This post is going to be all over the map. What can I say, sync is inherently nonlinear.
Yesterday I was in the mood for a harder sound after a few days of listening to Emily Linge and Simon & Garfunkel, so I listened to Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails, "My Blood" by Twenty One Pilots, and instrumentals from an electronic group called 3OH!3. People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like:
Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN, made me think of NINbad the Nailer, whose career is summarized as follows in "With":
Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood And did the only thing he could.
This is of course an allusion to Martin Luther, famous for nailing his 95 Theses to the church door and for saying "Here I stand; I can do no other" -- preferring to risk being burned as a heretic rather than recant. Say what you will about his theology, Luther was a badass, and I respect him. A lot of the "Head Like a Hole" lyrics actually fit him: Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.
And, what do you know, it turns out that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was raised Lutheran. You can't escape your roots.
I wasn't familiar with the Twenty One Pilots song, but looking up the lyrics, I see that they have certain Lutheran resonances as well:
Surrounded and Up against a wall I'll shred them all And go with you When choices end You must defend I'll grab my bat And go with you
"When choices end / You must defend" -- "Here I stand; I can do no other." The line "Up against a wall" is something the two songs have in common:
God money, I'll do anything for you God money, just tell me what you want me to God money, nail me up against the wall God money don't want everything, he wants it all
"Up against the wall" has an additional meaning in the synchronistic context of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (see "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window"). When dry leaves are blown against a wall, they go up:
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!" As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky; So up to the housetop the coursers they flew With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
"Humpty Dumpty revisited" associates Humpty's "great fall" with falling autumn leaves. "To the top of the wall" suggests putting Humpty in his place again, and dry leaves that "mount to the sky" seem to be reversing the fall. This imagery made me think of the Moody Blues line "Like the rain rising from the sea." I'd forgotten that the song it's from also includes the repeated line "I've reached the top of my wall."
Since we've already brought so many of my childhood writings into this, why not throw in another. This was a "spellcheck poem," created by typing song lyrics into a word processor backwards, running spellcheck, and then adjusting the resulting word salad a bit to make it grammatical:
You shall forever think yet thought's era of rhetoric is dead. The nets of reason, the webs of speech are many, and yet we think beyond the choking net. Are we wise? A falling leaf, a dying man: Both sink against the wind, I say.
The idea of a falling leaf sinking "against the wind" ties right in with the St. Nicholas poem, where the wind blows the fallen leaves up into the sky.
Speaking of the St. Nicholas poem, it says of St. Nick that "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot" and "the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Yet "His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! . . . a right jolly old elf." And of course, he goes up and down chimneys.
When I was writing "I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis," I ran a web search for chim chim. Most of the hits were not for the Speed Racer character but for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," the song sung by the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke) in Mary Poppins. The sweep sings:
Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke
Coming back to falling leaves for a moment, the Chim-Chim post quoted one of my brother's stories with an "intermission." Looking through my copies of old stories, I found only one other with such an intermission. Here it is:
"Well, the sheath was named after the sword."
"And the sword?" asked Pron.
"The sword was named after the
INTERMISSION: The Autumn Leaf
With it's Red and golden fire Comes the leaf swirling swooping on the breeze Down in between the barren trees With a dive all glory flies And the leaf lays crumpled on the ground.
I've been reading through the Book of Mormon a few chapters a day. Today I just happened to read 3 Nephi 10-14. Included there is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount, nearly word for word, including this bit:
No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (3 Ne. 13:24).
God? Money? Bow down before the one you serve. Then, in the next chapter:
Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened (3 Ne. 14:7-8).
No conditions are attached to this promise. He doesn't say, "Unless you ask for something stupid, like Bigfoot or a mini T. rex."
In a hypnopompic state this morning before fully waking up, I was thinking about Jay Leno and how odd that he of all people -- someone in whom I had no interest and about whom I knew virtually nothing -- should have appeared in my dreams. In my hypnopompic reverie, I latched onto the fact (discovered in my post-dream research) that Leno always dresses in blue denim when he's not on TV, and that this must shed some light on the meaning of the blue clothing worn by Tim in my dream, by Tim and Patrick in the Alizio story, and by the two wizards in the Joseph story. I started thinking about various terms for blue denim clothing. Denim itself ultimately means "of the sanctuary," while Levis comes from the tribe of Levi, the priestly lineage -- Aaron! Didn't Aaron, the high priest, wear a blue robe?
