Life imitates Unsong: A real-life double pun correction

My first mention of Joan of Arc on this blog was on December 15, 2020. I mentioned her as part of a pun from Unsong, which had been brought to mind by a P. G. Wodehouse novel, which had been brought to mind by a mention of the biblical story of Balaam's ass.

I am suddenly reminded of a passage from the P. G. Wodehouse novel Jeeves in the Offing.

'And, anyway, Reggie's gone for a walk and isn't available. I do wish you wouldn't always be so difficult, Bertie. Your aunt tells me it was just the same when you were a child. She'd want you to eat your cereal, and you would stick your ears back and be stubborn and non-cooperative, like Jonah's ass in the Bible.'

I could not let this go uncorrected. It's pretty generally known that when at school I won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.

'Balaam's ass. Jonah was the chap who had the whale. Jeeves!'

'Sir?'

'To settle a bet, wasn't it Balaam's ass that entered the nolle prosequi?'

'Yes, sir.'

I have recently been reading Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. One of the running gags is "biblical pun correction." One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is "corrected" by another: "Jonah whale; Noah ark." Later in the conversation, someone says "to no avail" and received the converse correction: "Noah ark; Jonah whale."

These pun corrections in Unsong always come in reciprocal pairs like this. So when one of the characters describes the pyramids as "solemn and huge," and is corrected with "Solomon wise; Goliath huge," you know that somewhere along the line someone is going to say something that sounds like "Goliath wise" and receive the converse correction. Trying to anticipate how and when the second pun will drop is part of the fun of reading the novel.

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In my March 27 post "The New Orleans Saint," I mentioned Joan of Arc and also happened to mention February 14 (Valentine's Day) as the date the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl. Mr. Andrew left this comment on the post:

I just finished "Something Fresh" by Wodehouse last night. The main love interest woman is named Joan Valentine. I think Wodehouse meant this as a joke because Valentine obviously refers to romance, while the Joan character is a strong, independent, and daring/brave woman - and both are names of Saints.

My sister Kat Valentine has drawn a portrait of Joan of Arc and written a poem about her, both of which have been featured on this blog. So when I read this comment, I thought, Unsong style, "Joan of Arc; Kat Valentine." (I didn't notice the Wodehouse connection until I went back and read my original Joan of Arc comment.)

Knowing the rules of Unsong puns, I started waiting for the second pun to drop. After "Joan Valentine," I should be on the lookout for something like "Kat of Arc" -- or, since Kat's real name is Crystal . . . Wait a second, this is the second pun! The first one dropped over a year ago! On January 19, 2021, I posted this:

There was an LED advertising board behind the counter at the shop. I looked up at it and saw the Tricolor and the words "Made in France" -- Maid in France -- which got my attention. Then the screen changed, and I saw what it was advertising: a brand of glassware called Cristal d'Arques. "Made in France" notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure d'Arques isn't real French; but if it were, it would be a homophone of d'Arc. (Incidentally, my post on Joan of Arc was illustrated with a portrait of that saint by my sister Kat, whose given name is actually Crystal.)

So let me say now what I should have said back then: "Crystal Valentine; Jeanne d'Arc."

St. Joan's Day

Today marks the 590th anniversary of the murder of my patron saint, Jehanne of Domrémy. No body lies a-moldering in the grave -- she was burned at the stake and then cremated twice more to ensure nothing would be left of her -- but she lives today, a resurrected being, and her soul goes marching on.

This poem was written by my sister Kat, who has graciously given me permission to publish it here. I had originally planned to quote it as part of a much longer post I am working on, but that is a post for another day, and the poem is a poem for today.

