Thumbs as art

My January 30 post "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air" included a video montage of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set to the song "Dirty Paws." At one point, the video shows someone holding a black-and-white photo of a thumb:

In today's post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan," Alph came up, as both the name of the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the word for "swan" in one of Tolkien's Elvish languages. This made me think of Tintin and Alph-Art, the unfinished 24th Tintin book -- Hergé's "swan song"? -- which I had heard of but never read. I checked the summary on Wikipedia, which ends with this sentence:

Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.

I'd never heard of that particular artist, so I clicked through to his Wikipedia article. One of his famous works is called Le Pouce ("The Thumb"):

Note added: In the song "This Country's Going to War" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, there's a bit where they sing, "They got guns / We got guns / All God's children got guns" -- but, due to the poor audio quality, as a child I always thought that what they were saying everyone had got was thumbs. This was reinforced by the body language as they sing that part, holding out their hands with thumbs extended:

Yes, I know thumbs doesn't make any sense in that context, but come on, was I supposed to be surprised at the Marx Brothers saying something that doesn't make sense?

I think I've mentioned before on this blog my uncle's half-serious opinion that Groucho Marx was the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. When I asked him where that idea had come from, he said the thing that originally suggested it to him had been Groucho's duck-like walk, which made him think of Zeus taking the form of a swan when he seduced Leda, fathering Helen of Troy and Pollux. (Castor was a twin half-brother, fathered by Tyndareus, as was Helen's twin half-sister Clytemnestra.)

Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A beautiful bunch of ripe banana

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

Hide the deadly black tarantula

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

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

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

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

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

Adam, Eve with the fruit

Why we need new new?

Only got two seats, why we need new coupe?

Only got two feet, why we need new shoes?

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

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

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

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

Milkommen

One of the main sources of William Wright's unusual ideas is what he calls "words" -- strings of text which he receives in what I guess is something of a dream-like manner, and which appear to be strange multilingual concoctions incorporating English, the fictional languages created by Tolkien, and sometimes other languages such as Spanish and German. He tries to decipher these and extract a story from them. Although I sometimes enjoy this kind of sleuthing (I was a big Finnegans Wake reader in my early twenties), and although I find William's ideas stimulating, I haven't been able to muster much interest in his "words" themselves. On December 22, he posted "Jan-Feb 2022 Words Part 1" -- the type of post that typically makes my eyes glaze over -- but in this case one of his "words" (literally just one word) captured my imagination:

Feb. 5

Milkommen

Commentary:

It was just this one word, kind of just hanging there, and I took it to be perhaps a play on words of the German "Wilkommen" (Welcome), but now with Milk, since the German language had been part of my 2019 words.  The Promised Land is associated with Milk and Honey, and so that is where my mind went, whether that accurate or not.

This is a pretty solid reading, obviously. The reference to the well-known German word Willkommen seems undeniable. Besides the "milk and honey" angle, I note that Wilkommen is transformed into Milkommen by turning the first letter upside down, inviting the reading "Welcome to upside-down world" or "Welcome to the looking-glass world." (The word milk is already associated with such inversions in my mind, since Klim is a popular brand of powdered milk here in Taiwan.)

My first thought on seeing Milkommen, though, was that it could also be read as Milkom-men -- meaning the Ammonites of the Old Testament, whose national god was called Milcom or Milkom. Since William's "words" seem to be more oriented to the Book of Mormon, it could be a very indirect way of referencing an unrelated people in that book who are also called Ammonites -- Lamanites converted by the preaching of Ammon, son of Mosiah.

Of course, Milkommen would be a rather inefficient way of saying "Ammonites" if that was all you wanted to convey, so I figured there must be more to it. On a hunch, I looked up kommen on Wiktionary. It's German for "come," of course, but I scrolled down and found this at the very end of the entry.

The very last line in the entry for kommen is a partial quotation of Isaiah 55:1, where it is Swedish for "come ye." Here's the whole verse:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye [kommen] to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

So looking up kommen led me directly back to milk!

It was quite late at night that I was making these connections. I went to bed and had a strange dream in which I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.

