The statue is still getting me high: Dick, Rilke

The October 24 post "William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs" introduced the 1992 They Might Be Giants song "The Statue Got Me High" into the sync-stream. I connected it with this photo I took last year:

I had originally posted this photo in "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," the name Dick being the central connecting link. A white Starbucks cup had been in the sync-stream at that time, and the name Starbucks comes from Moby-Dick. Dick Diver is Fitzgerald's autobiographical character in Tender Is the Night. The cup on Fitzgerald's head made him look like Serapis, which is a link to Zeus. Zeus Is a Dick tied in with the John Dee "God is a whale" theme. Oh, speaking of whales, "The Statue Got Me High" is from this album:

I had linked the photo of the two books to "The Statue Got Me High" because a giant white teacup and saucer feature prominently in the music video, and because of the line "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."

Last night, someone posted on /x/, asking "How do I have psychedelic experiences without taking any drugs?" -- a statue getting you high would be one obvious example of this! -- with this accompanying picture:

One of the commenters identified the man in the picture: "That's Philip K. Dick receiving info from VALIS. True story." VALIS is God. The name Philip has been in the sync-stream, associated with headlessness.

A couple of days ago I started reading Rilke, my previous exposure to his work having been limited to cultural osmosis. I posted one of his poems on my Book of Mormon blog on October 24. Not until this present post brought in the name Apollo and the theme of headlessness did I think of what is arguably his best-known poem (not among those I've read recently, but everyone knows it), which may have been one of the inspirations (Don Giovanni being the other obvious one) for "The Statue Got Me High":

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.