At this point I was fully awake. A quick word search on a Bible app confirmed that, yes, the only "blue robe" mentioned in the Bible is the one worn by Aaron (Ex. 28:31, 39:22). But Aaron is just one person, and the Blue Wizards are a pair. I had a hunch that I should look up the etymology of jeans. I already knew it -- it comes from Genoa, and Genoa means "knee" -- but I looked it up anyway, and saw something that I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not just been thinking about Aaron:
Did you notice it, too? Jeans comes from the Old French name for Genoa, which was Jannes. Jannes and Jambres are the names given by tradition and in the New Testament (2 Tim. 3:8) to the "wise men" or "magicians of Egypt" (Ex. 7:11) against whom Moses and Aaron faced off in the court of Pharaoh. I had previously mentioned that in the Joseph story and Mushroom Planet we have two Wise Men, in contrast to the traditional three, but in Jannes and Jambres we have a biblical set of two Wise Men. One Midrash has it that they left the Pharaoh and followed Moses out of Egypt.
Yesterday, thinking about Jay Leno and his blue denim outfits led me to "Blue Jays," the album by Justin Hayward and John Lodge. I assume that the album title has no reference to birds except as a pun but refers to Blue J's -- Justin and John, the two Moody Blues members whose names begin with that letter. Jannes and Jambres would be another such pair of J's.
In a comment on "Jay Leno, Coco, and the killer rabbit," William Wright discusses the possible meanings of the name Jay. When he's not on TV, Leno apparently always wears the same outfit -- blue jeans and a blue shirt -- making him a "blue Jay," and also a possible link to Tim and to the Blue Wizards.
In "William Alizio's links to other stories," I identified the Blue Wizards with the two figures standing in the background of this picture, from the cover or Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil:
After the blue jay theme had been introduced, I realized that Blue Jays -- the 1975 album by Moody Blues members Justin Hayward and John Lodge -- features two very similar figures:
As in the Murdoch cover illustration, the two men in blue are standing side by side under an arch and looking across a chasm to the other side.
I've never been a huge fan of Blue Jays, but one of the songs has some potentially relevant lyrics:
Oh, I dreamed last night I was hearing Hearing your voice And the things you said, well they left me Left me no choice
And you told me we had the power And you told me this was the hour But that you don't know how If I could show you now
Well, I dreamed last night you were calling Calling my name You were locked inside of your secrets Calling my name
And you told me lost was the key And you told me how you long to be free But that you don't know how Oh, let me show you now
Many years ago, I used to entertain the idea that Justin Hayward was the reincarnation of Arnaut Daniel, though I don't remember what first suggested the connection -- probably a dream or something. Possibly relevant in connection with the white rabbit:
I am Arnaut who nets the breeze and with an ox pursues the hare and swims against the rising seas.
The last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike, I lasted all of two days, so I guess I should be proud of myself for making it almost a whole week this time.
I had thought the sync fairies would either respect my moratorium or ignore it. I hadn't expected them to explain themselves and make their case. Twice this week now I've had "recitation dreams" -- the kind where most or all of the usual imagery is shut off and it's just some guy talking. Well, in this case there was imagery, but it had more the feel of a PowerPoint presentation; the talking was the main thing.
The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.
I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)
The main thrust of the lecture was that he and his colleagues were engaged in directing my attention -- the words directing your attention were displayed in English, in very large white italics -- and that this was an extremely complex and delicate operation. Its complexity was illustrated by means of a dizzyingly complicated multidimensional diagram that kept moving and changing and reassembling itself. Each attentional decision -- whether a choice of my own or a successful nudge from them -- opened up new attentional pathways and closed off others, and so the whole thing had to be played like chess, thinking several moves in advance and taking into account various contingencies. The purpose of any particular move might not become apparent until many, many moves later.
The first recitation was delivered during my ordinary sleep on Monday night. The second -- which had the same general message, though I don't think it was a repeat of the first -- was given in more unusual circumstances. I was in my study last night reading The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch. I was starting to feel a bit tired and thought I'd finish the section I was on and then go to bed. I was on page 137, and flipping ahead I saw there was a good stopping place -- five or six blank lines indicating a scene change -- on page 140, so I planned to stop there. When I reached the end of page 137, though, I suddenly felt just overpoweringly tired, like I had to stop immediately. But the page ended with the first word of a new sentence -- "There" -- and I couldn't very well stop with that! I would at least finish the sentence. As it turned out, I read the next sentence, too, which brought me to the end of a paragraph:
There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.
The urge to sleep was now overwhelming, and was accompanied by a little singsong in my mind, some lines from Joyce: "Sleep now, O sleep now, / O you unquiet heart! / A voice crying 'Sleep now' / Is heard in my heart." I couldn't even delay long enough to go into the next room to bed. I put the book down, lay down on the floor, and there was Tim again, with a "thank you for coming to my Ted talk" look on his face.
