Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes

In my January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," instead of using a common expression like "full circle," I instead appropriated a famous line from Finnegans Wake and wrote of how something "brings us by a commodious [sic] vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon." For those of my readers who have never attempted this self-described "usylessly unreadable" book, here is its iconic first "sentence," James Joyce's answer to "Call me Ishmael":

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The recentness of this random allusion on my part made me sit up and take notice when yesterday's post by William Wright, "Key-Stones and the Hill-Murray Pioneer," happened to mention how he and his wife had taken "the River Run Gondola" at a ski resort.

In the same post, William mentions Kubla Khan (referencing one of my own posts). When I looked up the first sentence in Finnegans Wake so I could paste it into this post above, I got it from this site, where mousing over the word riverrun causes a lengthy note to pop up, which includes this:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea."

Actually, William made a mistake and wrote "Kubla Kahn," which made me think of Alfie Kahn, a Jewish education theorist in whom my mother used to put a lot of stock. Looking him up just now, though, I found that I had made a mistake, too, as his name is actually Alfie Kohn. Anyway, Alfie is a link to Alph. Alph, by the way, is a bit of Elvish I know without having to look it up, remembering it from my childhood reading of Tolkien: It means "swan" and is derived from the root ALAK, meaning "rushing." Do swans rush? Maybe the incongruity is what made it memorable.

William Wright's post also mentions "White Holes" (opposite counterparts to black holes). This synched with dayhole, a word from my childhood which I had suddenly thought of a few days before. This was a word invented by my brother when we were kids. Since a bedside table was called a nightstand, he decided that the gap between a bed and a wall, if there is no furniture in it, should be called a nighthole. The space between a church pew and the wall was then dubbed a dayhole. If you happened to be sitting far from the aisle, you could get out of the chapel more quickly at the end of the service by "escaping through the dayhole." All this was brought back to mind a few days ago when I ran across a reference to one Chad Daybell, a fringe Mormon and accused murderer, dayhole being similar to his surname and also associated with Mormon churches. Later I found myself singing Harry Belafonte's famous calypso song, but with "Day-O" changed to "dayhole." Some of the lyrics tie in with the "banana spider" urban legend, which I mentioned in my December 19 post "RV and preparation."

A beautiful bunch of ripe banana

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

Hide the deadly black tarantula

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

On the road this morning, I had Finnegans Wake on my mind. I'm not sure why my train of thought went the way it did, but I ended up thinking about the name Mamalujo -- generally agreed to come from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- and wondering what the Old Testament equivalent would be. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers -- Geln? For the sake of euphony, we might need to throw in a few second letters, as Joyce did -- Gelen? Gelnu? Gelenu?

I had breakfast at an American-style diner in Taichung and stayed there for some time drinking coffee and reading. There was a TV on, showing some sportsball something-or-other, and a loudspeaker playing some extremely profane and sexually explicit rap, the sort of thing that would never fly as a background music in a family-friendly restaurant in the US but is fine in a place where most people don't know much English. I thought: These lyrics are like if Arnold had had leave the Demiurge's Reality Temple early, after replacing only 25% of the words in the English language with nigger.

In certain moods, though, I actually like having lots of background noise as I read.

Since I had just been thinking about "riverrun past Eve and Adam's," the rap on the loudspeaker got my attention when it mentioned those two names:

Adam, Eve with the fruit

Why we need new new?

Only got two seats, why we need new coupe?

Only got two feet, why we need new shoes?

Papa need new shoes, baby need new shoes, Imma need new shoes . . .

At this point, I glanced up at the TV and saw a commercial for, appropriately enough, shoes. Shoes called GEL-NIMBUS:

The reason the "new shoes" rap had gotten my attention was that it mentioned Adam and Eve, like the opening of Finnegans Wake. Earlier, on the road, I had been thinking about how to make a Mamajulo-like abbreviation out of Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers. Now here's a shoe called GEL followed by a word very similar to Numbers.

