The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist

William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend" discusses "Ya Hey" and "Step," the only two Vampire Weekend songs I know, both of which I have posted about before. He finds in them allusions to Tolkien's spider-demon Ungoliant and to a rat or mouse which he identifies with another Tolkien villain, Saruman.

So I guess it's time to talk about the poltergeist of July-August 2019.

The first thing that happened was that our phone line suddenly went dead in the middle of a call, and the phone wouldn't work after that. Eventually an electrician found the problem: A cable inside the wall had been snipped neatly in two, as if with a pair of shears. He said he couldn't understand how it had happened. He said sometimes mice will bite wires, but this was such a clean cut, and in a place that should have been inaccessible even to a mouse. And in any case we keep multiple cats, and mice are simply not an issue.

A day or two after that, an air conditioner, a water dispenser, and a television set all suddenly stopped working at the same time. In each case the technician found that a small but important component had mysteriously been cut neatly in two.

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Since some sort of spiritual presence seemed to be involved, I had the bright idea of "interrogating" it with Tarot cards. "Who are you?" I asked, then shuffled my deck, and drew a card: The Devil. "What do you want?" Death.

My reaction to this was, "Oh, come on!" It was just too corny, too cartoonish, too much like something out of a bad horror movie, and it didn't seem to fit the phenomena themselves, which seemed more mischievous than evil. I refused to take it seriously. I wrote at the time, "I think we're dealing with the spiritual equivalent of a 12-year-old boy making prank calls."

The feeling that we were dealing with an "animal" presence of some kind persisted, leading me into this dangerous line of thinking:

So far I haven't tried any prayers or other exorcistic gestures because, to be honest, my hunch is that this entity has shown up at my house the same way animals in need of help always do, and that I should receive it in the same spirit. Of course, to help it I need to know what it needs or wants (besides "death," I mean!). . . . Is it foolhardy to think I might be able to housebreak this thing? My feeling is that as long as I resist the temptation to try to enslave it, I'm not in any real danger . . . .

It's hard for me to understand now how I could have thought that way even for a moment, but I did. Fortunately, I quickly came to my senses:

Here's my thinking. A devil's purpose is not to annoy or terrorize but to tempt, and I think the temptation in this case was to do precisely what I almost did: to welcome this thing, using compassion as an excuse, but in fact motivated by morbid curiosity and pride.

Obviously, anything that calls itself the Devil, and that sees ordinary Christian prayer as a hostile act, should be taken at face value and sent packing. The only thing that made me hesitate to do so was the interesting (but absurd and illusory) prospect of "taming" it, as if I were King Solomon or something, as if I had somehow become a magician just by reading books.  . . . evil seems to be required to explicitly identify itself as such -- and it doesn't get much more explicit than saying "I'm the Devil, and I want death." If I had responded with," Right, well make yourself at home, then," I would essentially have been in the position of Faust inviting the black poodle into his house (and it was perhaps this subconscious connection that made me think of it as being like a stray animal).

I began using prayer against the thing, starting with some prayers that were recommended by a pen friend who is an Anglican priest. Phenomena ceased for about a week, and then this happened:

In what was by now a familiar pattern, two solid steel components in the ceiling fan -- which should have been the strongest parts of the whole structure -- had snapped neatly in half for no apparent reason. The workers who installed the new light fixture said they had never heard of such a thing happening. My wife had been on the sofa nearby when it fell and narrowly escaped being hit.

This type of violence represented a serious escalation, and I stepped up my efforts to get rid of the thing once and for all. What ended up doing the trick was a Latin prayer to St. Michael, recommended by a Catholic friend. (This was my first experience praying in Latin, which is now something I do every day.) When I started the prayer, one of my cats went absolutely berserk, behaving as if it were possessed, but by the end of the prayer, everything was normal, and the poltergeist phenomena never came back. Later that evening, when the Taoist "ghostbuster" team I had called earlier arrived, they said the house was clean and there was nothing for them to do.

In going back through my old emails while writing this post, I found this comment from a friend:

Although it is currently a mystery; I'm pretty sure that, if you find a cure, you will find-out what it was all about at some time later - assuming you remain curious to learn.

I wouldn't say I've found that out yet -- I'm not yet at the point where "It was a character from a Tolkien novel" feels like a real explanation -- but my curiosity has been reignited. After some time, I had more or less set the whole thing aside, contenting myself, like Bartholomew Cubbins and King Derwin, with saying "it just 'happened to happen' and was not very likely to happen again." Now, like so many other things from my past, it's resurfacing and demanding to be made sense of.

