lyrics, not even enough to tell for sure what language they were in, but the tune was unmodified, and each verse still ended with the singers belting out "Ur-lie in the mor-ning!"
This obviously suggests a new way of adapting the Ulysses passage:
What shall we do with the shrunken sailor?
What shall we do with the trunken tailor?
What shall we do with the drunken jailer?
Ur-lie in the mor-ning!
What shall we do with the whunken whaler?
What shall we do with the nunken nailer?
What shall we do with the funken failer?
Ur-lie in the mor-ning!
and so on until you run out of consonants. It could be the next "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."
William Wright has a new post up, "Leon Eggbert and Sun-Moon Time," in which he analyzes that name: Leon Egbert, which was included in some of his "words." He begins by respelling the last name with a double-g and interpreting it as Egg-bert.
As I've mentioned before, the TV aspect of my childhood education was sadly neglected. However, one program I did watch religiously was Sesame Street, being a particular fan of the Bert and Ernie sketches. When Q*bert came up back in 2021, I thought of this:
And when I saw Eggbert, I thought of this sketch:
As the scene opens, we see Ernie with a feather duster and what looks like a small stone (cf. Vaughn J. Featherstone) but turns out to be an egg. The egg is just sitting there on the counter, much like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, and Bert asks Ernie to "put my egg away, please" -- that is, to "put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," as in the version of the rhyme favored by Ludovicus Carolus, that most holy illuminated man of God. Ernie begins making excuses and giving reasons for not restoring the egg to its proper place, to the point where we begin to suspect that, like the king's horses and men, he can't. Finally, the exasperated Bert says, "Drop it, Ernie," resulting -- thanks to Ernie's literal-mindedness -- in Humpty's having his great fall. As in my "Humpty Dumpty revisited," Humpty is still sitting on the wall (or counter) when he cracks.
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The first element in the name Egbert doesn't actually have anything to do with eggs. It is related, rather, to our modern word edge, and the name as a whole means "bright edge," with the "edge" generally understood to be that of a sword. I think this fits with William Wright's ideas about Pharazôn, who did terrible things but whose story perhaps ends in redemption. In the Book of Mormon, the imagery of a bright sword represents the repentance and redemption of people who were once murderers:
Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son of our great God, which shall be shed for the atonement of our sins (Alma 24:12-13).
(There is perhaps a link here to "Makmahod in France?" Joan's sword was stained when she found it -- both literally and perhaps also figuratively with a long history of bloodshed -- but she kept it bright and never used it to shed blood herself.)
As in Egbert, so in Schwarzenegger does the egg element mean "edge." Arnold's surname indicates someone from Schwarzenegg -- "Black Ridge." This black edge obviously complements the bright edge of Egbert. Schwarzenegger has featured in past syncs here primarily in his role as Hercules in Hercules in New York. Interestingly, Hercules has recently resurfaced, and in connection with a ridge. In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I refer to a passage in Pausanias. Here it is:
On crossing the river Erymanthus at what is called the ridge of Saurus are the tomb of Saurus and a sanctuary of Heracles, now in ruins. The story is that Saurus used to do mischief to travellers and to dwellers in the neighborhood until he received his punishment at the hands of Heracles. At this ridge which has the same name as the robber, a river, falling into the Alpheius from the south, just opposite the Erymanthus, is the boundary between the land of Pisa and Arcadia; it is called the Diagon.
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William Wright's identification of Humpty Dumpty as a bright egg possibly ties in with "With?" -- a bit of doggerel riffing on a nonsensical passage in Ulysses. The last two stanzas but one are as follows:
Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft
Our polyvinyl chloride soft.
And last of all comes Darkinbad,
Who is Brightdayler hight,
Who'll go down in the dark abyss
And bring all things to light.
