The pillar of blackness

Eclipses are in the sync stream. Fellow synchromystic Chris Knowles recently posted about how the upcoming total solar eclipse will pass right over Eagle Pass, Texas, a place that's in the news a lot these days. Apparently it will also pass right over the area of Upstate New York where Joseph Smith had his First Vision and published the Book of Mormon, and will take place on April 8, just two days after the anniversary of the founding of the LDS Church. Followers of Denver Snuffer, a prominent fringe Mormon, are therefore planning a conference there to coincide with the eclipse. I know this because William Wright just posted about it in "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," including this image in his post:

When I was a missionary, we memorized and often had to recite an excerpt from the canonical account of Joseph Smith's First Vision, beginning with the line "I saw a pillar of light." This image, though, seems to show the opposite: a pillar of darkness, caused by the eclipse.

This idea of a "pillar of blackness" made me think of an incoherent story written by one of my brothers when he was very young and preserved in a collection of Tychonievich juvenilia known for historical reasons as the Scarlet Notebook. Here's how it begins, and if you can understand what's going on, you're a smarter man than I am, Gunga Din. Note that the name Wooma rhymes with melanoma, not with Montezuma. You should also know that this story has achieved undisputed classic status in my family. We quote from it as if it were Monty Python.

Wooma was going to a meeting. It was for L.L.L.L. (light, light, light, light) wizards. Wooma was an L.L.L.L.T. (light, light, light, light turquoise) wizard.

When he got to the meeting, he found the cause. The L.L.L.L.L. (a light, light, light, light, light) wizard directed.

"The black wizard is back!" L. said. "He is preparing to ash-storm us!"

"I smoke his cave!" said Emisto, arching smoke from hand to hand.

Erik suddenly darted out the door! Emisto and Enel followed! Then everybody followed -- or at least they tried. A darkness swallowed them. L. lit the room, but darkness continued to get stronger! So did the light! Finally, everyone except Wooma and L. left.

Then a pillar of blackness appeared. Out of the pillar stepped Blander the Black! Death shot from Blander's hand -- a blinding light in return!

A black dragon was made from the roof. Fire flared from its mouth. The building was in flames! Frantically, Wooma turned the flames to turquoise! Flames returned but were turned back to turquoise!

Meanwhile, L. had blinded Blander, and Blander killed L.!

Then the dragon shot, but as it came out of its mouth, it turned to ash! Enraged, the dragon blasted fire at Blander the Black, but Blander vanished into his pillar of blackness.

The building erupted in flames. Wooma turned turquoise for an hour. When the hour was over, so was the fire.

The place was burnt, as were the four closest cottages. The dragon was puffing uselessly at a heap of ash. Wooma looked at his land. It was black. His orchard was gone, his corn was gone, and his home was gone.

He told the dragon to take his land. Then he sat down and slept. When he awoke, the dragon was eating his land!

He went to Emisto's house to have breakfast. Then he set off for Eankerdnosh. He was going to try for king's wizard. The king was called Deornoch Knod.

It goes on like that for a few more pages. I vividly remember the first time I heard this story, when it was read aloud by the author at a student literary club. A friend and I were finally asked to leave because we couldn't stop laughing. We did make a valiant effort to control ourselves, successfully getting through the part where Wooma "hid by changing into a turquoise chair cover" during his job interview and the part where "he clapped his hands together and they both disappeared," but when "he frankly turned all the grass around the entrance to turquoise," we lost it. That "frankly" was the straw that broke the camel's back. For me, the real story ends with Wooma frankly turning the grass to turquoise. Everything after that I read only much later, when it was typed up for inclusion in the Scarlet Notebook, and it therefore feels less canonical.

As I've mentioned before, William Wright has connected eclipses with black holes on his blog. After seeing the pillar of blackness in the Remnant Eclipse Conference logo and thinking about Blander the Black, I randomly decided to run a web search for blander the black. I don't know what I was expecting to get, but what I got was black holes:

Another sync: In "Wolves," the post immediately before "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," William Wright recounts a childhood dream about a monster -- likely a wolf -- on its way to his house:

I began to move very steadily forward, and I was aware that I was moving toward the house.  I could see it in the distance, and I was heading for it.  I became aware that I was seeing things through the eyes of whatever it is that was coming for me, and I was scared.  My vision began to shift between the house itself, and back through the eyes of whatever it was that was coming, and it was getting closer and closer.