When I woke up, after the second lecture -- at around 4:00 this morning -- I opened the book and saw how the next paragraph began:
That's when I realized I'd been outsmarted. I had taunted the sync fairies with lines from Lady Gaga -- "You can call all you want, but there's no one home / And you're not gonna reach my telephone." Well, they had just summoned me as if to a telephone ("Sleep now, O sleep now"), I had answered, and they'd said their piece. Those were the words that came to mind -- "said their piece" -- which put a song in my head:
If you think it's a joke
That's all right, do what you want to do
I've said my piece
And I'll leave it all up to you
The rest of the lyrics are relevant, too:
By the way, that bit about "forty-four chalked on a wall" is a reference to this from p. 92:
As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.
This got my attention at the time because it was a general reference to the phenomenon of synchronicity. Forty-four also happens to be my age as I read this book for the first time, despite buying it many years ago, but that's a weak-sauce sync.
What's the significance of these "44" syncs in the novel? Well, obviously the only way to find out is to keep reading. If I stopped right now, refusing to read another page until I've figured out this 44 business, that would obviously be counterproductive. But that's what I'd told the sync fairies. I kind of get what Tim was saying.
I idly wondered whether this specific sync from the novel -- seeing 44 everywhere -- was going to start invading my life, as literary syncs so often do. No, not in this case. For superstitious reasons, any number ending in 4 or containing repeated 4s is avoided in Taiwan. House numbers get out of sync because one side of the street is numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, . . . while the other is 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 . . . . Forty-four is one number I'm definitely not going to see chalked on a wall or anywhere else.
With that thought, I went to bed -- in the bed this time.
*
In the morning, I taught a private English lesson. My student had brought an article which begins thus:
Have you ever heard of collage? It's art that combines different materials or parts of images together to make something new.
It was illustrated with a photo of Georges Braque -- I at first took him for Madame Blavatsky -- and his Violin and Pipe, prominently featuring what looks like a pair of sunglasses.
After the lesson and before lunch, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest: "Gordon Kor, a peaceful school bus, and Holy Places to Stand." He mentions an author called Gordon Korman, so I looked him up. His best known book appears to be one called Restart, with a broken-but-repaired pair of glasses on the cover:
Richard Arrowsmith used to talk about "strapping on the sync goggles" -- meaning tuning in to synchronicity -- so the glasses theme seemed relevant. Mr. Wright's post dealt with the Korman novel Schooled, so I looked that up on Wikipedia and read the first couple of paragraphs of the plot summary:
Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) as an eighth grader while Rain recovers.
At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.
Claverage is interesting because it suggests the Latin for "key."
Last night I checked the old Arts & Letters Daily blog, which used to be run by Denis Dutton before he died and hasn't been the same since. A link from there took me to "The 'Crispy R' and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter," which mentioned Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend as a notable "crispy r" speaker. This led to me rewatching the video for "Ya Hey," the only Vampire Weekend song I know, and noticing that, while the Chrysler Building is visible through most of the video, it ends with a long shot of the Empire State Building. (The champagne bottles are also a sync with Lady Gaga: "I'm in the club, and I'm sippin' that bubb', and you're not gonna reach my telephone.")
I only recently learned to recognize these buildings, the NYC skyline never having been one of my strong suits. (For example, I learned that the World Trade Center had been a pair of Twin Towers, and that they had been famous, on September 11, 2001, and not a day before.) I became curious about the Chrysler Building -- my one and only existing association being with a Calvin & Hobbes reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building" -- and checked a few things. I remembered that my parents used to have a Plymouth Voyager, made by Chrysler, and that the Plymouth logo used to be a picture of the Mayflower. As for the name Chrysler itself, it looks like it has something to do with the Greek for "gold," but it's actually from the German Kreisel, meaning a spinning top. This made me think of the Shakespeare line "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," which I looked up. It's from Twelfth Night, the play in which a fake love letter (cf. Schooled) induces Malvolio to go cross-gartered in yellow stockings. The immediate context caught my eye:
FOOL
. . . And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
MALVOLIO
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! [Exit.]
OLIVIA
He hath been most notoriously abused.
ORSINO
Pursue him and entreat him to a peace. [Some exit.]
He hath not told us of the Captain yet.
When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. . . .
The Fool then proceeds to sing "The rain it raineth every day."
The "whirligig of time" is juxtaposed with "golden time" -- my two interpretations of Chrysler. "The Captain" syncs with the Schooled character known as Cap, who is also notoriously abused. (The 42 trailer also has a line about "the abuse" Jackie Robinson is about to receive.)