After breakfast, I looked through the small English section of a used bookstore in Taichung. One of the books they had was John Man's Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East. A week earlier, on a visit to the same store, I had picked up a copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which consists largely of a fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

Milkommen

One of the main sources of William Wright's unusual ideas is what he calls "words" -- strings of text which he receives in what I guess is something of a dream-like manner, and which appear to be strange multilingual concoctions incorporating English, the fictional languages created by Tolkien, and sometimes other languages such as Spanish and German. He tries to decipher these and extract a story from them. Although I sometimes enjoy this kind of sleuthing (I was a big Finnegans Wake reader in my early twenties), and although I find William's ideas stimulating, I haven't been able to muster much interest in his "words" themselves. On December 22, he posted "Jan-Feb 2022 Words Part 1" -- the type of post that typically makes my eyes glaze over -- but in this case one of his "words" (literally just one word) captured my imagination:

Feb. 5

Milkommen

Commentary:

It was just this one word, kind of just hanging there, and I took it to be perhaps a play on words of the German "Wilkommen" (Welcome), but now with Milk, since the German language had been part of my 2019 words.  The Promised Land is associated with Milk and Honey, and so that is where my mind went, whether that accurate or not.

This is a pretty solid reading, obviously. The reference to the well-known German word Willkommen seems undeniable. Besides the "milk and honey" angle, I note that Wilkommen is transformed into Milkommen by turning the first letter upside down, inviting the reading "Welcome to upside-down world" or "Welcome to the looking-glass world." (The word milk is already associated with such inversions in my mind, since Klim is a popular brand of powdered milk here in Taiwan.)

My first thought on seeing Milkommen, though, was that it could also be read as Milkom-men -- meaning the Ammonites of the Old Testament, whose national god was called Milcom or Milkom. Since William's "words" seem to be more oriented to the Book of Mormon, it could be a very indirect way of referencing an unrelated people in that book who are also called Ammonites -- Lamanites converted by the preaching of Ammon, son of Mosiah.

Of course, Milkommen would be a rather inefficient way of saying "Ammonites" if that was all you wanted to convey, so I figured there must be more to it. On a hunch, I looked up kommen on Wiktionary. It's German for "come," of course, but I scrolled down and found this at the very end of the entry.

The very last line in the entry for kommen is a partial quotation of Isaiah 55:1, where it is Swedish for "come ye." Here's the whole verse:

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye [kommen] to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

So looking up kommen led me directly back to milk!

It was quite late at night that I was making these connections. I went to bed and had a strange dream in which I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.

I was awakened suddenly by what I thought was the sound of something exploding in my study. I got up and went into the study without bothering to turn on the light, and satisfied myself that nothing had happened and that the noise must have been part of the dream. I was just about to go back to bed when I noticed a particular book, dimly visible behind the glass door of one of my cabinets, and thought, "What's that funny-looking book? I don't remember owning a book like that!" I turned on the light and opened the cabinet, and the book in question fell out and landed face-up on the desk below. I photographed it exactly as it landed, without touching it:

The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. That is, the effect of the milky juice of the poppy on four men. The effect of milk on men. In rapid speech, the final consonant of on would be assimilated to the m that follows it, yielding milk-om-men.

The title of the book is of course a reference to the famous closing lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

That's a major sync with what I was reading last night: The Desert, the first installment in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. The main characters have just been welcomed to Dira, a vast underground city (cf. "caverns measureless to man") ruled by Kazak, a king said to have about 180 wives. (A pen friend of mine recently wrote a great deal of imaginative, possibly schizophrenic, material about Kubla Khan, much of it dealing with his practice of polygamy on a vast scale.) The people of Dira keep domestic ants, which in turn keep aphids. (All insects in this book are much larger than their real-world counterparts.)

[The aphids] were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the "palace."

Milk and honeydew juxtaposed, with the latter referenced as a food rather than a drink.