Though I never saw whatever it was in the dream, I have always associated it with a wolf.

In "The Heavens speaking," William links to an old Salt Lake Tribune article about Denver Snuffer and his movement. I followed the link and read the article on my phone, and at the end I found this:

In case you missed it, wolves are on their way.

One last sync note: The first I ever heard of Denver Snuffer (about whom I still know very little) was in a comment on this blog by Ben Pratt, dated April 6, 2021. The second mention of Snuffer by anyone I know was the post by William Wright, about a conference planned for April 6, 2024. April 6 as an anniversary is a big thing among Mormons; besides being the date the Church was formally organized, it is also held by many to be the true date of both Christmas and Easter.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name

I very rarely go out for breakfast, but this morning I just thought I would. Then, when I was about halfway to my intended destination, I began feeling a magnetic tug in the opposite direction. The only thing I can really compare it to is an experience I had several months ago when I found a fledgling dove, alone and in distress, and it somehow communicated its homing instinct to me by a sort of psychic rapport; I "followed the tug" and successfully returned it to its parents.

This time, the tug took me to a small bakery and café. I ordered a coffee and a croissant, found a table, and took a seat. I glanced up at the wall opposite me, and it was with a mixture of excitement and foreboding that I saw a sync-fairy calling card: a small framed photograph of the Empire State Building:

Next to it was a photo of a fingerpost with signs in Russian saying how many kilometers it was to Leningrad, Moscow, Berlin, and Vladivostok; based on the distances given -- only 35 km to St. Petersburg -- it must have been taken somewhere in the Leningrad Oblast (which is still called Leningrad even though the city's name has been changed back).

Over breakfast, I finished reading Christopher Morley's Swiss Family Manhattan -- which turns out to be completely bonkers, very much in the spirit of Hercules in New York. Lots of little sync winks there. It mentions "a radio station a the Vatican" (cf. William Wright's Nabisco post, linking the papal keys with radio antennas), and -- appropriately for a book by Morley -- there is a scene in which a hum is exterminated: "the scream of the wind outside drowned for a moment the steady hum of the motors."

After finishing Swiss Family Manhattan, I checked William's blog and started reading the latest post, "Calling out (fictional) demons." I haven't yet finished reading it, but it deals with the identity of "Tim" and the possibility that he may be Saruman or some similarly nasty character. The reader will recall that my own speculations have tentatively connected Tim with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's The Key and with a story I wrote a long time ago featuring an alien named Tim. This got my attention in William's post:

As I thought more about Tim, I was reminded of my own experience with "Mrs. Baal-ox".  I don't know her real name, and I think I shared that she had told me even her name at the very end of her haunting of my mind and pen, but I promptly forgot it (likely for good reason).

Last night I had dug up my old Tim story -- dated February 27, 1997. The main character, William Alizio, is characterized by his boring routine lifestyle, his profound lack of curiosity, and his blasé reactions to the most extraordinary goings-on:

One day, after he had finished pretending to work, William Alizio came home and noticed two little bald men with blue robes and dunce caps. They were sitting in his living room. One of them was reading the TV Guide. The other one was eating a big bowl of Hidden Treasures with no milk. William Alizio noticed some empty boxes of Hidden Treasures on the floor. He went into the kitchen and ate a can of chicken noodle soup. Then he went into the living room.

"I would like the TV Guide when you are done," he said.

The little bald man who was reading the TV Guide stood up and said, "You may call me Tim or Timothy."

The other little bald man stood up and said, "You may call me Patrick or Pat."

Then the little bald men sat down.

Tim did not give William Alizio the TV Guide, so William Alizio said to Patrick, "I know how to tell which ones have treasures in them."

"I know," said Patrick.

"Oh," said William Alizio. "How many boxes have you eaten?"

"Four," said Patrick.

"Oh," said William Alizio. "Then that's the last box."

"Yes," said Patrick. "When I finish it, I will tell you why Tim and I are here."

"Oh," said William Alizio.

Tim then asks permission to circle the name of a program in the TV Guide, attempting to pique Alizio's nonexistent curiosity with the information that "it has four adjectives and one noun, just like my secret name." This secret is clearly burning a hole in his pocket, and he tries, like a passive-aggressive Rumpelstiltskin, to prod Alizio into guessing it.