The slug the size of the Chrysler Building made me think that I'd mentioned slugs before on this blog. A search turned up only the 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- highly relevant to the theme of "sync goggles" and directed attention.
When I went out for lunch, I saw Braque-style sunglasses on the street:
I also passed the restaurant that has a big horseshoe on its sign, which I had never noticed until synchronicities made it relevant -- another link to "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness." Noticing that, I decided to go to D&D again for lunch.
Something else I'd never noticed before: One of the interior walls there is made to look like a blackboard with D∞D written on it in chalk. (It's a printed image, not actual chalk.) D is the fourth letter, so DD = 44. The lemniscate is 8, which is 4 + 4. Yes, even in Taiwan, "he had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall."
No sooner had I sat down to eat than a woman with very large breasts and a tight T-shirt -- real subtle way of "directing my attention," sync fairies! -- came into the restaurant and sat opposite me. The T-shirt said, "No rain, no flowers." This syncs with the Rain and Flora characters in Schooled and the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. A more common form of the proverb is "April showers bring May flowers," which syncs with Plymouth. It also fits with the message that the current rain of syncs, though sometimes annoying and seemingly pointless, may be preparing the way for something to blossom later on.
So -- sigh -- reporting for duty again, sync fairies.
Sometimes there really does seem to be something paranormal about Randonautica, the app I described in my January 10 post "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex." As you may recall, it works by generating a lot of truly-random map coordinates within a specified radius of the user and then identifying anomalies -- either "attractor" anomalies with an improbably large number of randomly generated points near them of "void" anomalies with an improbably small number. While it's generating the points and finding the strongest anomaly, you're supposed to "visualize your intention," which is supposed to affect the whole process in some mysterious way.
As recounted in the linked post, the first two times I used it I randomly chose "mini T. rex" as my "intention," and both times it led me to something answering to that description.
Today I wanted to do some walking, so I thought why not use Randonautica again. I had just been reading the cryptid section of Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls and remembering my childhood obsession with Bigfoot, which I had been sure was lurking somewhere in the woods of suburban Maryland and could be summoned by continually ringing a concierge bell I had bought for the purpose (the neighbors must have just loved me!) -- so when the "visualize your intention" thing came up, I thought, "Okay, Randonautica, point me to a Bigfoot!"
If a cul-de-sac outside Baltimore seems an unlikely place for Sasquatch hunting, it's got nothing on urban Taiwan! Nevertheless, Randonautica delivered. Everyone knows these trickster spirits delight in puns and in granting requests in an over-literal way. Here's where I ended up:
That's a footprint and the English word foot, both very big (the wall was approximately seven feet tall), with a big finger pointing it out for me. (Except for the finger, that's the logo of a very small local office supplies company. I used to work for the older and much more successful "Hand" brand, "Foot" being to them what the Byrds, the Monkees, and the Allegators were to the Beatles.)
Along the way, Randonautica led me past a little clothing shop I'd never seen before. One of the T-shirts caught my eye through the window.
Some time ago, I discovered David Talbott's fringe astronomy theories and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about them on the "Thunderbolts" channel. Since then, the algorithm occasionally suggests more videos in that vein. A few weeks ago, it suggested this one:
I didn't watch it, but the thumbnail makes the main point clear enough. According to the theory, at some point in the distant past our "sun" was actually an alignment of several planets, which were much closer to the Earth than they are now, and electrical discharges between them formed an eight-rayed pattern (the "octopus" configuration discussed in my March 2022 Tarot/sync post "Lightning from the Sun?"). When this eight-pointed "sun" was not visible, that would be "night," and this video presumably tries to back that theory up with linguistic evidence that the word night is derived from eight with a negative prefix (see also acht/Nacht, huit/nuit, etc. -- clever, really).
The T-shirt is obviously supposed to mean "Number Eight," but the sync fairies don't care about intentions. It says "No Eight," with a night-black background and what looks like a partially illuminated planet. Does it say Neptune? That would make sense, since it's the number eight planet. I couldn't see much more from outside, so I tried googling "no eight" "neptune" to see if I could find the T-shirt online. I couldn't, but I did unexpectedly run into an old friend -- twice, in case I missed it the first time:
The Eight of Cups is normally Saturn in Pisces, but I guess this one blogger identifies it with Neptune. Note that the card shows a night sky with a crescent, just like the T-shirt.