They marched to the fire with a drum roll and battle-cries

They mobbed through the courtyard with passionate hate

They tied to the stake a soldier-maiden

And lighted the flames to purge heresy-taint

 

They shouted huzzah! as the pyre leapt upward

They tossed up their caps to the conquering flame

They toasted their mess-mates for burning a maiden

And ridding the earth of a scourge and a stain

 

They marched off in glory, content with their doing

They knew that a fire leaves nothing behind

They left her in cinders, and smoldering ashes

And wended their way with a bright, fearless mind

 

But they found, to their fury, she had somewhat escaped them

They knew not at first, but they finally learnt

Her heart was on fire with vision already

And fire is the one thing that cannot be burnt

Those who watched Joan burn report seeing a dove rise phoenix-like from the flames -- conveying, in the symbolic language of the prophets, the message, "This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name."

There are heavy rains and flooding in Taiwan today, forecast to continue for a week, marking the end of the longest and most serious drought in many decades. The timing of these things is never just a coincidence.

The dragon and the subterranean swan

Back in December 2019, I posted about an allegorical picture of my sister Kat's -- a rather unconventional depiction of the Last Judgment, using a swan in an underground chamber as a symbol of Christ.

Then Cometh the End

I connected this with a drawing by Oswald Wirth which I had seen a few days earlier -- the Judgment card of the Tarot, with a huge swan replacing the angel who sounds the Last Trump. Just as Kat's swan is underground, Wirth's seems to be diving down into an open grave.

Wirth associates each of the Major Arcana with a constellation, and the constellation associated with the Judgment is Cygnus, the Swan. These correspondences are summarized in this diagram, taken from an English translation of Wirth's Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge.

Note that Cygnus is directly above Draco and oriented as if it were diving down towards the dragon. (These two constellations are not so oriented in the sky.) Notice also that Draco is labeled 13, meaning that it corresponds to the nameless 13th trump, which represents Death. Wirth's swan drawing also shows the swan diving down into a representation of death, while Kat's shows the swan already in a sort of "underworld."

In his 2006 article "Constellations Testify of Seven Angels," John P. Pratt connects the Swan with Simon Peter -- who was, famously, crucified upside down.

The constellation of the Cross is usually called the Southern Cross because another name for the Swan is the Northern Cross. Note how the stars in the Swan form a nearly perfect crucifix in the heavens. And also note that the Swan is upside-down on the cross, the head of the Swan being the foot of the cross. Could it be that Peter's upside-down crucifixion could have been represented in these heavenly figures thousands of years before it occurred? What do you think? There is no doubt in my mind that the answer is yes, because the symbolism is too clear and too perfect.

There is no dragon in the story of Peter's martyrdom, but it does feature the "swan" (Peter) being in an underground chamber. In the same article, Pratt quotes this account of the apostle's last days.

Maliciously condemned, Peter was cast into the horrible, fetid prison of the Mamertine. . . . described as a deep cell cut out of solid rock at the foot of the capitol, consisting of two chambers, one above the other. The only entrance is through an aperture in the ceiling. The lower chamber was the death cell. Light never entered it and it was never cleaned.

This deep cell, accessible only through an aperture in the ceiling, suggests the cavern in Kat's drawing, or the open grave in Wirth's. The use of the word "aperture" in this context also puts me in mind of one of the most laughably bad passages in the Bible translation used by Jehovah's Witnesses: "upon the light aperture of a poisonous snake will a weaned child actually put his own hand" (Isaiah 11:8; KJV "the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den") -- giving us an indirect link to the serpent or dragon.

Finally, the identification of the swan with the angel of Judgment, and its association with the dragon, ties in with the Rider-Waite version of the Judgment card, where the angel bears the banner of St. George the Dragon-slayer.

In a recent post, I saw the name George paired not just with the dragon, but with Draco -- the Dragon as constellation.

My sister and the Maid on adjacent lines of text

Kevin McCall recently posted "Some thoughts on psychics," which begins by citing my own old post "The influence of adjacent lines of text."

In Kevin’s post, I found this:

The reference is to Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, but it's also an abbreviation of my own surname. I have recently received several email messages about my sister's portrait of Joan of Arc -- whom my correspondent usually refers to by her title "the Maid."