"That's nice," said William Alizio.

"I can't tell you my secret name," said Tim, "so don't try to find out."

"Patrick has finished the Hidden Treasures," said William Alizio.

Tim and Patrick both stood up and grabbed William Alizio. "Are you William Alizio?" they demanded.

William Alizio admitted that he was.

"We have come to take you away," said Tim.

"Our spaceship is in your backyard," said Patrick.

"Oh. I was wondering what that purple thing was," said William Alizio.

"Our spaceship," explained Patrick.

"You must come with us," said Tim, "because we have laser guns." He and Patrick pulled purple laser guns out of their robes.

"But I have to go to the office tomorrow," protested William Alizio.

"No, you don't," said Tim.

"Then I have to pretend to do yard work," said William Alizio.

"No, you don't," said Patrick. "You have to come with us in our spaceship. We are going to take you to our planet."

"Okay," said William Alizio.

He went into Tim and Patrick's spaceship. It looked like a big, purple horseshoe crab with headlights. Tim and Patrick showed him around, and then the spaceship took off.

When I read this last night, two things got my attention. First, Tim and Patrick dress in blue, just like the former's recent namesake. I had remembered purple being their signature color, which it apparently is, but nevertheless their robes are blue. Second, their spaceship -- which Alizio had already seen but paid no attention to -- looks like a horseshoe crab. Ever since my brother Luther's 2013 post "Seen but not True," Horseshoe Crab Effect has been my mental shorthand for the way something can be right in front of you, "hiding in plain sight," but effectively invisible until it has been pointed out to you, after which it becomes obvious. Here, in 1997, for no apparent reason, is a similar term in a similar context.

Now, though, the secret name -- which only Tim has, not Patrick -- stands out. Besides synching with William Wright's "Mrs. Baal-ox" comment, it also reminds me of Strieber's visitor in The Key, who is also coy about his name. (As printed in the book, Strieber's words are in italics; the stranger's, in roman.)

I know that you can ask very clever questions. Don't try to play with me, Whitley.

That's an even more clever answer -- what's your name, anyway?

If I said Michael?

An archangel in a turtleneck?

Legion, then?

I think you're a perfectly ordinary person with an ordinary mother and an ordinary name.

I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.

Notice the immediate context, with its focus on being "clever." ("Tim. He's very smart.") When Strieber insists that the stranger must have a perfectly ordinary name -- the whole point of the Monty Python joke is that "Tim" is about as ordinary as it gets -- the stranger replies that he "can imagine no greater honor." What does Tim mean, anyway?

I didn't know that, by the way, despite usually being a pretty etymologically savvy guy, until William Wright pointed it out. I had always unreflectingly assumed that the name meant "fear of God," but of course that would make it half Latin and half Greek -- uncharacteristically sloppy of me to think that.

So I'm going to go ahead and start calling Strieber's visitor Tim. It adds up. This also seems to reinforce William Wright's idea that Tim may be Saruman, however we are to interpret that. He had earlier identified Saruman with a character in a music video who reads from a book with keys on the cover. Strieber published his conversation with Tim in a book called The Key, with a key on the cover.

As I was making these connections, a song started playing in the background, one I'd never heard before:

Drink what's in your cup

You have to get right up

The music never stops

You got me, I got no alibi

You got me, I got no alibi

No alibi

That was weird, because I remembered that Tim had made Strieber drink something he didn't want to drink. I looked it up. Strieber wakes up the morning after the visit, finds the illegible notes he took, and questions the whole event:

Had he been real, or a dream? If you took notes in your sleep, they might look like this.

Then I also remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had. . . . I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused. So this must have been a dream. In real life, I would never have drunk something like that.

Except, across the strange life I have lived, I could remember drinking the same bitter liquid at the end of other extraordinary experiences, such as in the eighties when I was having contact experiences.

In this context, "You got me, I got no alibi" felt like an admission from Tim: You got me. You figured out who I am. Yes, I'm that weirdo who barged into Strieber's hotel room. Yes, I'm the chap William Wright calls Saruman. You got me, I got no alibi.

