I've never listened to the Sex Pistols. I mean I literally don't think I've ever listened to a single Sex Pistols song. They're not the sort of band that gets played on the radio, let alone as background music in public places. Nevertheless, they're supposed to have been an "important" group in the history of popular music, and I've picked up a thing or two about them through cultural osmosis. So when I needed a title for a sync post about seeing the word caster twice in rapid succession -- not Castor and Pollux but Caster and Caster -- what came to mind was "Never mind the Pollux," a reference to the 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.
Not really knowing anything about the album, I looked it up after posting and found this:
Mortimer produced an expert witness, Professor James Kinsley, Head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham, who argued that the word "bollocks" was not obscene, and was actually a legitimate Old English term formerly used to refer to a priest, and which, in the context of the title, meant "nonsense." Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who appeared with Mortimer, recalled the professor saying that early English translations of the Bible used "bollocks" to refer to testicles, this being replaced by the word "stones" in the King James Version of the Bible, at which point Rotten handed Robertson a note saying, "Don't worry. If we lose the case, we'll retitle the album Never Mind the Stones, Here's the Sex Pistols."
Johnny Rotten was referencing the Rolling Stones, of course, and implying that his band was better. (By the way, one of the Bible passages with stones for "testicles" is Job 40:16-17, which is subtly alluded to in one of the most secret parts of the Mormon temple ceremony.) After William Wright left a comment on the post, though, I thought of the Stones he is so obsessed with, so I left a comment mentioning Rotten's quip. William replied with this:
Hmmm - that [Sex Pistols reference] went over my head. I've never listened to them and don't know a thing about them, until I looked them up just now.A seeming reference to your latest post on raising eyebrows? Seems like that group raised a few back in the day, from what I've just read.A group referencing themselves as Dicks (using this slang here on purpose for reasons below) that asks folks to not mind (pay attention to) the Stones is interesting, in a bad way I guess, if one is willing to interpret Stones in a different way than intended.Your Banana group that charged after the Civil War nuts seemed to be also a reference to dicks, if I understood you correctly?Dick is a nickname based on Richard, which also has Rick as a nickname. You wrote about a picture of someone who likes to "rick", meaning swinging a massive morningstar, which you mentioned was badass and pretty cool. We see a similar weapon (a flail, technically) in the Iron video held by a person that could probably be described as a badass.In your post announcing you were sync posting again, you actually did the same thing that the Sex Pistols are telling people to do in their album title, in a way. You changed "Let's rock and roll" to "Let's rick and roll", replacing the rock (Stone) with a rick (dick)....as in, never mind the Rock-Stone, here is the Rick-Dick.
How is it that I never made any of those connections? I knew the literal meaning of bollocks, and the intended meaning of Sex Pistols, but I never put two and two together and realized that the album title is literally saying "Never mind the testicles, here's the penises." I guess pitting those two parts of the male anatomy against each other is so odd and unnatural that it never crossed my mind.
As for the Bananas vs. the Civil War Nuts (see "Charge! Run away!"), the Freudian implications of bananas vs. nuts seem inescapable once they've been pointed out, but I never made the connection until I read William's comment. When I wrote that "I was very interested in, uh, bananas," I think William took my uh as wink-wink-nudge-nudge, but it was just intended to signal sheepishness as I admitted that, while my peers were interested in intellectually stimulating subjects like the Civil War, I myself was obsessed with something as vacuous as a particular kind of fruit. No double entendre.
Here's how I came to be Banana Man. When I was very young, maybe two or three, I used to wake my parents up almost every night screaming about big-eyed "monkeys" looking in my window or coming into my room. I would later come to think of these unwelcome guests as "the bugs" and superstitiously repeat the prayer "Don't let the bugs bother me tonight," but at this point they were "monkeys." My parents, who believed in tackling phobias head-on (my father would often tell the story of how he overcame his own formerly extreme arachnophobia), responded to this by buying me a Curious George doll and encouraging me to embrace all things monkey -- which I did, with a vengeance. Eating lots of bananas was part of this, and I insisted on eating them "the monkey way" -- meaning with the skin peeled back but not removed, as I had seen monkeys eating them in cartoons. Over time, bananas gradually took over center stage from monkeys, and monkeys began to seem to be an aspect of my obsession with bananas even though it had originally been the other way around. I still have some of my old writing assignments from elementary school, and everything -- everything -- is about monkeys or bananas. When we read Banner in the Sky, I always referred to it as Banana in the Sky, and when I had to create sentences using vocabulary words like edelweiss and reconnoitre, I came out with stuff like, "Few people realize that, like edelweiss, banana trees can flourish at high altitudes." It became a challenge: I saw "Write one sentence using each of the following words" and read "Write a paragraph about monkeys or bananas incorporating each of the following words." I was pretty good at it, and I like to think it made checking homework marginally less boring for my teachers.