Since I couldn't find the T-shirt online, I went into the shop to take a look. Here's a clearer shot of it:
It was a strange shop. Here's another of their T-shirts:
That's a guy on a bicycle, made up of random letters of the alphabet, together with a few repeated lines from Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun (plus a little introduction explaining that the North Wind is cold). In Aesop, the Sun proves itself stronger by making a man take off his coat, the North Wind having failed to blow it off. In this version, weirdly, the Sun denies the North Wind's ability to make typhoons and huge waves.
There was also this little gem. I'm not sure if it's meant to be worn by a man or a woman, but either way, it's a little weird.
Since the unplanned an unexpected strikes so many, why even bother trying to plan anything?
I'm pretty sure "double cuppin'" is a reference to that cough syrup drank singers of a certain race are always on about. How this stuff ends up printed on T-shirts in Taiwan, I'll never know. (Having just looked it up, I see these lyrics come from an American song that includes the line "Tomorrow got a flight headed to Taiwan" -- to rhyme with a reference to cocaine being "all white like Parmesan." Real art gives me chills sometimes.)
After my walk, I read a few more pages in Ecology of Souls -- the book responsible for making me think of Bigfoot -- and found this:
This may be what several Penobscot tribesmen observed when spying on medicine man John Neptune, who met the approach of "an immense eel" not with terror but affection, gently cradling its head and "drumming on it softly."
That's the only occurrence of Neptune in this 1405-page book, and I read it just after a sync involving a Neptune T-shirt. The combination of Penob-scot, fearlessness, and "an immense eel" made me think of a Moody Blues song:
Captain Scott, you were so bold
Now you're looking rather cold
Out there in the snow
What did you find there?
Did you stand a while and stare?
Did you meet anyone?
I've seen polar bears and seals
I've seen giant Antarctic eels
I've still not found what I'm looking for
The reference is to Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer, who I'm sure never saw polar bears. By a strange coincidence, an East India Company ship called the Neptune (admittedly a popular name for ships) was piloted by a different captain also named Robert Scott, perhaps a relative.
Yesterday, September 23, I happened to see a bright blue scooter with the license plate MDY-0098. I thought that MDY-00 was the best way of encoding the word moody in the ABC-1234 format (keeping in mind that there are no Os on license plates, only zeroes), and this combined with the color of the scooter made me think of the Moody Blues -- the very first band I got into as a teenager. The remainder of the plate number was 98, and I was pretty sure that in '98 the Moody Blues were in Italy, recording their album Strange Times. This was released in 1999, during a time when I had no access to secular music, but buying it was almost the first thing I did after returning to secular life in 2000. It served as my main soundtrack during that in-between time, after my mission and before entering the linguistics program at Ohio State. I used to play it in the car on my many drives from Kirtland out to Lake Erie to wander around the saltless, surfless beaches, meditate, and compose not-very-good verses on the metaphysical significance of erosion.
The cover of Strange Times shows the Earth inside what looks like a transparent snail or ammonite shell, on a beach.
Anagrams were very much my stock in trade at that time in my life (almost as much as synchronicities are now), and of course I had subjected the Moody Blues to the treatment. Their band name yielded such pleasing anagrams as The Bloody Muse and Embody the Soul. As for this album, Strange Times is an anagram of Granite Stems -- i.e., crinoid fossils, complementing the possible ammonite fossil on the cover.
Running into a license plate that evoked Strange Times was a bit of a sync because just two days previous (September 21), in my Book of Mormon post "Lehi, Nephi, and the pillar of fire that 'dwelt upon a rock,'" I had revisited my 2022 post "Snail on shingles," about a remote-viewing image of an enormous snail shell on a shingled roof. At the end of the post, I note a sync with the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland, which mentions a "snail . . . on the shingle" -- meaning of course not roofing shingles but pebbles on the seashore.
On September 22, one day after revisiting "Snail on shingles" and one day before the Strange Times sync, I received an email from a correspondent who always emails me about synchronicities related to the number 555. This time it was about a rock shop where most of the items had been labeled "555." He sent me several photos of these items, but the one that got my attention -- and the only one I mentioned in my reply -- was a rock with fossils of Orthoceras, a primitive genus of ammonites.
Though the shell on the Strange Times cover has the familiar shape of a snail shell, the rough edge at its mouth makes it look more like a fossil, suggesting that in fact it is an ammonite. I suppose the word Plates is also a sync with the Book of Mormon context in which I revisited my remote-viewed snail shell. Come to think of it, Orthoceras is "straight horn," a standard iconographic attribute of the Angel Moroni.
That was all yesterday, and I didn't think it quite synchy enough to be worth posting.