The sync fairies drew my attention back to this just yesterday. I was talking with a friend who runs a high-end cable company, whom I hadn't seen in six months. She told me about a problem they were having with the jackets of one of their new products, which were formerly made of PVC but recently changed to a different material because of pressure to phase out PVC in the European market for environmental reasons. The problem was that the new material was less flexible than PVC, causing it to crack slightly when the cables are braided. As I said, I hadn't seen her in half a year, and we very rarely talk about manufacturing issues in this kind of detail anyway, so hearing that so soon after I had randomly written about the softness of PVC (because I thought Phthailer suggested phthalates) was a noteworthy coincidence. In the same conversation, she happened to ask how to say "hail a cab" in English, which also ties in with the poem -- "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car."
In the next stanza, Darkinbad the Brightdayler goes "down in the dark abyss." In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen," I had cited Aleister Crowley's reading of "Humpty Dumpty":
Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter . . . .
It's a little weird to say the wall is the Abyss -- surely he falls from the wall into the Abyss? At any rate, when I wrote the Darkinbad quatrain, I had no thought of Humpty's being "bright" or going into an "abyss"; these links were later supplied by William Wright and the Great Beast, respectively.
I dreamed I was somewhere away from home -- in a hotel room, I think, with some family members -- and I was reading a book. This was a very thick blue or green paperback, and on the cover was nothing but an oval-shaped black-and-white photograph of James Joyce. I don't think the book was actually by Joyce, though, although it was certainly thick enough to be Ulysses. Something about the typeface and punctuation gave a strong 19th-century impression, and when I tried to picture the author, I got an image of a professorial-looking man from that era, with a receding hairline and a heavy beard. I though it might be either William James or Éliphas Lévi. I don't have a clear idea of the content of the book or even of the language, but I'm sure it was a modern European language (perhaps English, French, or Italian), and that many of the paragraphs began with em-dashes. Reading it gave me the exhilarating feeling of seeing puzzle pieces fit together.
I decided to eat the last page of the book. It came apart in my mouth like pastry and had a light honey-like flavor. For a moment I reproached myself for this stupid mistake -- How could I finish reading the book now that I'd eaten the last page? -- but then I remembered that I had another copy of the same book at home, so it was no big deal.
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The idea of eating a book and having it taste like honey is biblical, and this dream may have been influenced by my fairly recent (February 22) reading of Ezekiel 2 and 3:
"But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee."
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
Moreover he said unto me, "Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel."
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, "Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."
And he said unto me, "Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand" (Ezek. 2:8-3:6).
The language of the hand being "sent" also parallels what Daniel told Belshazzar about the writing on the wall:
And thou . . . hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; . . . and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written (Dan. 5:22-24).
John of Patmos -- whose Revelation is, among other things, a synthesis of the various Old Testament prophets -- reports an experience similar to Ezekiel's:
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open . . . .
And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."
And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, "Give me the little book."
And he said unto me, "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey."
And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, "Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings" (Rev. 10:1-2, 8-11).
Unlike Ezekiel, who is specifically told that he does not have to speak "to many people of a strange speech," John is instructed to "prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues."
I think the honey-like flavor of all these books is probably an allusion to manna -- "the taste of it was like wafers made with honey" (Ex. 16:31) -- which symbolized the word of God:
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live (Deut. 8:3).
Recent syncs have implicitly brought up the idea of eating a book, as the golden plates of the Book of Mormon have been connected with the breakfast cereals Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Hidden Treasures. (see "A chameleon (or salamander) shifting trees -- this is cereal, guys!") Just as Ezekiel and John must eat a book before prophesying, Patrick tells William Alizio that he must finish eating all the Hidden Treasures before he can deliver his message (the message being "We have come to take you away").
Just yesterday I was at the supermarket to buy cocoa powder, and I saw that they had two kinds of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for sale: "Classic" and "Honey Flavor."
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.
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.
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.
Last night I happened to listen to this haunting version of the Blue Öyster Cult classic "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," set to an instrumental track by P!nk.