Something else I remembered from The Key is that Tim kept hinting, without outright claiming, that he had been present in Nazi Germany -- implying, but again not quite asserting, that this was in the capacity of "a Jew in the camps." This, together with the name-guessing theme, made me think of "Sympathy for the Devil":

I rode a tank

Held a general's rank

When the Blitzkrieg raged

And the bodies stank

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name

Ah, what's puzzling you

Is the nature of my game

That was the only verse I could think of, so I looked up the lyrics. Here's what immediately precedes the lines quoted above:

Stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed the Tsar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

"St. Petersburg," a.k.a. Leningrad? "Around" like within a 35-km radius?

Isn't it odd that when I saw that photo, before "Sympathy for the Devil" had even crossed my mind, I tried to deduce  where it had been taken and even looked up the Leningrad Oblast and found its coat of arms? I wouldn't ordinarily have processed the image beyond "fingerboard with a bunch of signs in Russian."

The Leningrad and Berlin signs are both pointing to the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building has been a hallmark of recent syncs. St. Petersburg and Nazi Germany are the two places the devil claims to have been in the Rolling Stones song.

So, what am I to conclude from all this? That Tim is evil? Okay, but what's puzzling me is the nature of his game. If he's the devil, shouldn't he be trying to get me to do something instead of just going around pointing at things and saying, "Hey, look, there's the Empire State Building again"? Is he just here to keep me distracted and waste my time? Surely there are plenty of less involved ways of doing that! The only real life change I can think of that I've made as a result of sync-fairy activity has been taking up the Rosary, and it's pretty hard to see that as a bad thing. "An evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray."

I will say that some of my syncs have led some other people down some pretty dark paths. (Not naming names, iykyk.) Am I being used for that purpose by Tim and company? Do I need to stop publishing syncs?

The other issue is this: Who's Tim? Apparently the being responsible for at least some of my syncs. What's telling me Tim is evil? Syncs. If Tim is evil, syncs are unreliable -- but if syncs are unreliable, I have no particular reason to think Tim is evil. And anyway, I already knew syncs were unreliable! I don't use them to "prove" anything or base life decisions on them.

I need to think about this some more and try to figure out what it all means.

Quel canard! Quelle oie!

Referencing the mandrakes that have been showing up in the syn stream recently, Poppop left this comment on my last post.

Glad you saw the etymonline mandrakery -- I saw it too last week and almost dropped you a line. I had probably gone 30 years without encountering the word and then boom it was there online twice.

 

Perhaps in an alternate universe, there is an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Man-Drake, who fights crime since witnessing his parents' murder at the hands of mean hunters? Quel canard.

I read this comment on the afternoon of November 13 (Taiwan time). On the morning of the same day, approximately six hours before reading the comment, I had been cleaning out some cabinets in my study when I found a folder containing some very old papers, going all the way back to my toddler days. A lot of them, I have no idea why I kept them, but now that I have kept them all these years, just throwing them away would be unthinkable. Among the papers filed there were four pages of cartoons drawn by my brother Luther on the backs of documents dated 1991 and 1992, when he would have been 10 or 11.

Welcome to your alternate universe, Poppop.

Now I happen to remember that this is not actually an anthropomorphic duck but rather an anthropomorphic goose named Gilbert, and that his hunter nemesis is called Milton. There's no real backstory beyond that -- nothing but this handful of drawings -- but he's obviously an anthropomorphic waterfowl with a grudge against hunters, and he certainly seems to have super powers. I mean, in the first strip he is apparently strong enough to break a rifle barrel with his bare hands and fast enough to do so, pound the broken piece into the ground, and tie Milton's shoelaces to it all before the latter has time to react. Then he apparently takes the gun, repairs the broken barrel with some super-strong material, and later deflects bullets by holding his gun in just the right position so they hit the reinforced barrel and bounce off! That's some next level kung fu there.

Poppop ended his comment with Quel canard, "What a duck!" Later that day, some random link-following led me to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's take on Dave Chappelle's recent monologue. It's no surprise that the word canard was used a few times -- antisemitic and canard go together like kippers and marmalade -- but one instance nevertheless stood out.

That joked [sic] echoed a familiar line of Jewish defense groups, who are often at pains to point out that a disproportionate Jewish presence in an industry is not an indication of a conspiracy -- an age-old canard.