Today (September 24), I unexpectedly had an hour to kill while away from home, so I camped at a coffee shop and read Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls -- to which I have recently returned after taking a break to read all eight volumes of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon.
Almost all of the background music they were playing in the coffee shop was unfamiliar to me. As soon as I sat down, a song started which repeated "Time to wake up, time to wake up" an inordinate number of times. Given the recent syncs related to "Wake Up Time" by Tom Petty, this got my attention. I looked it up on my phone and found that it was a song by the band Cacti, called -- no points for guessing! -- "Time to Wake Up."
"Wake Up Time," as you will know if you've read the linked post above, was connected by William Wright with a dream he had about a man who called himself El-Anor ("sun-star"), and who Mr. Wright thought represented simultaneously a man and a stone. Just as the song "Time to Wake Up" was ending, I read this in Ecology of Souls:
One informant living in Belize told Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that he met the "stone woman" of Mayan legend . . . describing her as "magnificent," "beautiful," "glow[ing] like a star," . . . .
A stone woman like a star is an obvious sync with the stone man who called himself Sun-Star. Note also that yesterday I posted "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" -- about a vision of one whose "luster was above that of the sun at noon-day" and "twelve others" whose "brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament." The popular Mormon imagination associates the Book of Mormon peoples with the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations.
(Incidentally, in writing my post on the 13 luminous beings, I considered, but did not end up committing to writing, the possibility that the brightest being was the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is traditionally depicted with a crown of twelve stars.)
Some minutes later, I read in Ecology of Souls a long quotation from Suzy Hansen, about "the incarnation process":
The familiar soul, the blue ball of light, would accompany me in this life, as would two others from the group of souls present . . . . We would all become part of something together, but the blue soul is the one I have had a long connection with . . . .
The incarnating soul is depicted as a "blue ball of light." Just yesterday I had been remembering my old anagram habit: The Moody Blues = Embody the Soul. Furthermore, the cover of Strange Times depicts a literal blue ball, encased in rough shell as if it were a soul incarnate in crude matter.
Just then, another unfamiliar song came on in the coffee shop. The only lyrics I could make out were the repeated line "Would you turn to stone?" This syncs with the ammonite fossils, the "stone woman," and the man who was also a stone, so I tried to look it up. I had no luck finding the song itself. The only thing that came up was a song called "Losing My Shit" by a band called Breakfast In Silence. Here are the lyrics in full:
Feel a little crazy like I wanna shave my head
but their music makes me wanna grow out my hair again
Do I have much to lose?
I just want my head to cut it out.
Will you turn to stone if I put another hole in my head?
Got a Medusa last week --
Will you care if I still can't get out of bed?
I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit,
I'm so moody, and I forget a lot of shit.
I'm so moody -- you've got to be kidding me! Scrolling down their bandcamp page just now, I see that Breakfast In Silence is based in Salt Lake City, which syncs with the general "Mormon" theme (Ammonite is another Book of Mormon word, by the way) and with my specific mention earlier in this post of the saltlessness of Lake Erie.
I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I shaved my head today (as I do about once a week), and that I used to be called Tom Petty in college because my long blond hair made me look like him.
Recently on YouTube I've been listening to a lot of old Moody Blues albums, as well as some of Justin Hayward's solo work, plus a lot of Kill_mR_DJ mashups, and of course that one Jay-Z Linkin Park collaboration. So I suppose the recommendations the algorithm served up aren't really surprising.
First, there was this 1995 spot on Entertainment Tonight featuring Justin Hayward with his daughter Doremi. (Yes, I suppose it makes sense that a guy who named one of his albums Every Good Boy Deserves Favour after the line notes of the treble clef staff would have a child named after the musical scale.) I clicked on the video solely because of the daughter's name -- Doremi is Domrémy, birthplace of the Maid of Orléans, which is the sort of thing that always gets my attention. The video was quite uninteresting, though, and it turns out she pronounces her name more like Dorramy, with the stress on the first syllable, than like Domrémy.
The next suggestion was truly inevitable: Unbeknownst to me, Kill_mR_DJ had actually done a version of "Numb/Encore," mashing it up with a French New Age song called "Ameno," with plainsong-style singing in gibberish meant to sound like Latin and a video evoking the Catholic Middle Ages.
The lyrics of "Ameno" begin with "Dori me" -- which is then repeated probably 30-some times. And for a brief second the video even flashes an image reminiscent of the Maid from Domrémy.
So, the sync fairies have drawn my attention to St. Catherine, about whom I know little beyond her association with breaking wheel.
When I see a crowned woman with an eight-spoked wheel, though, my first thought is of Fortuna, from whose Greek name Tyche my own surname ultimately derives.