The original version of this song is famously featured in the 2000 Christopher Walken "More Cowbell" sketch, but this mashup version has no cowbell at all. This, in the context of recent Wizard of Oz syncs, made me think, "Cowbell out of order. Please knock." But it's not like any "knocking" has been added to replace the cowbell, so I dismissed the thought.
The line "Seasons don't fear the Reaper" always makes me think of some lines from James Joyce, one of the poems from Chamber Music: "The leaves -- they do not sigh at all / When the year takes them in the fall." In fact, I guess I've always sort of assumed the song was inspired by that poem, directly or indirectly. Today, I looked up the whole poem and was surprised to find that it features knocking!
Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We two shall wander, hand in hand,
Forbearing for old friendship’ sake,
Nor grieve because our love was gay
Which now is ended in this way.
A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree;
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves -- they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.
Now, O now, we hear no more
The villanelle and roundelay!
Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything --
The year, the year is gathering.
A few days ago I had the thought that a tree could be the equivalent of the Green Door, but I can no longer retrace the train of thought that led me there. All that comes to mind now (though it was not my original thought) is Yggdrasil, the tree that is the "gate" between the worlds. Today I saw a roadkilled squirrel on the road and thought, "Ah, poor Ratatoskr!"
Another poem from Chamber Music also came to mind.
Gentle lady, do not sing
Sad songs about the end of love;
Lay aside sadness and sing
How love that passes is enough.
Sing about the long deep sleep
Of lovers that are dead, and how
In the grave all love shall sleep:
Love is aweary now.
The Reaper's sickle, and the end of love, then made me think of Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Joyce's embrace of the Reaper comes from a deep intuition which he himself did not understand and thus explained wrongly. The reason for not fearing the Reaper is not that "Love that passes is enough" -- how could it be? -- but that death and resurrection are the gateway to the realm of that which does not pass, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. "Romeo and Juliet / Are together in eternity."
Human love, as experienced in mortality, is as mortal as every other human thing. It alters, it changes, it bends with the remover to remove. But resurrection is coming, and the restoration of all things. "Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life," wrote the Prophet Joseph Smith, "it will rise with us in the resurrection" (D&C 130:18). He did not say that we will keep it, but that it will rise in resurrection -- for we forget so very much of what we learn, and many of us end mortality in a state of dementia. What the Prophet said of intelligence is true also of love. Whatever broken, imperfect, changeable principle of love we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. "For all things must fail -- but charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever" (Moro. 7:46-47).
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:42-44).
And a little wink from the synchronicity fairies: I had known Blue Öyster Cult only for "The Reaper," but Wikipedia informs me that they are best known for three singles, the other two being "Burnin' for You" and -- "Godzilla."
I first encountered the Irish mystic George William Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym A.E., in the pages of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus borrows money from him and then quips, "A.E.I.O.U." I thought that was a pretty good pun but, compared to some of the other work of the greatest punster ever to walk the face of the earth, nothing spectacular.
Only recently (as in this week) have I actually gotten around to reading any of A.E.'s work. I found that in The Candle of Vision he makes the letters of the alphabet an object of mystical contemplation, considers the vowels separately from the consonants, and takes pains to get the letters in what he considers to be the correct order. Given that the Candle was published just two years before Ulysses, and that the two authors knew each other, I can only conclude that the allusion to A.E.'s alphabetical mysticism was deliberate.
So, Joyce, I apologize for having underestimated you here. Despite everything (and there's a lot to forgive!), you were, in your own way, God.
⁂
On pp. 116-118, A.E. explains his project of "brooding upon the significance of separate letters":
I was first led to brood upon the elements of human speech by that whisper of the word "Aeon" out of the darkness, for among many thoughts I had at the time came the thought that speech may originally have been intuitive. I discarded the idea with regard to that word, but the general speculation remained with me, and I recurred to it again and again, and began brooding upon the significance of separate letters, and had related many letters to abstractions or elements . . . . I then began to rearrange the roots of speech in their natural order from throat sounds, through dentals to labials, from A which begins to be recognisable in the throat to M in the utterance of which the lips are closed. An intellectual sequence of ideas became apparent. This encouraged me to try and complete the correspondences arrived at intuitively. I was never able to do this. Several sounds failed, however I brooded upon them, to suggest their intellectual affinities, and I can only detail my partial discoveries . . . .
