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.

Ya Hey

I've almost finished reading Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon. The penultimate chapter of the last volume ends with a long quotation from the lyrics of the Vampire Weekend song "Ya Hey." Since I just posted on a song called "Hey Oh," this seems like a sync. Also, I can't stop listening to it.

The lyrics left untranscribed in this official lyric video are Latin: ut Deo.

But who could ever live that way?

Ut Deo, Ya Hey

Ut Deo, Deo

This phrase appears only once in the Bible, in Galatians 2:19. Ezra Koenig is Jewish, but the context ("who could ever live that way?") makes me think the New Testament allusion is intentional.

Ego enim per legem, legi mortuus sum, ut Deo vivam: Christo confixus sum cruci.

For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God: I am crucified with Christ.

The bridge mentions "spinning 'Israelites' into '19th Nervous Breakdown'"; not sure what the connection is.

Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.

This past July, ben, who comments here, alerted me to the fact that William Wright, who (as WW) wrote that interesting guest post for Bruce about orcs, had started a blog of his own, called Coat of Skins. Mr. Wright assumes that both the Book of Mormon and Tolkien's Legendarium are true and writes about how they interrelate -- Abinadi was the reincarnation of Faramir, the Book of Ether contains a hidden reference to the Brother of Jared opening the gates of Khazad-dûm, that sort of thing. It's a bit fringe even by my standards, but I find it interesting and have been reading it regularly.

One of the early posts was "The Liahona as a Palantir (the Anor Stone)" Palantiri are generally black, but Mr. Wright argues that the name Anor Stone (anor being Sindarin for "sun") suggests that this one had a golden appearance, matching the description of the "brass" Liahona in the Book of Mormon. This caught my attention because back in December 2020, I had some syncs (documented in "Red Sun, Yellow Sun") connecting the Liahona with the Sun.

Early on in my reading of Coat of Skins, I Googled an unfamiliar name used in a since-deleted post there and discovered the work of Daymon Smith, who I had never heard of before. He's a Mormon linguistic anthropologist who has written extensively about the Book of Mormon, and whose most recent work also involves treating the works of Tolkien as non-fiction and trying to integrate them with the Book of Mormon. I read a few pages of his Jaredites-from-Numenor story The Words of the Faithful but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered his sprawling Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, which I have found absolutely fascinating. I bought all eight books (it consists of five volumes published as eight books, whatever that means!) and am currently reading the final (eighth/"fifth") one.

On August 2, Mr. Wright posted "Eleanor and 'Wake Up Time.'" He recounts a dream in which he saw a man in a tailcoat playing a grand piano. When the pianist noticed he had an audience, he turned around and said, "Hello, everyone. My name is Eleanor," and then Mr. Wright immediately woke up. Upon waking, he figured the name must actually have been El-Anor, Sindarin for "Sun-Star." Later, he was reminded of this dream when he was watching a documentary about Tom Petty and saw this image:

This synched with his dream because it included a grand piano, the Sun (anor), and "Wake Up Time." (He had woken up from his dream when he heard the pianist say "My name is El-Anor.") Although the post didn't mention it, elanor is also the name of a flower in Tolkien, and "Wake Up Time" is from Tom Petty's album Wildflowers.

The "Wake Up Time" image caught my eye because WUT is visually very similar to my initials, WJT, and because when I was in college people thought I looked like Tom Petty and used to call me Tom. Despite this, I don't really know anything about Petty or his music -- except, now, this song.

Immediately after reading the post and listening to "Wake Up Time," I picked up an old book I had had printed and bound about a week before but hadn't started reading yet: Paradise Found by William Fairfield Warren. I opened it up and found that the very first sentences is, "This book is not the work of a dreamer." This insistence that he was not dreaming when he wrote the book seemed like a potential sync with the idea of "wake up time."

The next morning, I met with a businessman whom I tutor in English. He told me that he'd read an English article called "Why Are Piano Keys Black and White" but didn't want to discuss it because it was too boring. This random reference to piano keys also seemed like a potential sync. It also made me idly wonder how many keys of each color a piano has (I knew the total was 88), so I looked it up: 52 white and 36 black.

Later in the day, I wanted to get some background on William Fairfield Warren, so I checked his Wikipedia page. His first listed publication is The True Key to Ancient Cosmology. I also clicked a link to the article about his brother, Henry White Warren. Among this latter Warren's works was Fifty-two Memory Hymns. So, just after learning that a piano has 52 white keys, I ran into this reference to a musical work with the number 52 in its title, written by someone named White whose brother wrote a book called The True Key. This was enough of a sync to make me curious about the contents of Fifty-two Memory Hymns, so I found it online. The first hymn in the collection includes this stanza:

Enthroned amid the radiant spheres,

He glory like a garment wears ;

To form a robe of light divine,

Ten thousand suns around Him shine.

The plural reference to "ten thousand suns" may be referring to the stars as "suns," making it a link to El-Anor, "Sun-Star."

I discovered all this on August 3. Later that same evening, I was reading the first volume of Daymon Smith's Cultural History. Although ostensibly a history of the Book of Mormon, it includes many long digressions on a variety of other topics, and one of the things I read in it that night was Keith Richards's story of how he "wrote 'Satisfaction' in my sleep. I had no idea I'd written it." He woke up the next morning and found that he had recorded it on a cassette during the night, with no memory of having done so. This happened, Smith mentions, while Richards was "living in St. John's Wood."