After reading William Wright's post, I was going to listen to those Vampire Weekend songs again, but I somehow tapped the wrong thing and ended up instead listening to Denmark + Winter's strange reimagining of Johnny Cash (another "Man in Black" for you, Bill):

"I keep my eyes wide open all the time / I keep the ends out for the tie that binds / Because you're mine, I walk the line." Is it strange to imagine this being sung by an unblinking spider spinning its thread?

To end with a random sync wink: William Wright's introduced Ungoliant in his post "A familiar symbol, secret combinations, and Mama Ungoliant." The "familiar symbol" of the title is a circle inside, or sometimes overlapping with, a triangle. This morning, after writing most of the above but before posting it, I stopped in a clothing store to buy some socks and saw this on a T-shirt:

Still "From the Narrow Desert"

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.

Well, that didn't take long

The last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike, I lasted all of two days, so I guess I should be proud of myself for making it almost a whole week this time.

I had thought the sync fairies would either respect my moratorium or ignore it. I hadn't expected them to explain themselves and make their case. Twice this week now I've had "recitation dreams" -- the kind where most or all of the usual imagery is shut off and it's just some guy talking. Well, in this case there was imagery, but it had more the feel of a PowerPoint presentation; the talking was the main thing.

The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.

I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)

The main thrust of the lecture was that he and his colleagues were engaged in directing my attention -- the words directing your attention were displayed in English, in very large white italics -- and that this was an extremely complex and delicate operation. Its complexity was illustrated by means of a dizzyingly complicated multidimensional diagram that kept moving and changing and reassembling itself. Each attentional decision -- whether a choice of my own or a successful nudge from them -- opened up new attentional pathways and closed off others, and so the whole thing had to be played like chess, thinking several moves in advance and taking into account various contingencies. The purpose of any particular move might not become apparent until many, many moves later.

The first recitation was delivered during my ordinary sleep on Monday night. The second -- which had the same general message, though I don't think it was a repeat of the first -- was given in more unusual circumstances. I was in my study last night reading The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch. I was starting to feel a bit tired and thought I'd finish the section I was on and then go to bed. I was on page 137, and flipping ahead I saw there was a good stopping place -- five or six blank lines indicating a scene change -- on page 140, so I planned to stop there. When I reached the end of page 137, though, I suddenly felt just overpoweringly tired, like I had to stop immediately. But the page ended with the first word of a new sentence -- "There" -- and I couldn't very well stop with that! I would at least finish the sentence. As it turned out, I read the next sentence, too, which brought me to the end of a paragraph:

There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.

The urge to sleep was now overwhelming, and was accompanied by a little singsong in my mind, some lines from Joyce: "Sleep now, O sleep now, / O you unquiet heart! / A voice crying 'Sleep now' / Is heard in my heart." I couldn't even delay long enough to go into the next room to bed. I put the book down, lay down on the floor, and there was Tim again, with a "thank you for coming to my Ted talk" look on his face.

When I woke up, after the second lecture -- at around 4:00 this morning -- I opened the book and saw how the next paragraph began:

That's when I realized I'd been outsmarted. I had taunted the sync fairies with lines from Lady Gaga -- "You can call all you want, but there's no one home / And you're not gonna reach my telephone." Well, they had just summoned me as if to a telephone ("Sleep now, O sleep now"), I had answered, and they'd said their piece. Those were the words that came to mind -- "said their piece" -- which put a song in my head:

If you think it's a joke

That's all right, do what you want to do

I've said my piece

And I'll leave it all up to you

The rest of the lyrics are relevant, too:

By the way, that bit about "forty-four chalked on a wall" is a reference to this from p. 92:

As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.

This got my attention at the time because it was a general reference to the phenomenon of synchronicity. Forty-four also happens to be my age as I read this book for the first time, despite buying it many years ago, but that's a weak-sauce sync.

What's the significance of these "44" syncs in the novel? Well, obviously the only way to find out is to keep reading. If I stopped right now, refusing to read another page until I've figured out this 44 business, that would obviously be counterproductive. But that's what I'd told the sync fairies. I kind of get what Tim was saying.

I idly wondered whether this specific sync from the novel -- seeing 44 everywhere -- was going to start invading my life, as literary syncs so often do. No, not in this case. For superstitious reasons, any number ending in 4 or containing repeated 4s is avoided in Taiwan. House numbers get out of sync because one side of the street is numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, . . . while the other is 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 . . . . Forty-four is one number I'm definitely not going to see chalked on a wall or anywhere else.