In the following chapter, he lays out these partial discoveries, which may be summarized thus:
A: the self, God; a circle
R: motion; red; a vertical line
H: heat; orange; a triangle
L: fire, light, radiation; a shape like an upside-down Y
Y: binding, concentration, condensation, gravitation, the will; yellow; a triskelion
W: liquidity, water; green; the lower half of a circle, a smile-like shape
G: earth; a square
K: mineral, rock, crystal, hardness; a square crossed by a diagonal, so oriented that the diagonal is vertical
S: impregnation, inbreathing, insouling, the genesis of the cell; a circle with a horizontal line through the center, like the letter theta
Z: multiplication, division, reproduction; a circle with a cross in it, like the astronomical symbol for Earth
TH: growth, expansion, swelling
SH: scattering, dissolution, decay
T: individual action, movement, initiative, ego, extroversion; a symmetrical cross, like a plus sign
D: silence, sleep, immobility, abeyance, inwardness; the upper half of a circle, with a horizontal line joining its ends, like the letter D rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise
J: --
TCH: --
V: life in water, all that swims; blue
F: what lives in air and flies; blue
P: masculine life, paternity; indigo
B: feminine life, maternity; indigo
N: continuance of being, immortality; violet
M: close, limit, measure, end, death; violet
A.E. writes, "In all there are twenty-one consonants which with the vowels make up the divine roots of speech. . . . I despair of any attempt to differentiate from each other the seven states of consciousness represented by the vowels." I am not sure why A alone is discussed together with the consonants. At first I had thought it must, like the Hebrew aleph, represent a glottal stop, but A.E. clearly says that there are 21 consonants, which means A is a vowel.
The selection of sounds, and the order in which he puts them, are highly idiosyncratic. These 22 sounds correspond neither to any alphabet I know of nor to the phoneme inventory of any language with which I am familiar. It appears to be based on the sounds of English, as understood by someone deeply ignorant of phonetics. Many native speakers of English do not realize that there are two different "th" sounds (as in thy and thigh, respectively), that the "s" sound in vision is a distinct sound, or that "ng" is not just a combination of the "n" and "g" sounds.
The placing of R in second place implies that A.E. used a uvular ("guttural") "r" sound, as in French. According to Wikipedia, "A guttural/uvular [ʁ] is found in north-east Leinster. Otherwise, the rhotic consonant of virtually all other Irish accents is the postalveolar approximant, [ɹ]." A.E. was from County Armagh, adjoining north-east Leinster, so it is possible that he spoke this way -- or it could be just another sign of his general confusion regarding where in the mouth different consonants are articulated.
The consonants from 7 to 22 appear in pairs, often but not always representing voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound. Sometimes the voiced sound comes first (G-K, J-TCH, V-F), and sometimes the voiceless (S-Z, T-D, P-B). TH and SH are paired, presumably because A.E. was not aware that each had its own voiced counterpart, and because these two "orphan" fricatives seemed vaguely similar. N and M are paired because they are the only nasal consonants of which he was aware. I surmise that A.E. had no knowledge of the voiced/voiceless distinction but simply put together those consonants that seemed intuitively to be similar in sound.
Despite his use of such terms as "dental" and "labial," and despite his account of how he brooded over these sounds, repeating them to himself again and again, A.E. seems not to have been very clear on what was going on in his mouth when he pronounced them. The sounds are supposed to be organized according to place of articulation, from back to front, but there are many puzzling exceptions. L is an alveolar sound, articulated in the same place as T and D, but it is placed far in the back. When he repeated the L sound to himself, he must have been saying "ull, ull, ull" -- giving the consonant its "dark," velarized pronunciation, rather than the "clear" pronunciation found in "luh, luh, luh." The "dark l" sound is unusual in Hiberno-English but apparently does occur in some Ulster dialects.
