On a brief hike this morning before work, I found myself humming "Greensleeves" to myself:
Greensleeves was all my joy Greensleeves was my delight Greensleeves was my heart of gold And who but my lady Greensleeves?
Then when I had lunch, the restaurant was playing Neil Young's "Heart of Gold":
In the afternoon, I taught an English class. The textbook used statements about superstitions to model first-conditional grammar, and one of the examples provided had to do with new shoes.
After going through the examples with the students, I asked them to describe local superstitions using the same grammar. This led to this little conversation:
"Many people believe that if a dog or cat has white paws, it will bring its owner bad luck."
"So the Black man in the picture is lucky. His dog is white, but its paws are brown."
"I think its paws are really white. They're dirty because it was digging."
"So the horseshoe really brought him good luck, because now his dog doesn't have white paws."
After the class, I put on some background music while I did some paperwork, letting the YouTube Music algorithm do its thing. The very first song it served up was "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. I looked at the screen and saw that the accompanying video was a montage from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a 2013 Ben Stiller movie based (very loosely, one assumes!) on the Thurber story.
For me, Ben Stiller's most iconic role will always be that of Tugg Speedman playing Four Leaf Tayback in Tropic Thunder, so there's a link back to the four-leaf clover in the textbook.
William Wright's "Needing new shoes to roller skate in Xanadu" post includes several references to "walking on air." Here's the poster for the Stiller movie:
And yes, that's the sync fairies' favorite building in the bottom right corner.
Here's another poster:
Where have I seen that imagery before? Oh, right. Here's a still from the Panic! at the Disco video "High Hopes," from my December 7 post "Mr. Mxyztplk revisited":
Mr. Mxyztplk is often called Mxy for short, not too far from Mitty.
I must say, this sync-synergy with William Wright is going on much longer than I had expected.
And that was it. Try as I might, I couldn't get any more than that one line, and that one line didn't make any sense. Nostradamus had written over a thousand quatrains that didn't make any sense, and here I couldn't even get two lines! Well, all have not every gift. I turned to other pursuits.
That one opaque line has been filed away in the back of my mind ever since, just in case it should ever turn out to mean anything, but the contingency has seemed a remote one. I've mostly assumed it's meaningless, but then nothing is ever really allowed to be meaningless, is it? Every idle word . . . .
Today, William Wright posted "A familiar symbol, secret combinations, and Mama Ungoliant." He discusses a repeating theme in music videos in which lights are set up "almost like beacons or signals, . . . as if they are expecting and signalling for someone to arrive from space." He then brings up Ungoliant, Tolkien's evil spider-demon, and speculates that it is "her, perhaps, that these signals are meant for." Spiders and lamps -- the juxtaposition made me think of my old Nostradamic monostitch.
That post also included the old Mormon Tabernacle Choir logo, which William thinks suggests a spider:
In the past, I've noticed the hidden NaCl in the name of this Salt Lake City-based organization, but today what jumped out at me was Bern. The Mormon temple in Bern, Switzerland, has been in the sync-stream recently, and of course it's also a homophone of burn, the final word of the "lamps of Salem" line. Then I noticed what I had somehow missed before: that one of the music videos discussed in William's post is actually called "Burn" -- a song by Ellie Goulding.
On a hunch, I ran a search for ellie goulding spider. The first hit was a song called "Mama" by a band called Clean Bandit, featuring Goulding, for which someone had created a video consisting of scenes from one of the Spider-Man movies:
William Wright's post explicitly connects the word Mama with spiders ("Mama Ungoliant"). One of the music videos he discusses -- where Mama came from -- is Panic! at the Disco's "High Hopes," in which "Brendon Urie climbs a tall building (walking up on the outside)" -- obviously the sort of behavior one associates with Spider-Man.
I certainly wouldn't say my monostitch makes sense now, but at least there are now, at long last, some hints that it may actually mean something. I'll see if anything develops from this.
I recently found a copy of Superman #30 (1944), Mr. Mxyztplk's debut issue. Here are some miscellaneous notes on how Mr. Mxyztplk relates to various other parts of the sync-stream:
Whitley Strieber's The Key, a book I have associated with Tim, exists in two different versions, one with a gold key on the cover and the other with a silver one, and with slightly different text. When quoting The Key in recent posts, I have referred to the two versions not by year or publisher but rather as the "gold-key" and "silver-key" versions. Mr. Mxyztplk also exists in "gold" and "silver" versions with slightly different text. In Golden Age Superman comics, his name is Mxyztplk; in the Silver Age, this is changed to Mxyzptlk.
In my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert,'" I posted the music video for "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco, which shows Brendon Urie defying gravity by walking up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top.
In Superman #30, Mr. Mxyztplk walks in front of a truck while reading a newspaper, is hit, and pretends to be dead. When an ambulance comes, he then makes himself too heavy to lift, then steals the ambulance and drives it straight up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top:
In the final panel above, it is revealed that the newspaper Mr. Mxyztplk had been reading was printed in mirror image. As everyone knows, the newspaper in Metropolis is called the Planet. Printed backwards, that would be Tenalp. In my December 2020 post "The rain god and the weather dogs," I discuss a story called "The Planet Tennalp." (In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic. By a strange coincidence, the "rain god" post also mentions the New York Times.)
