Little Skinny Planet

I've posted quite a bit recently about an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about William Alizio. An excerpt is posted in "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name." It was a deliberately silly story, deliberately badly written, and not consciously intended to mean anything. Attempts at nonsense and randomness are, of course, openings for material to come in from elsewhere.

The excerpt I posted ended with Alizio being taken away in Tim and Patrick's spaceship. Here's what comes next:

"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours.

"Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick.

"What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?"

"It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore."

"Oh? What do you speak now?"

"English."

"English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?"

"It's a long story," said Patrick.

"Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?"

"Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?"

"I don't know," admitted William Alizio.

"When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg."

"What does that mean?"

"It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'"

"Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio.

"They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty."

"Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?"

"Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."

Little Skinny Planet was not a name I coined for this story. I used to talk about the Little Skinny Planet when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this, but I know it from the journal entries I used to dictate to my mother before I was able to write. This was a name comparable to "Black Africa" -- not a description of the place itself, but a reference to its inhabitants. It was where I imagined the Little Skinnies must come from.

Rereading this now, remembering that prika-vlein apparently means "little and skinny," and that the planet got this name on account of giraffes which were raised as livestock, I made a connection I hadn't before.

In my May 2021 post "On the threshold of a dream," I described my experience of a dream taking form. A spiral of fiery letters in "para-color" slowly transforming into blobs and then . . .

Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.

Farmland with giraffes -- notably skinny giraffes with "spindle legs." And why are they described as "picking their way across the fields"? I remember that when I wrote this, it felt like "pricking on the plain" -- from the famous opening line of Spenser's Faerie Queene -- was the perfect way of describing the giraffes' movements, but I didn't know why. Spenser is referring to the knight pricking his horse with his spurs, which makes no sense when applied to riderless giraffes. I therefore went with the nearest somewhat semantically defensible phonetic approximation of the word I wanted, and pricking on the plain became picking their way. Now, though, it seems likely that some dim memory of prika-vlein in connection with skinny giraffes on a farm may have suggested those words to me.

The other thing about the giraffes in the dream is that they were "shimmering" with impossible colors.

Yesterday, as documented in "Blue Boat Home," I discovered the song "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men.

I heard it in a restaurant and didn't actually watch the music video until after posting. The beginning syncs with Swiss Family Manhattan, as we see an "airship" crash in a giant tree after being attacked by Ziz in the form of a black two-headed bird of prey -- symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. (The Swiss family crashes their airship on the Empire State Building, which they believe is a giant tree.) The synchronized insect-like way the men in the video move their spindly legs has a creepy "uncanny valley" effect that reminded me very much of trooping fairies or Little Skinnies. The floating fairy-like creature that accompanies and protects the Little Skinnies reminded me of Tim the Enchanter with the way she keeps zapping things and making them explode.

After she has zapped Ziz, Behemoth, and Leviathan, a final gigantic creature appears which she does not zap. It is full of shimmering colors and presented in such a way as to suggest that -- although I first thought of it as "Humbaba" -- it is meant to represent God:

Its rams' horns were another link to Tim the Enchanter, but its gigantic size and many eyes made me think of something else:

That's a screenshot from the Keanu Reeves film 47 Ronin, from my April 27, 2014, post "A beast with many eyes." I compared it to a qilin (a creature from Chinese myth) in the post. The night before seeing it on TV, I had dreamed of a whale "blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." The qilin-type beast "aside from the fur, horns, and nostrils, [looked] exactly like the many-eyed 'whale' I saw in my dream." Later, in 2022, I found that I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision.

The beast from "Little Talks" doesn't suggest a whale at all, but I think it does suggest the qilin-creature from 47 Ronin. Here's a traditional Chinese depiction of a qilin; the link with the 47 Ronin beast is indisputable:

The Humbaba creature at the end of the "Little Talks" video has shimmering colors like the farmyard giraffes in my dream (in a video that also features Little Skinnies, remember) -- but surely none of these fantastic creatures bears the slightest resemblance to a giraffe, right? Here's Wikipedia:

The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.

Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."

So the qilin is linked not only to the giraffe but to the whale as well! Keep in mind that my 2014 dream whale, like the qilin, "had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." A whale with such accoutrements was a novel idea to me at the time, but here it is in the 1997 William Alizio story:

"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin.

"I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese."

"I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin.

"Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."

There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.

I think I conceptualized this at the time of writing as a gigantic carp, but big fish and whales have been interchangeable since the time of Jonah.

And then, in the sort of scene familiar from the "Little Talks" video, the monster is zapped and explodes. Some intelligent extraterrestrial monkeys, minions of the villain Thomas Hosey, have stolen Tim's laser gun and are trying to shoot Alizio and Nolin:

There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.

No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat.

"Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .

A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.

When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.

Go back and watch Time the Enchanter and "Little Talks" again and tell me there's no connection. Tim the Enchanter makes a tree explode for no apparent reason -- and here Tim's laser gun (Patrick's having been destroyed) does the same thing. The fairy in "Little Talks" zaps an enormous sea monster just as it is about to eat one of the Little Skinnies. I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail no earlier than 2000, three years after writing the Alizio story, and of course the "Little Talks" video didn't even exist until 2012.