The Wheel of Fortune is something I have written about quite extensively at The Magician's Table. On July 18 of this year, I saw Jupiter in a halo around the Moon and wrote, "When I see a 'wheel' in the sky with the Moon at the center, my immediate thought is 'O Fortuna / Velut luna . . . .'" One month before that, I had ha the last in a series of recurring dreams about a spacecraft sailing through an enormous ring or torus in the sky.
Catherine and her wheel made me think of "Eternity Road," a song by Ray Thomas from To Our Children's Children's Children, the 1969 Moody Blues concept album inspired by the moon landing. The lyrics begin thus:
Hark, listen, here he comes
Hark, listen, here he comes
Turning, spinning, Catherine wheeling
Forever changing, there's no beginning
Speeding through a charcoal sky
Observe the truth, we cannot lie
When I sat down to write this post, I opened the Brave browser. The home screen has a background image which changes from time to time, and today it was, for the first time, this:
These two songs have been running through my mind for a few days now. Now they can run through yours, too.
I've always thought the Ween song was about preparing to die. "I'm dancing in the show tonight" always reminds me of that old joke: The good news is that, yes, there is baseball in heaven. The bad news is you're pitching tonight.
And if the Ween song's not creepy enough for you, their source material was even creepier!
When I was 14 or thereabouts, I was assigned as a home teaching companion to one Brother Barr (not his real name), a somewhat eccentric lawyer who, like the Dormouse in Alice, seemed perpetually on the verge of falling asleep. Some years later, when Brother Barr became a counselor to the bishop and used to sit up in front of the congregation every Sunday, counting how many times he nodded off and jerked awake again was an amusing way of whiling away the occasional dull sacrament meeting. (He always sat with one leg crossed over the other, and the moment his chin hit his chest, his leg would start bouncing up and down spasmodically, waking him up for another few minutes. It really was quite entertaining.)
But what was harmless fun when it occurred in church was rather another matter when Brother Barr was behind the wheel of a moving automobile -- which was the situation when he took me out home teaching. We covered a rather rural part of Ohio, which meant long drives along silent country roads after dark, and I spent those drives -- well, "in a state of abject terror" would be an exaggeration, but "braced for impact" would not -- and I must admit the whole experience sowed doubts in my mind as to whether forbidding the use of coffee were really the most effective way of fending off the destroying angel.
In an effort to keep him awake, I used to have Brother Barr regale me with tales of his misspent youth -- and by "misspent" I am of course referring to the game of Dungeons & Dragons. I heard his (predictably, somewhat eccentric) D&D stories again and again. The time he killed the Great Granddaddy of Assassins ("I just shot him. Saw him flying around overhead and just shot him!"). The time he faced a bad guy who was surrounded by a reddish-gold cloud which -- get this -- turned out to be a red dragon and a gold dragon flying around in circles so fast that they looked like a cloud! Eventually, though, the familiar tales of derring-do would peter out, and Brother Barr would have recourse to the old standby of cranking the air-conditioning up to eleven and playing the radio.
One night the radio happened to be playing "Melancholy Man" by the Moody Blues. I had just recently become interested in that band but had not yet acquired that particular album, and so it got my attention. I thought it certainly sounded like the Moodies but wasn't entirely sure, so I listened very closely, hoping the DJ would mention the band's name at the end.
The reason I remember this all so clearly is what happened during the song. Just as Mike Pinder sang, "When all the stars are falling down," a positively gigantic meteor, like a long-tailed fireball, streaked downwards across the sky in front of us and disappeared behind the trees.
I've never had any sense of direction, but I nevertheless felt quite certain that my house was in that direction and that the meteor "had my name on it." Throughout the rest of the drive I was lost in a fantasy of coming home and finding a smoldering crater where my house had been -- perhaps with an outsize mushroom or two.
Of course in the end I found -- with a sense of relief tinged with disappointment -- that the shooting star had not struck my house and that everything was just as it had always been, but the fantasy had been so extraordinarily vivid, and I had felt so sure about it, that it has stayed with me all these years and still comes to mind every time I hear "Melancholy Man."
Once I have misheard the lyrics of a song, my brain can be quite insistent on continuing to hear them that way, even after I have been informed of what they "really" are. For example, despite knowing now that the phrase repeated in the chorus of the David Bowie song "Five Years" is -- as should have been obvious! -- five years, I continue to hear it as bupkis: "Bupkis, that's all we've got. We've got bupkis, what a surprise . . . ." Of course bupkis is a Yiddish-derived Americanism unlikely to have been in Bowie's active vocabulary, and "Five Years" is, you know, the name of the song, but the part of my brain that listens to music remains unconvinced.