Taken literally, isn't that saying that the idea that disproportionate Jewish presence is not an indication of conspiracy is a canard?

One more coincidence to note: Before suggesting that "Man-Drake" might be an anthropomorphic duck superhero, Poppop said that the last time he had encountered the word mandrake was probably 30 years ago. Thirty years ago would be 1992 -- which, judging by the dates on the backs of the pages, is probably the very year that my brother's athropomorphic goose superhero comics were drawn.

Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness

There's a series of Japanese horror films that my wife likes to watch. Each one is supposedly a collection of "found footage" of fairly boring scenes -- two people talking in their apartment, someone jogging in the park, a guy walking around in a parking garage, etc. At the end of each clip (each lasting maybe five to ten minutes), it stops and a voice-over says (in Japanese) "Did you see that?" And of course you didn't see anything out of the ordinary, so it replays part of the clip, and then a shorter part, and then in slow motion -- until finally you catch it: some extremely unsubtle and ought-to-be-obvious CGI "ghost," the kind of thing that would be a jump-scare in a normal horror movie but here, with no dramatic music and no reaction from the human characters, is almost never even noticed by the viewer until maybe the second or third replay. Once you've seen it, it's obvious. If you go back and watch the whole scene again, the ghost jumps right out at you (in two senses!) and you can't believe you didn't see it before. It's like a horror version of those Where's Wally? books.

And I guess it's pretty effective as horror (I have to guess, lacking the being-scared-by-horror-movies gene myself). I mean, the idea that a super-scary ghost could be right there in front of your face and you wouldn't even notice it -- isn't that kind of frightening?

⁂

A week ago I was reading Whitley Strieber's Solving the Communion Enigma, and he described how some people (including, he says, the late Gurdjieffian Joseph C. Stein) can make themselves invisible by exploiting these quirks of human attention.

I have known people who were able to seemingly disappear before one's eyes. How did they do it? By being aware that attention is not continuous but a wave form, and not only that, when groups of people come together, their attention soon becomes entrained. If you know how, you can watch groups of people, even whole stadiums full of people, wax and wane together.

I'm not quite sure I buy this -- wouldn't they notice you when their attention waxes again? -- but the general concept of "attentional invisibility" (demonstrated for example in the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment) is certainly well documented.

This Strieber passage stuck in my memory because just after reading it, I read Bruce Charlton's post "How do modern people choose evil?" which featured some very similar wording.

The mass media is directed at manipulation of mass-scale emotions and motivation by attracting and holding attention, and shaping (entraining) attitudes, thoughts, actions by means of mechanisms both explicit (hard sell, Big Lies) and implicit (soft sell, tendentious reasoning on the basis of hidden and denied assumptions).

Aside from the synchronicity of juxtaposing "attention" and "entrain," Bruce is talking in part about an extreme example of inattentional blindness: the unaccountable failure of nearly everyone to notice the extremely obvious -- jump-scare-ghost obvious, gorilla-on-a-basketball-court obvious -- fact that there has been a worldwide totalitarian coup.

If something is just too bizarre, too unexpected, too hard to fit into one's understanding of the world, we simply filter it out of our perceptions.

⁂

Last night I was on one of my nocturnal rambles and was thinking about all of this, and about a story my brother Luther once told about horseshoe crabs. A group of friends had been walking on a rocky beach for some time when one of them noticed a horseshoe crab among the rocks. Once that one crab had been noticed, everyone suddenly noticed that there were actually horseshoe crabs all over the beach and that they had simply failed to notice them before, their brains having been inattentively processing them as rocks.

As I walked through the dark neighborhood, I thought to myself, "I'm going to notice something. I'm going to keep my eyes open, expect the unexpected, and see something that had been invisible."

It's really hard to "try to notice something" when you have no idea what it might be that you're supposed to notice, but I did my best -- and found nothing. I was just on the point of giving up when, about a quarter-mile from my home, something finally caught my eye: Did I just see a pair of tiny tentacles retract into that dead leaf?

Indeed I had. On closer inspection, the leaf turned out to be a very strange sort of slug that I had never seen before, shaped like a dead leaf and with very discreet tentacles. I looked it up when I got home and found that it was a specimen of the aptly named tropical leatherleaf. In over 16 years of rambling around Taiwan at night, I had never seen one.

Will I start seeing them all the time now?