I was awakened suddenly by what I thought was the sound of something exploding in my study. I got up and went into the study without bothering to turn on the light, and satisfied myself that nothing had happened and that the noise must have been part of the dream. I was just about to go back to bed when I noticed a particular book, dimly visible behind the glass door of one of my cabinets, and thought, "What's that funny-looking book? I don't remember owning a book like that!" I turned on the light and opened the cabinet, and the book in question fell out and landed face-up on the desk below. I photographed it exactly as it landed, without touching it:

The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. That is, the effect of the milky juice of the poppy on four men. The effect of milk on men. In rapid speech, the final consonant of on would be assimilated to the m that follows it, yielding milk-om-men.

The title of the book is of course a reference to the famous closing lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

That's a major sync with what I was reading last night: The Desert, the first installment in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. The main characters have just been welcomed to Dira, a vast underground city (cf. "caverns measureless to man") ruled by Kazak, a king said to have about 180 wives. (A pen friend of mine recently wrote a great deal of imaginative, possibly schizophrenic, material about Kubla Khan, much of it dealing with his practice of polygamy on a vast scale.) The people of Dira keep domestic ants, which in turn keep aphids. (All insects in this book are much larger than their real-world counterparts.)

[The aphids] were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the "palace."

Milk and honeydew juxtaposed, with the latter referenced as a food rather than a drink.

In my friend's writings about Kubla Khan, paintings of the Khan show him accompanied by two kittens, one white and one black:

To complete Kubla as a Proper Man, perched precariously on the folds of Kubla’s dark cloak are two mysterious Entirely Separate Beings depicted as two tiny cute small kittens, one white and one black, that he has taken in and sheltered in his cloak from the bitter cold. The two harmless-looking kittens make quite a contrast with the stern and barbaric and pitiless visage of Kubla himself. When Kubla returns to a mortal world and sees the two kittens in portraits of himself and realizes who they represent, he also snorts, but somewhat fondly, as if the portraits reminds him of a great Cosmic Joke that the painter is not fully aware of.

I referenced Through the Looking-Glass above without remembering how it begins. This is the first sentence:

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

The looking-glass world, you will recall, is laid out in the form of a chessboard:

This same chessboard imagery appears in the Ava Max music video "Kings & Queens," on which I have recently posted:

Lest the Masonic connotations of the black-and-white tiling be lost on the audience, we have a couple of pillars thrown in for good measure. Later, Ava demonstrates a Masonic penal sign while singing "Off with your head" -- a phrase with Lewis Carroll resonances.

The "Kings & Queens" video begins with a shot of white doves in flight and later shows champagne being poured into overflowing glasses:

What made me think of the looking-glass world in the first place was the way the W in Wilkommen is turned upside down (or reflected) to create Milkommen. Back in 2018, I wrote about W/M reversals in "The Rider-Waite Magician." The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups features a white dove and an overflowing cup marked with a W that looks more like an upside-down M.

"We would pop champagne and raise a toast" is a recurring line in "Kings & Queens." Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen and others drink a toast to Alice by turning their glasses upside down:

'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health -- Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces -- others upset the decanters and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table . . . .

Coming back to Isaiah 55 (sorry, it's hard to write about this non-linear web of associations in a linear manner), here's another passage from the same chapter:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (vv. 10-11).

Rainwater is no good if we just collect it and let it stagnate. It's supposed to be used and transformed, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater -- and the same is said of the word of God. This reminds me of a poem I wrote in 2010 about manna -- which must be eaten and internalized, or else it quickly goes bad.

Who on the bread of life will feed,

will live forever -- so we read

in that same book which oft is read

as if it were itself that bread.

But in that book is also told

how manna stinks when it is old,

in but a day breeds worms and reeks --

Then what if it were kept for weeks?

Or months? Or many a yawning year?

How would the manna then appear?

When centuries had past it paced,

how would the bread of life then taste?

And were it served at such a date,

what would become of them that ate?

The historical manna is often understood to have been something produced by desert insects, so there's a possible link to the idea of feeding on honeydew.

I'm not sure which, if any, of these many disparate associations will lead anywhere worthwhile. I just wanted to get them all written down first before I forget them.