With that thought, I went to bed -- in the bed this time.

*

In the morning, I taught a private English lesson. My student had brought an article which begins thus:

Have you ever heard of collage? It's art that combines different materials or parts of images together to make something new.

It was illustrated with a photo of Georges Braque -- I at first took him for Madame Blavatsky -- and his Violin and Pipe, prominently featuring what looks like a pair of sunglasses.

After the lesson and before lunch, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest: "Gordon Kor, a peaceful school bus, and Holy Places to Stand." He mentions an author called Gordon Korman, so I looked him up. His best known book appears to be one called Restart, with a broken-but-repaired pair of glasses on the cover:

Richard Arrowsmith used to talk about "strapping on the sync goggles" -- meaning tuning in to synchronicity -- so the glasses theme seemed relevant. Mr. Wright's post dealt with the Korman novel Schooled, so I looked that up on Wikipedia and read the first couple of paragraphs of the plot summary:

Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) as an eighth grader while Rain recovers.

At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.

Claverage is interesting because it suggests the Latin for "key."

Last night I checked the old Arts & Letters Daily blog, which used to be run by Denis Dutton before he died and hasn't been the same since. A link from there took me to "The 'Crispy R' and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter," which mentioned Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend as a notable "crispy r" speaker. This led to me rewatching the video for "Ya Hey," the only Vampire Weekend song I know, and noticing that, while the Chrysler Building is visible through most of the video, it ends with a long shot of the Empire State Building. (The champagne bottles are also a sync with Lady Gaga: "I'm in the club, and I'm sippin' that bubb', and you're not gonna reach my telephone.")

I only recently learned to recognize these buildings, the NYC skyline never having been one of my strong suits. (For example, I learned that the World Trade Center had been a pair of Twin Towers, and that they had been famous, on September 11, 2001, and not a day before.) I became curious about the Chrysler Building -- my one and only existing association being with a Calvin & Hobbes reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building" -- and checked a few things. I remembered that my parents used to have a Plymouth Voyager, made by Chrysler, and that the Plymouth logo used to be a picture of the Mayflower. As for the name Chrysler itself, it looks like it has something to do with the Greek for "gold," but it's actually from the German Kreisel, meaning a spinning top. This made me think of the Shakespeare line "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," which I looked up. It's from Twelfth Night, the play in which a fake love letter (cf. Schooled) induces Malvolio to go cross-gartered in yellow stockings. The immediate context caught my eye:

FOOL

. . . And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

MALVOLIO 

I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! [Exit.]

OLIVIA 

He hath been most notoriously abused.

ORSINO 

Pursue him and entreat him to a peace. [Some exit.]

He hath not told us of the Captain yet.

When that is known, and golden time convents,

A solemn combination shall be made

Of our dear souls. . . .

The Fool then proceeds to sing "The rain it raineth every day."

The "whirligig of time" is juxtaposed with "golden time" -- my two interpretations of Chrysler. "The Captain" syncs with the Schooled character known as Cap, who is also notoriously abused. (The 42 trailer also has a line about "the abuse" Jackie Robinson is about to receive.)

The slug the size of the Chrysler Building made me think that I'd mentioned slugs before on this blog. A search turned up only the 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- highly relevant to the theme of "sync goggles" and directed attention.

When I went out for lunch, I saw Braque-style sunglasses on the street:

I also passed the restaurant that has a big horseshoe on its sign, which I had never noticed until synchronicities made it relevant -- another link to "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness." Noticing that, I decided to go to D&D again for lunch.

Something else I'd never noticed before: One of the interior walls there is made to look like a blackboard with D∞D written on it in chalk. (It's a printed image, not actual chalk.) D is the fourth letter, so DD = 44. The lemniscate is 8, which is 4 + 4. Yes, even in Taiwan, "he had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall."

No sooner had I sat down to eat than a woman with very large breasts and a tight T-shirt -- real subtle way of "directing my attention," sync fairies! -- came into the restaurant and sat opposite me. The T-shirt said, "No rain, no flowers." This syncs with the Rain and Flora characters in Schooled and the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. A more common form of the proverb is "April showers bring May flowers," which syncs with Plymouth. It also fits with the message that the current rain of syncs, though sometimes annoying and seemingly pointless, may be preparing the way for something to blossom later on.

So -- sigh -- reporting for duty again, sync fairies.

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.