A chameleon (or salamander) shifting trees -- this is cereal, guys!

I read a bit in Karen Russell's novel Swamplandia! today. The narrator, Ava Bigtree (a White girl whose family has adopted an Indian surname and dresses as Indians as part of their alligator-wrestling act) is traveling in the Everglades with an eccentric known only as the Bird Man. When they unexpectedly encounter a park ranger, the Bird Man seems to transform:

[T]he Bird Man put on a big grin that made his face unrecognizable to me. It rejiggered his features so that they were at their most ordinary; even his eyes seemed pale and normal. Who had I been traveling with this great while? How could you change so completely when another person showed up, like a chameleon shifting trees? I was impressed (pp. 252-53).

Any reference to chameleons catches my eye these days, and this was a somewhat odd one -- not "changing colors" but "shifting trees." I guess the idea is that moving to different surroundings -- shifting trees -- might prompt a chameleon to change to a different color to maintain its camouflage. But this would only make sense if the two trees were different colors. This theme of two trees with contrasting colors has come up recently. In "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," I include a picture of John Opsopaus's Star card and quote him on the significance of the two cypress trees on the card:

[T]he dark cypress (with its serpent) is the Tree of Knowledge and the white cypress (with its bird) is the Tree of Life.

The white cypress with its bird is the Tree of Life. The name Ava has various origins, but as a modern name it is generally held to be a variant of Eva, meaning "life." So Ava Bigtree is White, her name suggests the Tree of Life, and she is accompanied by the Bird Man and (though it is not mentioned in the excerpt quoted above) by her pet, a young alligator which was born bright red. On Opsopaus's card, the serpent in the dark cypress is red, and the bird has the head of a lion. In recent syncs, the chameleon has been red and has been associated with the lion-headed serpent and with lion-headed creatures with wings. (See "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge" and "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires.") In another recent post, "Chameleons everywhere," we see a bird and a chameleon together in a tree, on the cover of a book called Lemurs, Chameleons, and Golden Plates.

In "Leaves of gold unnumbered," the golden plates were associated with leaves of gold in two poems by Tolkien. One of these two poems was quoted again in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose," in connection with another pair of differently-colored trees: the Two Trees (gold and silver/white) of Valinor and their scions in Gondolin. I put particular emphasis on the line in the poem which says the golden leaves "are falling in the stream, the river flows away."

In Swamplandia!, a few pages after the "chameleon shifting trees" reference, Ava Bigtree uses very similar imagery in describing how her memories of her deceased mother seem to be slipping away:

Even the few facts I did have about her last weeks tended to float away from me like shining leaves on water the more I tried to get a picture together (p. 256).

Opsopaus has a white tree and a dark one; Tolkien has a white tree and a golden one. Can this discrepancy be bridged? In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, I found a small fire smoldering the hollow of a tree. I stoked this fire, with the result that another tree became engulfed in white flames but was not consumed. The first burning tree could be considered both "dark" (because the fire was a small one, mostly just smoldering, with few flames) and "golden" (because such flames as it did have were the ordinary yellow-orange color of a wood fire). When the fire "shifted trees," it -- like a chameleon -- also changed color, becoming white.

So now the chameleon has been symbolically identified with fire -- an idea already latent in the existing "red chameleon" theme -- and specifically with a white fire. From this idea of a fiery lizard, it is no great jump to the idea of a salamander, and specifically a white salamander, though one also associated with "leaves of gold." I just posted, for reasons unrelated to any of these themes, "Hofmann's haiku: The Broo Jerroo." This is a haiku that seems at first to be about chameleonic gelatin ("The blue Jell-O / It is yellow"), and its author is the master forger Mark Hofmann, whose most notorious forgery is a letter in which Joseph Smith's leaves of gold are guarded not by the familiar Angel Moroni but by a folk-magicky trickster spirit in the form of a white salamander:

the next morning the spirit transfigured himself from a white salamander in the bottom of the hole & struck me 3 times & held the treasure [i.e., the golden plates] & would not let me have it . . . the spirit says I tricked you again

In "Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones," I write parenthetically "Half man, half chameleon, and half cat -- I'm cereal," linking to the classic South Park episode in which Al Gore, in a parody of his global warming shtick, tries to raise awareness of the deadly threat that is ManBearPig -- "half man, half bear, and half pig" -- and keeps repeating "I'm cereal" instead of "I'm serious."