Another particularly stubborn mishearing is the beginning of the Moody Blues song "Blue World" -- which, as you may not be aware, begins "Arkansas took control, took control of me." Apparently so many people mishear "Arkansas" as "heart and soul" that the latter version actually made it into the liner notes, an error which has been repeated on roughly 100% of Internet lyrics sites!
Looking at the context, we can easily see that "heart and soul" is an error.
Arkansas took control,
Took control of me.
Paid my dues, spread the news,
Hands across the sea.
Obviously your heart and soul can't take control of you; they are you. Just as obviously, this is about getting involved in some sort of political rannygazoo -- dues-paying and news-spraying not being activities noted for their soulfulness. Since my immersion in the music of the Moody Blues began quite abruptly in September 1992, a few months before Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, was elected president, I naturally associated this political "Arkansas" with him. Never mind that "Blue World" was released in England in 1983, nine years before Clinton's election and 17 years before his party began to be thought of as the "Blue" faction; one can't get too hung up on linearity when it comes to interpreting lyrics.
*
A further dimension was added to the Arkansas theme by a bluegrass song I first encountered around the same time as the Moody Blues: "Down in the Arkin'," as performed by a local Thompson, Ohio, bluegrass band called Barb and Uncle Dave's Pure Quill on their album There's a Place in Thompson. (It turns out not to be true that everything is on YouTube now.) It consists of a series of doggerel verses, with this refrain, slightly different from the classic Jimmy Driftwood version:
Down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin-saw,
The prettiest girls I ever did see were down in the Arkin-saw
For some reason -- perhaps it was the covert influence of the hidden word ark -- I thought of this as being sung by the angels in Genesis 6 who looked down from heaven and "saw the daughters of men, that they were fair" -- hence the reference to pretty girls down in the Arkansas. "Arkansas" then became, in my mind, a name for the corrupt antediluvian world, and the first line of the refrain became "Down in the Ark, and down in the Ark, and down in the Arkansas" -- directly paralleling the Beatles' line "Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR."
Just as "US" (the United States) turns out to be the beginning of "USSR" (the enemy of the United States), so "Ark" (of Noah) turns out to be the beginning of "Arkansas" (Noah's enemies). And the line about "the prettiest girls I ever did see" parallels "the Ukraine girls really knock me out" etc. The implication is that the US is not so different from the USSR, and the Ark is really just another Arkansas.
Once "Arkansas" had come to be associated with the world destroyed by the Flood, it was only natural to reinterpret the "Blue World" of the Moody Blues song as a reference to that Flood, a connection that was reinforced by the release a few years later of the heavily advertised movie Waterworld.
*
At this point, the synchronicity fairies have chimed in. I just checked the Wikipedia article on "Back in the USSR" to see what year it was released, and I found this 1984 quote from Paul McCartney.
I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there [in Soviet Russia], even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not.
"Hands across the water" is one of McCartney's own lines, from "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (1971), but it ties in nicely with the "hands across the sea" in "Blue World."
*
The Arkansas/Flood connection was reinforced and expanded by another Jimmy Driftwood song, "Tennessee Stud," which I believe I first heard from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, although it may have been Barb and Uncle Dave again. These days my favorite rendition is Suzanna Choffel's, which captures some of the subtle unearthliness of the lyrics about a horse "the color of the sun."
The song begins thus:
Along about eighteen and twenty-five
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never woulda got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee stud.
Why "the Arkansas mud"? Because the floodwaters have only just receded from Arkansas. Almost everything has been killed by the Flood, but the singer (presumably either Noah or one of his sons) is still "very much alive." It follows that "Tennessee" must mean the Ark and is actually "Ten-Asea" -- a reference to the eight human beings and two horses which it saved. Of course there were a lot of other animals as well, but the horses -- the Ten-Asea Stud and the Ten-Asea Mare -- were considered part of the family.
*
This idea of a flooded Arkansas was already firmly cemented in my mind when, in 1999, John Linnell released his solo concept album State Songs, including the astonishingly appropriate "Arkansas."
The song is about a ship called the Arkansas which is "the exact dimensions and the shape of the state whose name she bore," and the final verse asks,
When the rising tide engulfs the shore
And the waves roll over Arkansas,
Will the ship return to anchor there and replace the sunken state?
For the ship was shaped like Arkansas,
And the hull was formed without a flaw.
Every detail had been reproduced on a scale of one to one.
So once again we have Arkansas sinking beneath the waves, its place being taken by an Ark which is not in the end so different from what it is replacing.