Note added: Kevin's post also mentions' Swedenborg's clairvoyant vision of "a fire in Stockholm." The stock in Stockholm means "stake, pole," so this is another nod to St. Joan.

Joan and the ark

My first mention of Joan of Arc, which set off the present chain of synchronicities, was a reference to "biblical pun correction" in Unsong: "One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is 'corrected' by another: 'Jonah whale; Noah ark.'" That is, one of the characters deliberately "mishears" the name "Joan of Arc" as "Jonah ark."

The first mention of Jonah in Unsong is when a girl meets a rabbinical student in a bar and gets him to agree to kiss her if she knows something about the Bible that he doesn't. She then asks him, "How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?" -- and he walks into the trap, replying "three days and three nights" without noticing that the question is about Joseph rather than Jonah.

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The more usual form of this joke is "How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?" And the punchline, more often than not, is, "None. Moses wasn't on the ark." But of course Moses was in an ark. Here is Exodus 2:3-6.

And when [the mother of Moses] could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.

And his sister [Miriam] stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.

And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.

Ark -- flags -- maid -- remind you of anyone? Many of my recent posts about Joan have centered on her distinctive banner or flag, and I have even had occasion to write (without any thought of Moses), "The word flag, of course, can also refer to a lilioid flower." In fact, when the word flag occurs in the King James Bible, it always refers to a riverside plant, never to a banner.

Joan's flag bore the names Jhesus and Maria. While the intended referents were of course Jesus Christ and his mother, these are also the New Testament forms of the Old Testament names Joshua and Miriam, respectively. Joshua was Moses' lieutenant and successor; Miriam, his elder sister who watched over him while he was in the ark.

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But the main biblical ark is the Ark of the Covenant, created under the direction of Moses. Like Joan's banner, it features God between two angelic beings. Here is Exodus 25:22.

And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.

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In the previous post, I mention my pleasure in discovering that Joan of Arc has had what is described as a "boat-shaped church" built to her name in Rouen (even though the church itself is an outrageous eyesore), because it recalls the joke about Joan of Ark being Noah's wife.

And then I realized that, if a boat-shaped church counts as an ark, "Jonah ark" isn't a mistake after all. Check out Chapters 8 and 9 of Moby-Dick. While the chapel Ishmael visits isn't technically "boat-shaped," it's certainly much more boat-like than your average house of worship. The pulpit is made to look like the prow of a ship, and is ascended by means of a rope ladder "like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." The preacher begins by shouting out nautical commands to the congregants -- "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard -- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" -- and then, addressing them as "shipmates," proceeds to deliver a sermon on -- Jonah.

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While I was in the process of writing this post, and had already made the Moses-Joan connection, Frank Berger left a comment on my previous post: "Check out my comment from your June 17, 2019 post in which you linked a gallery of your sister's fine drawings. The gallery featured thirty drawings, yet I comment on only one . . ."

The one drawing he had commented on was, of course, the portrait of Joan of Arc.

As for myself, in the 2019 post referred to, I had selected two of my sister's drawings as my favorites: one of an unidentified young woman, and the other titled Moses in the Court of Pharaoh.

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After writing all of the above, I suddenly had the idea that I should check Bible passages numbered 20:21 to see is they had any applicability to the year that has just begun. Remembering how my uncle William John had based his interpretation of 9/11 on Revelation 9:11, I thought I'd try Revelation 20:21 -- but there is no such verse. Psalm 20:21, then? No such verse. Genesis? No such verse. Exodus, then? Jackpot.

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

You and me both, Moses.

Can you just choose a patron saint?

Kat Valentine, Joan of Arc

I'm a Mormon. I don't know how this stuff works. Not that I've ever been much of a stickler for playing Christianity by the rules.