So "Satisfaction" is "the work of a dreamer" -- an obvious sync with Warren's assertion that his book is no such thing. The dreaming happened in St. John's Wood, which syncs with the opening lines of Petty's "Wake Up Time":

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams,

You follow your leader into the trees

The strangest sync, though, was that the story was about Keith Richards, one of the Rolling Stones. William Wright writes that, in thinking about his "Eleanor" dream, he began considering the possibility of "the man introducing himself actually representing a stone," or "that the man and his piano could have represented both of these possibilities -- an actual man and a stone." Keith Richards: an actual man, and an actual Stone.

When I went out on the morning of August 4, I found that this cardboard box had been left out in front of my house for the recycling people to pick up.

SUNSTAR -- a pretty on-the-nose sync with El-Anor. If you've got good eyes and can recognize some basic Chinese/Kanji characters, you might notice that there's a 石, "stone," in the fine print, too (in the phrase 第二石油類, "second petroleum category").

Around noon on August 4, I was pacing around my study thinking of this and that, and I thought how "Wake Up Time" begins with following your dreams into the trees -- similar to how Dante's Comedy begins with the poet sleepwalking into a forest. The very last words of the Comedy are "il sole e l'altre stelle" -- "the sun and the other stars," El-Anor again. Dante's journey takes him in the end to Paradise, so there's also another sync with Paradise Found.

Then I remembered that WW’s post had mentioned that El was also a name of God, and that Dante discusses this somewhere in Paradiso. I thought for a second that Dante even connected El with the Sun, but then I remembered that, no, that was the Irish poet known as A.E. or Æ. (For the relevant quotes from each poet, see my 2019 post "U.E. echoes A.E.") I was, as I have said, pacing around as I thought about all this, and just as I thought of A.E., I turned and saw this on my wife's desk:

She has a whole set of these yellow apples, each marked with a different phonetic symbol. The one marked with the pen name of an Irish poet just happened to be the only one visible, and my eyes just happened to fall on it just as I was thinking about that poet, who wrote of our earliest ancestors, "I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored."

The apple is the traditional fruit of Eden, or Paradise, and in the Greek version (Garden of the Hesperides), it's even the golden apple. The golden apple is a solar symbol, too: "The Song of Wandering Aengus," by A.E.'s lifelong friend Yeats, begins (like Dante and Tom Petty) in a forest -- "I went out to the hazel wood" -- and ends with the line "The golden apples of the sun."

Then I remembered what had happened the night before (August 3). I was teaching a children's English class in which one of the students used to go by the English name Apple but later changed it when she found out it wasn't really a very normal name. Some of the other students like to tease her about it, and on the evening of August 3, one of them had made a pencil sketch in which there was a big apple in the sky radiating light. The student formerly known as Apple accused him of drawing an apple on purpose to annoy her, but he insisted (in bad faith, obviously) that it wasn't an apple, it was the sun. It was a monochrome pencil sketch, but of course the apple/sun would be understood to be yellow in color. I'm sure Eris was looking down from Olympus and chuckling at these two arguing and fighting over, of all things, a golden apple.

On August 9, I discovered one of Daymon Smith's now-defunct blogs -- called (there's the forest theme again) these mystry woods -- and skimmed, among other things, a 2015 post called "It is what It is," which begins with a picture of a Klein bottle.

This series of thoughts in the post -- I'm quoting three non-contiguous passages here -- got my attention:

"I am that I am" must be saying something about Language, capital L.

Maybe L and the Word, and what-ever-Is-is are really "just" light?  Different kinds of Light?

How can we understand L? or EL?

Here the letter L is used to represent Language, and Light, and the divine name El. Remember A.E.'s fantasy of our ancestors looking up at the sun and "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored"?

Smith ends his post by finally talking about the impossible Klein bottle: Klein bottles "don’t exist here as bottles, but we can describe them. They exist in L."

The next day, August 10, I was reading Smith's Cultural History -- Volume 2A now -- and Smith mentioned that the CJCLDS is "a corporate body with rights of ownership irrespective of human life-spans." This made it sound like copyrights owned by a corporation never expire, which would mean the Book of Mormon isn't in the public domain -- but I was quite sure that it is in the public domain. I ended up Googling it to make sure, and the highlighted answer was no!

Still thinking that must be wrong, I scrolled down to the fourth result, which was from the church’s own website and said the text itself was in the public domain.

Clicking that link for details, I found a forum conversation in which one of the participants had a name and avatar that caught my eye:

That's another Klein bottle, and the guy's name appears to be A.E. The thread is about the possibility of publishing an edition of the Book of Mormon with no verse numbers -- and just such an edition of the Book of Mormon has been published by none other than Daymon Smith, who posted the first Klein bottle!

Oh, and on August 25 I happened upon someone wearing this "Wake Up Time"-esque T-shirt:

Note added: On the same day that I posted this -- September 13, even though it's reporting syncs from early August -- William Wright revisited Tom Petty on his blog, with "Rock & Roll in Rivendell: Tom Petty, Elrond, and Alma the Younger." I'm not sure which of us posted first, but I didn't see his post until the next morning, and there's no indication in his post that he had read mine. Looks like just more synchronicity.

War, children . . .

Debbie points out how this song sounds very different in the era of the peck.

When are Mick and the boys going to cover this?

Seriously, when? Weezer finally caved and did "Africa." You can't fight your destiny.

Seriously seriously, Mick and Keef could slay this.