I wrote the above paragraph in the morning and then went out to deal with some things. The New York Times referred to at the end of the paragraph was a license plate that said "192 NYT." While I was out, I saw another license plate which also contained the strings "NYT" and "19."
A few pages later, Superman grabs Mr. Mxyztplk, but he slips out of his grasp:
When Supes grabs him, Mxy says, "In popular parlance, pal, ya got me!" In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name," I report hearing a song with the repeated lines, "You got me, I got no alibi," and thinking of them as being spoken by Tim.
In the third panel, Superman is holding Mxytplk very tight, but somehow he slips out anyway. This is something that Mushroom People can do in Eleanor Cameron's novels. More than once a human seizes a Mushroom Person only to have him slip free even when it seems impossible to do so. At first the boys believe that Mushroom People must have no bones at all, but later they decide their bones must be "compressible." In my November 25 post "Likeness in anything is likeness to him," I connected Mxy's flight out the window on the above page with the ascension of the Mushroom Person Tyco Bass.
Later, a giraffe puts in an appearance:
The bottom left panel above is what I was thinking of when I said earlier (in a comment on William Wright's blog) that Mxy makes music come out of a refrigerator. Actually, I see now that it's not a refrigerator but some sort of cabinet or safe.
On the last page, we discover that Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.
I love how this is portrayed as Superman "outwitting" Mxy, when his sole strategy is just to ask him, "What's the magic word?"
In the third panel above, Mxy says, "I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!" This reminds me of these lines from the Muse song "Knights of Cydonia" (see "Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur"):
And how can we win
When fools can be kings?
Don't waste your time,
Or time will waste you.
The "Russian reversal" in the last line is a close cousin to the idea of saying something backwards -- and of course time is very close to Tim.
Finally, note that Superman, Inc. is located at 480 Lexington Ave. That's a four-minute walk from the Chrysler Building, which is number 405.
A few weeks ago I discovered and started listening to a second Vampire Weekend song, "Step":
This is the chorus:
The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out What you on about? I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house Such a modest mouse I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone
Given the immediate context, I don't think "the wisdom teeth are out" refers to routine dental surgery. It means "the snake has bared its fangs," snakes being a metonym for wisdom ("wise as serpents"). The third line reinforces this reading with its (probably unintentional) nod to Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":
But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone.
Listening to "Step" now, I naturally think of Narrow Brain, "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one," the malevolent spirit in Time and Mr. Bass. In the post I've just linked, I noted with concern the link between Narrow Brain and my blog title From the Narrow Desert. It's a line from a poem by George MacDonald in Phantastes. The complete couplet is:
From the narrow desert, O man of pride, Come into the house, so high and wide.
I've been thinking of the implications of that last line because of the recent syncs relating to the Wise Men: "And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him" (Matt. 2:11).
And what does the chorus of "Step" say? "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."
I started to think that maybe it was time to retire the name From the Narrow Desert. I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview. And, I thought, haven't I done that? I made it -- right, guys? Whatever else you might say about me, I'm not a narrow materialist anymore. I've made it into the house. Maybe I should change the blog name to High and Wide.
When I played "Step" just now, YouTube queued up after it an unfamiliar song by an unfamiliar band: "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco:
The video shows Brendon Urie walking up the side of a skyscraper in Los Angeles until he reaches the roof, where he performs with his band. At first I took this as confirmation -- it's a house that's very high -- but almost immediately I realized that this interpretation didn't sit well with me. Urie (a lapsed Mormon, incidentally, and not in a good way) never actually goes into the building. He stays on the outside, never entering its heart, and uses it to realize his "high hopes" -- which turn out to be no higher than some vapid dream of being a famous pop star. This isn't the imagery of the Wise Men bowing down to the infant Christ, but of the people who wanted "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven," an idea planted in their hearts by the same being who plotted with Gadianton (Hel. 6:28).
Returning to "Step," "Such a modest mouse!" now seems like a sarcastic response to "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."
In 2002, They Might Be Giants released their first children's album, No!, and these lines from "The House at the Top of the Tree" startled me:
There's a plan to eat the house In the mind of a mouse in the woods.
Back when I lived in Maryland, more than a decade before this song was released, we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. The tree was down in a ravine, so the tree house could be entered by a ramp connecting it to higher ground, without the need for a ladder. One time my sister and I went into the tree house only to find two large snakes coiled around the radio. They looked like colubrids of some kind, and therefore non-venomous, but they still scared us enough that we turned tail and ran back down the ramp.
A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house. I could feel its presence and its thoughts, like those of the nightmare toad. Although I thought of it as a "mouse," my mental image was of a very large animal almost like a rodent grizzly bear. When I saw the illustration associated with the TMBG song, it startled me even more:
Where do mental images come from? Why would we get the same one like that?
I've been reading the Psalms, a few a day, and today these two passages jumped out at me:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me (Ps. 131:1).
Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob; Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house . . . until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob (Ps. 132:1-5).
So no, I'm not going to rename the blog. High hopes to one side, these posts remain dispatches from the narrow desert.