The placing of the palatal sound Y in the back, behind the velars, is incorrect but understandable. Since the tongue only comes close to the hard palate without actually touching it, the sound's palatal character is not easy to discover by self-observation. In fact, we can see that A.E. put all approximants in the back, regardless of place of articulation, perhaps because it was not easy to observe how they were pronounced.
The interdental TH and the post-alveolar SH, J, and TCH are also also misplaced, less understandably. (I assume this is tch as in Tchaikovsky, thus spelt to differentiate it from ch as in Bach.) If you pronounce TH, S, and SH in succession, I think it's pretty easy to observe the tongue moving from the front of the mouth toward the back.
But the most obvious exception is N, which is placed with the labial consonants apparently on the strength of its similarity to M.
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These amateurish errors, together with the incompleteness of the mappings, demonstrate the sincerity with which the project was carried out. I have not the slightest doubt that A.E. did just what he said he did: brooded over these sounds for a long time and wrote down only those correspondences which were confirmed by intuition. Sometimes he didn't get anything (as with TCH and J), and other times his results were only tentative. (Although my summary does not show it, many of the correspondences are qualified with "I think," or "it vaguely suggested itself to me.")
On one level, this whole list of correspondences seems to be obvious nonsense. Aside from the linguistic difficulties, what does it even mean to say that R corresponds to motion, the color red, and a vertical line? What would follow from such a statement's being true or false? It seems like a classic example of an assertion that is (as Wolfgang Pauli would put it) "not even false." I am reminded of Valentin Tomberg's statement that the traditional planet-metal mappings of astrology (Sun to gold, Moon to silver, Venus to copper, etc.) have been confirmed for him time and again by experience. What sort of experience, I wondered when I read that, could possibly confirm such a thing? What properties of tin unfolded themselves to his understanding when he reflected on the "fact" that tin corresponds to the planet Jupiter? Or what light did tin shed on the nature of Jupiter?
Some of A.E.'s mappings did ring true, but it's hard to be sure why. For example, when I read about F ("what lives in air and flies"), I thought of English fly,flap, flutter, fowl, and feather; of Chinese fēi and Hebrew 'af, both meaning "fly"; and of T. H. White's geese singing "Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings" -- but of course this is just picking cherries, and most flight-related words in most languages do not feature the "f" sound. Does the abundance of such words in English mean that Anglophones have historically been particularly sensitive to the "true" meaning of their consonants? Do Anglophones think "better" or more clearly about flight because they call it flight? Is that why it was the English-speaking Wright brothers who invented the airplane? (On the other hand, the Montgolfier and Breguet brothers were French, and the great American ornithologist Audubon was born Jean Rabin in French-speaking Saint-Domingue.) Or, more likely, are A.E.'s intuitions unconsciously influenced by the vocabulary of his native language? One feels that the influence of English is also at play in A.E.'s mapping of R to red and Y to yellow. (Both of those mappings were found to be particularly common in Sean Day's survey of 43 colored-letter synesthetes, qv; Day regrettably neglected to record the languages spoken by his subjects.)
Still, despite these very deep misgivings, both about the general meaningfulness of the questions A.E. was asking and about the validity of his specific answers, I found that I reacted to many of his mappings with delight, and with a sense that, somehow and for some reason, his project was after all worth doing. I suppose what I am reacting to, more than to anything specific, is the general attitude of taking things seriously, of refusing to take arbitrariness and meaninglessness as the null hypothesis.
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Incidentally, the bit about the alphabet is only a few pages long; the bulk of The Candle of Vision is a serious and sustained meditation of the phenomena of imagination and clairvoyance and on what they mean. It's definitely something I'll be rereading.