As I got older, I got tired of the Banana Man persona but found that it was too well established to be readily shaken off. Fortunately, right around that time the Cold War ended, and my father left Martin Marietta and the land of submarines for an insurance company in Cleveland. This meant a substantial step down in terms of coolness-by-association, but it also meant a fresh start in a new town, and I left Banana Man behind in Maryland.
When I read William's comment about how bananas were clearly "a reference to dicks," my first thought was, "Oh, come on! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!" -- the line humorously attributed to Sigmund Freud. But of course, much like Freud himself, I have made a habit of reading hidden meanings into everything and therefore have no right to say that. Live by the -- oh, wait, that's a phallic symbol, too, isn't it?
Then I remembered how one of my teachers, adapting a common expression about cigars for the benefit of the Banana Man in his class, used to say "Close but no banana" when a student's answer wasn't quite correct. And I used to have a sync blog called No Cigar. This was a reference to a line in the They Might Be Giants song "See the Constellation" (later Galahad Eridanus would independently use the word constellating to mean noticing connections and synchronicities) but also to the Freud joke: No, a cigar isn't ever just a cigar because nothing is ever just itself; everything has a meaning. Furthermore, the word cigar likely comes from, or was influenced by, cigarra, the Spanish for "cicada." I adopted the cicada as a sort of personal emblem c. 2009. I wore a jade cicada pendant, and my blog was called Bugs to fearen babes withal (a deliberately misinterpreted line from Spenser, also adapted by Melville in his Encantadas), with an anatomical diagram of a cicada as the header image. Real longtime readers (maybe just Bruce?) will remember this. When in 2010 I asked for and received a "sign from God" (which failed to convert me from atheism), it took the form of a cicada.
How did the cicada -- considered a "true bug" by entomologists -- come to succeed the banana as a personal symbol? Well, it goes back to that Spenser line and to my childhood terror of the little chaps I thought of as "monkeys" or "bugs." In other words, the banana and the cicada can ultimately be traced back to the same source.
Now things get really weird. Shortly after moving to Ohio -- so I would have been around 12 -- I had a dream in which my old friends the bugs (long neglected and no longer terrifying) appeared and rather gleefully sang me a song in English (as opposed to the wordless drone that was their normal "song" in my infancy), to a tune similar to the Star Wars theme. Music always makes things easier to remember, and I can give you the cryptic lyrics verbatim all these years later:
R-V!Remember the other word: dea-con!Indestructible workerLet him without stone cast the first cigarette
I was myself a deacon at that time, as are most Mormon boys of that age. I remember that in the dream I understood RV to stand for preparation worker, even though that doesn't make any sense. The literal meaning of deacon is "servant" (worker), and in Mormonism it is considered to be a "preparatory" office; after two years as a deacon, a boy would normally be promoted up through the ranks of the priesthood, becoming an elder at the ripe old age of 18.
What strikes me now, though, is the last line, which at the time seemed to be nothing but an opaque and apparently meaningless corruption of "let him without sin cast the first stone." Notice how perfectly it fits with our present theme: no stones, but here's a phallic symbol. It even features the word cast. William Wright linked the "casters" of my post (one of which, remember, was a cigarette pack) with Aaron and the magicians "casting" their rods. In Mormonism, it is with ordination as a deacon that one is admitted to the ranks of the Aaronic Priesthood. Mormons are, of course, strictly forbidden to smoke.
Another oddity: Earlier this year, around January and February, a persistent idea kept coming into my mind, seemingly out of nowhere, that I should buy an actual cigar and smoke it. The whole thing was weird. I've never smoked anything in my life, and literally no one takes up smoking at the age of 43 -- or at least no one has done so since the Elizabethan era. The idea -- I would say "temptation," but it wasn't at all tempting -- was that I would buy a single cigar from a convenience store, go out in the mountains somewhere and smoke it in secret, and then return to civilization and to being a non-smoker. What could possibly be the point of that? People smoke first for social reasons and then because it's a habit. Who the hell decides in middle age to smoke a single cigar all alone in the mountains and then never smoke again? No one, not even me. I never did it, but the idea kept presenting itself to me with a strange persistence, for a couple of months.