I've been a bit hard on the synchronicity fairies of late, resenting the way they've commandeered my blog for their political rannygazoo. Through it all I've never questioned their basic goodness, though, and now they've more than compensated me for my troubles by introducing me to one of the most perfect human beings that ever lived. All is forgiven.

I've been reading up a bit on Joan, trying to enter her world -- and then she unexpectedly entered mine. Twice today I've felt her presence around me so powerfully that I was reduced to uncontrollable tears (and I'm the kind of person who cries a few times a decade, if that). I believe she has taken an interest in us mortals now, in our darkest hour, and has begun working behind the scenes. God knows we need her.

Mark Twain captures her essence beautifully:

[T]he character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.

When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.

She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. . . . And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned, stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.

A saint for our time, in other words.

So this January 6, Epiphany, when you are celebrating the coming of the Magicians to Jesus Christ -- or, more likely, being distracted by the showdown in Washington -- take a moment to remember Jehanne of Domrémy. Not her death, which is remembered on May 30, but the miracle of her birth -- the birth of a pure soul into a brutal, wicked, rotten world. There is always hope.

By the way, some of my readers have expressed the opinion that my "synchronicity fairies" are God. They are not. They're just people; good people, not exactly human I think, but in the end just people. Once you've experienced the presence of someone genuinely divine, the difference is unmistakable. Fairies are fairies, angels are angels, gods are gods.

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!

The rain god and the weather dogs

On the road today I stopped at a red light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a helmet similar to the one pictured below, except that the color scheme was different. The helmet was predominantly green and black. The words "RAIN GOD" were written in white, with the "GO" in green. (I didn't take a photo and wasn't able to find a photo of the exact same helmet online.)

This caught my attention because the Chinese word for "dog" is 狗 -- transliterated gou and pronounced like the English word go. (When I was first learning Chinese, the P. D. Eastman book title Go, Dog. Go! served as a mnemonic.) So the helmet design highlights the dog in God, and it is a green dog. I connected this with my recent posts God and dog at the Panama Canal and The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) A further coincidence is that this helmet is produced by a company called Zeus; an important step in the train of associations in my "God and dog" post had been that Suez:Zeus::dog:God. Looking at the photo now, I also notice a black "two-prong crown" behind the words "RAIN GOD," but I can not be sure the helmet I saw also had this.

(Incidentally, if the letters GO, written in a different color, are removed, what remains is an anagram of INDRA -- who was indeed a "rain god" and is considered the Indian counterpart to Zeus,)

A rain dog. Words that become other words when written backwards. Suddenly I thought of a story fragment one of my sisters had written when she was a little girl, called The Planet Tennalp. Fortunately, my family has kept lots of our juvenilia and I have it in a PDF, so I was able to look it up. It begins thus:

Once upon a time there lived seven dogs. Their names were: Thunder, Lightning, Snowy, Misty, Rainbows, Showers, and Sleet. They were the Weather Dogs. They lived on Tennalp.

Weather Dogs, including one named Showers. And of course Tennalp is basically just planet written backwards. As we read on, we learn that Tennalp was created by a sorcerer called Nrogara (Aragorn backwards) from the planet Dalrow (world backwards, with a vowel added for pronounceability). Given this context of things written backwards, it can scarcely be considered a mere coincidence that the opening sentence -- "there lived seven dogs" -- contains a backwards devil as well as a backwards God.

All this flashed through my mind in a second as I waited at the red light. In my original "God and dog" post, I recounted a story from Whitley Strieber in which God/dog was associated with seeing a coincidentally meaningful license plate. I glanced down at the license plate of motorcyclist with the Rain God helmet: "192 NYT." NYT was at least a meaningful series of letters -- New York Times -- so, although the number didn't immediately mean anything to me, I memorized it for future reference. Later, while still on the road, I suddenly thought that 19 - 2 = 18 and 19 + 2 = 21, so the number encodes 1/8/21 -- January 8, 2021. Of course it doesn't, though, because 19 - 2 is actually 17. So close!