In my "Fighting in ash-mud" dream, literal cereal came up. I needed a blanket to put out the tree's white fire, and I thought I could get one by finding a suitable word on the side of a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Then, hours after the dream, a conspiracy channel I subscribe to on YouTube, which had never ventured into the field of breakfast cereals before, posted a video about what's written on the side of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Flat yellow Corn Flakes are synchronistically adjacent to leaves or plates of gold. Frosted Flakes differ from Corn Flakes in that they are frosted with white sugar, so we have the gold/white duality again. The mascots of these two cereals -- a bird and a large feline -- suggest some of the animals that have come up in connection with the chameleon. The other cereal that has come up on this blog recently (see "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name") is Hidden Treasures. This is also a golden plates-adjacent name, and in my quote from Hofmann's salamander letter, the plates are referred to as "the treasure."

A red frisbee almost brained him

My last post, "Dinoco, here we come!" brought up the Al Jolson song "California, Here I Come," with its repeated line, "Open up that golden gate." At the same time, I have been reading Karen Russell's novel Swamplandia! about a family that owns a gator-wrestling theme park with 98 alligators, all of which are named Seth. These two things together made me think of The Golden Gate, the 1986 novelty novel by Vikram Seth, which is written entirely (even the table of contents!) in Onegin stanzas, the verse form invented by Pushkin for his verse novel of that name. Here’s the first stanza of the novel proper:

To make a start more swift than weighty,

Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon

A time, say, circa 1980,

There lived a man. His name was John.

Successful in his field though only

Twenty-six, respected, lonely,

One evening as he walked across

Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss

Of a red frisbee almost brained him.

He thought, "If I died, who'd be sad?

Who'd weep? Who'd gloat? Who would be glad?

Would anybody?" As it pained him,

He turned from this dispiriting theme

To ruminations less extreme.

In my Dinoco post, I linked to William Wright's post about Dinoco, which latter post also happens to feature this image:

There's the name John, together with an image that is certainly suggestive of someone getting brained by a red frisbee.

The lake and the larch-root tree

This was a sort of amorphous dream, neither very visual nor very verbal, but I got the general idea.

There was a small lake and growing near it a very tall tree called a “larch-root tree.” A magician wanted to move both of these to a distant location, so he caused each of them to collapse into a little cylindrical capsule, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun shell but only half as long. He put the two capsules in the pocket of his robe and left.

When he arrived at the new location, he made the capsules expand again into a lake and a larch-root tree. However, he lacked the understanding to do this properly. Their original configuration had been stable, but the new one was not. Something about their relative position made it possible for the larch-root tree to suck up all the water in the lake, and in no time the lake was completely gone.

The magician had definitely not been expecting this, and his facial expression made it clear that it threw a spanner in his plans.

There were a few follow-up dreams revisiting this event and explaining its significance, but I can’t remember any of them.

Note added: About two hours after posting the above, I read this in Swamplandia! by Karen Russell:

Melaleuca quinquenervia was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry (p. 96).

That’s a pretty tight sync with the dream, in which a tree sucks a lake dry after being relocated to a new environment.

Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach

My last two posts have featured syncs with a cross or crucifix between the antlers of a stag. Today, on one of my truly-random rambles through Taichung, I found this on a the door of a closed restaurant. (It's Chinese New Year; everything is closed.)

It's a pretty odd thing to find in February in a non-Christian country. It appears to be permanently attached to the door, not a seasonal decoration. But the important thing, sync-wise, is that right at the top we have Christ -- as part of the word Christmas -- located between the antlers of a stag. Exactly centered between the antlers is Ch -- a transliteration of the Greek X, the cross. Notice also that each of the two circles around the stag is broken into eight segments, suggesting the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune.

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Chameleons have been in the sync stream. Today I read a bit in Shadowland by Colin Wilson and also started reading Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Shadowland is the sixth installment in the Spider World series, which deals mainly with human beings and giant spiders. In the bit I read today, a new intelligent species is introduced: color-changing "chameleon men." I didn't see that coming. Then later I started reading Swamplandia!, about a family that runs an alligator theme park in Florida, and found this:

According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator . . . . That monster's surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa's dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa's Chameleon Baptism (p. 31).

I don't really get why they called it that. Because the dots being erased from her skirt is sort of like changing color? The meaning of "Chameleon Baptism" is not explained, and so far (I'm on page 52) it hasn't been referenced again. In Shadowland, the main character meets the chameleon men after they pull his unconscious body from a river, he having just gone over a waterfall. In William Wright's January 24 post, "'Get to the choppa!': A skin-removing Chameleon hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger," which started this whole chameleon theme, he writes that in the movie Predator, "Arnold even gets a 'baptism' after his run away from the Chameleon." By "baptism," he means jumping into a river and going over a waterfall, much like Niall in Shadowland; and the "Chameleon" is of course the nearly invisible humanoid Predator, much like Niall's "chameleon men."