In my friend's writings about Kubla Khan, paintings of the Khan show him accompanied by two kittens, one white and one black:

To complete Kubla as a Proper Man, perched precariously on the folds of Kubla’s dark cloak are two mysterious Entirely Separate Beings depicted as two tiny cute small kittens, one white and one black, that he has taken in and sheltered in his cloak from the bitter cold. The two harmless-looking kittens make quite a contrast with the stern and barbaric and pitiless visage of Kubla himself. When Kubla returns to a mortal world and sees the two kittens in portraits of himself and realizes who they represent, he also snorts, but somewhat fondly, as if the portraits reminds him of a great Cosmic Joke that the painter is not fully aware of.

I referenced Through the Looking-Glass above without remembering how it begins. This is the first sentence:

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

The looking-glass world, you will recall, is laid out in the form of a chessboard:

This same chessboard imagery appears in the Ava Max music video "Kings & Queens," on which I have recently posted:

Lest the Masonic connotations of the black-and-white tiling be lost on the audience, we have a couple of pillars thrown in for good measure. Later, Ava demonstrates a Masonic penal sign while singing "Off with your head" -- a phrase with Lewis Carroll resonances.

The "Kings & Queens" video begins with a shot of white doves in flight and later shows champagne being poured into overflowing glasses:

What made me think of the looking-glass world in the first place was the way the W in Wilkommen is turned upside down (or reflected) to create Milkommen. Back in 2018, I wrote about W/M reversals in "The Rider-Waite Magician." The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups features a white dove and an overflowing cup marked with a W that looks more like an upside-down M.

"We would pop champagne and raise a toast" is a recurring line in "Kings & Queens." Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen and others drink a toast to Alice by turning their glasses upside down:

'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health -- Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces -- others upset the decanters and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table . . . .

Coming back to Isaiah 55 (sorry, it's hard to write about this non-linear web of associations in a linear manner), here's another passage from the same chapter:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (vv. 10-11).

Rainwater is no good if we just collect it and let it stagnate. It's supposed to be used and transformed, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater -- and the same is said of the word of God. This reminds me of a poem I wrote in 2010 about manna -- which must be eaten and internalized, or else it quickly goes bad.

Who on the bread of life will feed,

will live forever -- so we read

in that same book which oft is read

as if it were itself that bread.

But in that book is also told

how manna stinks when it is old,

in but a day breeds worms and reeks --

Then what if it were kept for weeks?

Or months? Or many a yawning year?

How would the manna then appear?

When centuries had past it paced,

how would the bread of life then taste?

And were it served at such a date,

what would become of them that ate?

The historical manna is often understood to have been something produced by desert insects, so there's a possible link to the idea of feeding on honeydew.

I'm not sure which, if any, of these many disparate associations will lead anywhere worthwhile. I just wanted to get them all written down first before I forget them.

Dupes of a deep delusion!

"Dupes of a deep delusion!" -- the phrase recently popped into my head while I was trying in vain to get through to someone very close to me, an intelligent man and a Christian, who is somehow also a birdemic true believer and couldn't understand my objection to (and I quote!) "wearing a mask and avoiding close contact for a couple years."

"Dupes of a deep delusion!" -- I knew I had read that phrase decades ago in a book about sound symbolism by Reuven Tsur (he was interested in the oo-ee-ee-oo sequence of vowels) and that it was a quote from some poem or the other (Romantic-era English, from the feel of it), so I just now looked it up.

It turns out to be from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a 1798 poem with the extraordinarily appropriate title "Fears in Solitude." I quote the passage that cut the deepest when I read it.

O Britons! O my brethren! I have told

Most bitter truth, but without bitterness.

Nor deem my zeal or factious or mis-timed;

For never can true courage dwell with them,

Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look

At their own vices. We have been too long

Dupes of a deep delusion! Some, belike,

Groaning with restless enmity, expect

All change from change of constituted power;

As if a Government had been a robe,

On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged

Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe

Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach

A radical causation to a few

Poor drudges of chastising Providence,

Who borrow all their hues and qualities

From our own folly and rank wickedness,

Which gave them birth and nursed them.

The problem is not political. The solution is not political. Stop distracting yourself; play no more tricks with conscience. Gaze no more in the bitter glass; beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Those last few sentences (some of them pinched from Yeats) are addressed to myself and myself only -- but, hey, if the shoe fits . . .