William Wright mentions my September 8 post "I don't care what people say, Rick and roll are here to stay," which marked my return to sync-posting after a long break, and which replaces rock (stones) with Rick (dick). Of course I wasn't thinking of male anatomy but of rickrolling -- which, for those of you who have been living under a rock, refers to the practice of posting bait-and-switch links that unexpectedly lead to a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up." (If you're unfamiliar with this childish so-called "joke," Dr. Simon West's presentation "The History and Semiotics of Rickrolling" will bring you up to speed.)
Rickrolling evolved from duckrolling. At one point, 4chan would replace with word egg with duck in posts, changing eggroll to duckroll. This gave rise to bait-and-switch links leading to an image of a mallard duck on wheels accompanied by a song about, of all things, Jean-Luc Picard, the Star Trek character played by Patrick Stewart. Testicles are called "eggs" in many languages, including Spanish and Chinese. In the "Bananas vs. Civil War Nuts" pictures, one of the Nuts always had a duck's bill to indicate that he was Patrick, who had played the role of a duck named Dr. Mallard in a school play. The duckroll meme also links a mallard duck to a role (duckrole?) played by an actor named Patrick. In case you missed it, William Wright recently brought up Jean-Luc Picard, and the significance of his being played by an actor named Patrick, in a context completely unrelated to duckrolling.
One more thing: Last night, I was thinking about my dream about "One and forty-four" and possible meanings of those numbers, when a book on my shelf caught my eye: Number by Tobias Dantzig. I thought, "Well, there's a book called Number. I'll just take it down and see what's on page 144."
Page 144 was blank.
Since I had the book down, I flipped through it a bit, and between pages 220 and 221 I found an old bookmark which I must have left there when I last read it -- which, according to my records, was in 2009:
The Chinese is my wife's handwriting, and I'd added a transliteration because I was still pretty illiterate in Chinese at that time. It's a song Taiwanese soldiers used to sing, which can be loosely translated as follows:
This here is my longer gun;I've also got a shorter one.Long's for killing spies (Red China's).Short's for sticking in . . .
Well, you get the idea. She'd been singing the song because we were raising sugar gliders at the time -- an animal that literally has two penises -- and I'd asked her to write it down. Then, apparently, I used the note as a bookmark and forgot all about it for 14 years, until the sync fairies needed it.
What's on the cover of my copy of Number? Glad you asked:
A picture of three stones, and a quote from someone named One Stone -- why am I thinking of that Herb Caen line about martinis?
⁂
What does it all mean? Well, a penis is a mechanism for delivering what is produced by the testicles, so I guess all dick and no balls is all delivery and no content -- Oscar Wilde's "I have nothing to declare except my genius," or McLuhan's "The medium is the message." The applicability to me likely has to do with sync-posting itself. I have focused almost entirely on the coincidences themselves (the medium), with minimal attempts to interpret what they all mean (the message). This is partly because they're very hard to interpret, and partly because in my experience people who do try to forge their syncs into a coherent narrative always end up succumbing to delusions of grandeur and going completely -- well, as it happens, the mot juste here is nuts, which is subtly different from going bananas.
Galahad Eridanus talks about the tension between blindness and madness and the need for narrative thinking. I think I've been trying to walk the tightrope between blindness and madness by seeing all kinds of crazy things but declining to interpret them. If I didn't see, I would be blind. If I interpreted, I would likely go mad; at least everyone else seems to do so. But this isn't a clever "middle way"; it's just pointless. It's like learning to "read" a language correctly in terms of pronunciation without learning what any of the words mean -- a completely useless skill, unless you're reading to someone who understands the spoken language but is illiterate. I guess that's the excuse I've been using -- that maybe most of my syncs aren't "for" me, that I'm just reading them off for other people's benefit, and that the interpretation is up to them. I think that's a cop-out, though, and in any case no one else actually seems to be doing that interpretive work successfully. Readers may benefit from an individual sync here or there, but interpreting the whole stream and turning it from one damn thing after another into a story? Well, that's my job. Who else could be expected to do it? Dee-and-Kelley type partnerships have occasionally borne fruit, but I don't have that. I have to play both roles. With some help from my readers and correspondents, yes, but in the end it's my own work to do.
Agnosticism is a cop-out. You have to make hypotheses. You have to plant a seed and see if it grows. Failure to do so is just another version of the contemptible ethic of safety first.