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Note added: I just looked again at the PDF file I opened to check The Planet Tennalp -- 33 pages of miscellaneous story fragments with titles beginning Mo-Sa -- and noticed that the very first page is one of my own childhood compositions, from which I quote the second paragraph.

He walked over to his coon-shee, who was nibbling at the rich, green moss which carpeted the forest floor. The coon, too, was a recent purchase. It was a strong, healthy stallion of good pedigree, and the flickering patches of green on its sleek, black coat were unusually brilliant. It carried on its back a huge, lidded basket with several small saddle-bags tied to it.

What is this coon-shee? The name is a hybrid of Cŵn Annwn and cú sídhe -- Welsh and Irish faery-hounds, respectively -- and my idea was that they were actually faery horses (or, to be precise, diminutive chalicotheres), mistaken by outsiders for dogs because of their small size and clawed feet.

Do I really need to make that coinsídhence pun again? You must surely be getting tired of it.

Then Cometh the End

A rare allegorical picture by Kat Valentine (née Crystal Tychonievich), who usually does portraits. It depicts the Last Judgment.

Then Cometh the End

I found this a very striking composition, even though I do not yet understand the allegory itself in any detail. I was also struck by the synchronicity of her choice to include an enormous swan in a picture of the Last Judgment -- something which Oswald Wirth also does in his chapter on "Le Jugement" in Le tarot des imagiers du moyen-âge, which I read a few days before seeing the above picture for the first time. His version of that trump is quite conventional, based closely on the Tarot de Marseille, but he also includes a small picture of the same scene, but with a huge swan replacing the angel.

Wirth offers no real explanation of this picture, except to note that Cygnus is the constellation that most closely corresponds to the 20th trump ("we should picture the swan of Leda as being the Pagan equivalent of the Dove of the Holy Ghost"). He connects every one of the trumps with a constellation, though, but in no other case does he offer an alternative version of the card in which its astrological alter ego is inserted into the scene.

Besides the general similarity -- a swan at the Last Judgment -- note that Kat's swan is in an underground cavern, while Wirth's appears to be diving down into an open grave. Note also the unusual dimensions of Kat's picture, which almost make it look like a Tarot card itself.

Pictures by Kat Valentine

My sister Kat Valentine, who is a talented artist but has always been rather secretive about her work, has finally decided to post some of her pictures in a publicly accessible gallery. Here are two of my favorite pieces.

Moses in the Court of Pharaoh

An Unfinished Life

A dodo with pedals

From time to time I suddenly remember the dodo with pedals, a weirdly vivid memory dating back to a time from which few memories survive.

I can't be sure how old I was at the time, but I was living in New Hampshire and had not yet started kindergarten, so somewhere in the two-to-four range. My little sister and I were drawing pictures in crayon to send to "Auntie Lane" (whose proper name, I was later to find out, was actually Aunt Elaine).

"What should we draw next, Chris?"

"I don't know."

A sudden inspiration: "Let's draw a dodo with pedals!"

"Okay! That's a pretty good idea."

So I drew just that: a dodo bird with a pair of bicycle pedals instead of legs. Somehow I had gotten the idea that a dodo's beak pretty much looked like the mouth of a trumpet, flaring out and ending in a big circular opening. All my information about dodos came from a picture book based on Disney's Alice in Wonderland cartoon, and dodos were also connected in my mind with a picture I had seen of Donald Duck somehow puckering his beak to blow out a candle. (I always said "beak," never "bill," even referring to hadrosaurs as "duck-beaked dinosaurs.")

(Looking up the Disney dodo now, I see that, yes, the dark bit at the end of its beak could easily be mistaken for an opening. It also has a normal mouth underneath its apparent trumpet-mouth, but I'm pretty sure my drawing had a trumpet only, with no articulated jaw.)

Looking over at Chris's picture, I saw that she had completely misunderstood my idea and had drawn her dodo with petals. Girls!