In my own syncs, the red chameleon has been particularly important, as has its long red protruding tongue, which has also been seen on a Pokémon and a female vampire:

When I checked in with The Most Censored Publication in History today, I was greeted by this image:

An AI-generated image of Lady Liberty with vampire fangs and an extremely long protruding red tongue -- what more natural way to illustrate a story about Zuck censoring the supreme leader of Iran?

Later, since I'm finding Swamplandia! quite a good read so far, I googled the author, Karen Russell. This is what came up:

Look at the books that are highlighted: First, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I already knew about. (It's why I bought Swamplandia!, as documented here.) Second, an edition of Swamplandia! with a red alligator on the cover -- which is even more unusual than a red chameleon! It's an unusually short-snouted gator, too, looking more like a lizard, and even looks as if it has a chameleon-like crest at the back of its head. (My own copy is a different edition, with a regular alligator-colored alligator. If you do an image search for swamplandia, the seventh result is the first one with a red gator. Still, that's the one Google chose to highlight.) And right next to this thing that looks an awful lot like a red chameleon, the word VAMPIRES. And is it just me, or does that leaf make the lemon look like a hand grenade?

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Here's something else I read in Swamplandia! today which confused me:

I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café (p. 32).

Wait, the clock is inside an alligator's stomach? Then how can anyone see it to check the time? My best guess at the author's intended meaning, taking both inside and stomach rather loosely, is that there was some skin taken from a gator's underbelly, with the clock mounted in the center. But my literal interpretation on the first read, together with the word hook in the following sentence, made me think of Hook's nemesis in Peter Pan, a crocodile that made a ticking sound because it had swallowed a clock. In the Disney movies, the crocodile's name is actually Tick-Tock.

Then, on the same truly-random ramble that led me to another Christ-between-antlers, I found this:

Okay, what exactly is that on the left? I mean, it's obviously meant to suggest a clock (with no hands), but what about the other features? What's that thing on top, that gives it the shape of a cartoon bomb? Is it supposed to be a stopwatch? But why does it look like it has some black liquid in it? Is it a bottle, and that thing at the top is the cap? But I've never seen drink sold in a bottle like that. It looks more like a perfume bottle or something. . . .

Then I remembered something else I had read in Swamplandia! today. After the death of the narrator's mother, no one in the family is doing laundry:

I don't know what [my brother] was doing for clean clothing during that period; for months my sister and I had been spraying out undershirts and shorts with Mom's perfume. . . . two pumps, per sister, per day. We were using Mom up, I worried, and for some reason that fear made me want to spray on more and more. The perfume worked like a liquid clock for us: half a bottle drained to a quarter, that was winter.

Just logging syncs. We'll see if they lead anywhere.

Another "raised by wolves" sync -- and Shadilay!

The phrase "raised by wolves" -- as used as a slogan by the Minnesota Timberwolves -- came up in my February 1 post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan."

Today I was browsing in a new-to-me used bookstore I had discovered, and I was drawn to a novel called Swamplandia! by Karen Russell even though the cover had that "critically acclaimed" look that usually makes me give a book a wide berth. I opened it up and found this:

The sync fairies have spoken. I bought the book.

William Wright left a comment on my original "raised by wolves" post in which he connects the expression, by way of the Rudyard Kipling character Mowgli, with spacefaring frogs:

The phrase "Raised by Wolves" reminds me of Jungle Book. Mowgli is raised by wolves. Kipling said that Mowgli was a made up name - in other words, though it meant "frog" in the book, this wasn't based on any known languages.

As an amphibian, Mowgli would be able to live and travel on both land and water - perhaps even Many Waters?

A frog crossing space has come up in your own posts, where in one instance you reference Pepe the Frog crash landing on a shooting star. The 'thumb'-nail image for that video you posted has Arnold's head swapped with that of a green frog as he flees the temple (likely skipping out of this world for another).

This immediately made me think of the 1986 Italo disco song "Shadilay" (I mentioned Italo Calvino in the post), which on September 11, 2016, was suddenly discovered by /pol/ and became associated with Pepe the Frog and his Egyptian deity alter ego Kek.

For those unfamiliar with the song and its memetic significance, see "SHADILAY: The sacred word that founded a new meme faith." That article also points out that Shadilay was the name of a fan-created Pokémon made in 2015, described by the author as "a glum-faced amphibian, water/ghost-type Pokemon." Since another "ghost-type Pokemon" has recently entered the sync stream, that seems relevant.

Kipling said that Mowgli means "frog" but that he'd just made it up. Shadilay is also a made-up word, but according to its creator, Marco Ceramicola alias Manuele Pepe, it means "spaceship." (I can't seem to find where he said that, but I'm sure he did. A 4plebs search confirms I'm not crazy.)