I haven't even begun to figure out what this all means, but it clearly means something.

One more thing: William Wright has hinted several times on his blog that he thinks the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages. As anyone at all familiar with the field will know, every theory of Book of Mormon geography begins with postulating the identity of the Narrow Neck of Land. Narrow Neck of Land. Little Skinny Planet. Despite its central importance for would-be BoM geographers, the exact phrase "narrow neck of land" only actually occurs once in the text. Care to guess which chapter?

Yes, it's Ether 10.

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.

Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision

I was at a bookstore yesterday to place an order for some textbooks, and I happened to see these two books displayed together.

In the context of the Greek name Zeus, the phrase a dick suggests ádikos, “unjust.” Since Zeus was proverbially just, this would be a blasphemous inversion of a common piety, analogous to Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

In my recent post "A forgotten literary movement," I recounted a dream in which I asked one person after another to help me remember the name of an early 20th-century literary movement. The only name I could remember associated with the movement was Francis Scott Key, which I knew wasn't right. No one was able to help me with the name of the movement, except one person who suggested, "Wasn't there a group of writers around that time called the Schmucks?" Upon waking, I guessed that the "Francis Scott Key" I had been thinking of must have been the early 20th-century novelist Francis Scott Key ("F. Scott") Fitzgerald.

In the above display, Fitzgerald is juxtaposed with the word dick. In my dream, it had been suggested that "Francis Scott Key" might have been part of a group called the Schmucks -- and schmuck is the Yiddish counterpart to dick, meaning both "penis" and "contemptible person."

I have never read anything by Fitzgerald, but I do own one of his novels: the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Tender Is the Night. On the back cover, between the title and the summary, is the boldface quote, "Help me, help me, Dick!" -- Dick Diver being the main character, based on Fitzgerald himself.

On the Fitzgerald book in the photo above, a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on Fitzgerald's head. In a few recent posts, including "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," I have discussed a Time magazine cover in which a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on the head of Kamala Harris. I commented that the cup on her head made me think of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, who wore a cup-shaped headdress. Originally a combination of Osiris and the bull-god Apis, this god was later combined with Zeus and worshipped as "Zeus-Serapis."

(My earlier posts have associated the white cup both with the owl and with Serapis. Last night, I happened to see a random shitpost on /x/ which had a picture of a German woodcut of a bull-headed Moloch idol and said, “This is Moloch. His name is pronounced MOE-lock. He is an owl. That is all.” Yesterday, someone emailed me some of Royal Skousen’s textual research on the Book of Mormon. Among its new-to-me conclusions was that the name printed as Mulek in the BoM as we have it is a scribal error, and that this character’s correct name is Muloch, interpreted by Skousen as a variant of Moloch. In the /x/ thread, an anon argued that Moloch was itself an error for the common noun melek, “king.”)

"Zeus is a dick." Dick is Fitzgerald's fictional alter-ego. Zeus is Serapis. Fitzgerald is portrayed as Serapis.

In the posts about the white Starbucks cup, one of the commenters mentioned that the name Starbuck comes from Moby-Dick., which brings us to the next thing that caught my eye yesterday.

A whale juxtaposed with the word vision. This made me think of the synchronistic saga of the whale with many eyes. Eyes are organs of vision, and I had also used that word repeatedly with reference to Dee and Kelley’s whale experience. See for example “I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s many-eyed whale vision.”

Then I noticed that the word could also be read as VI Sion. I had recently read the seven Penitential Psalms aloud in Latin, and they include a few references to Sion (the Latin spelling of Zion). The first Penitential Psalm is Psalm VI, and the sixth is De Profundis, which alludes to Jonah’s prayer from within the belly of the whale.

Then I thought that V. I. Sion could stand for Veni in Sion, “come to Zion.” At the same time, V. I. is 5 followed by 1. In Isaiah 51, we read “Et nunc qui redempti sunt a Domino revertentur, et venient in Sion laudantes,” “Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion” (v. 11). Just two verses previous, the Lord is addressed as the one “that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon” — Rahab being a sea monster similar or identical to Leviathan, and thus a link to the whale.

Later that day, we visited some of my wife’s relatives. Our young nephew showed me a children’s book about sea creatures, opening up to a page that had a picture of a whale shark mislabeled (in both Chinese and English) as a “great white shark.” When a whale is called a great white, that’s obviously another link to Moby-Dick.

The TV was on, and there was a trailer for some sort of romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. In one scene, the Clooney character is reluctant to swim with dolphins, saying, “Are you sure they’re not sharks?” but is persuaded to jump into the water. The scene then cuts to him saying, “I can’t believe I got bit by a dolphin!”

Mr. Owl ate my metal worm

Some months before all this owl business started, one of my students noticed that racecar spelled in reverse is racecar. I told her that this was called a palindrome and gave another example: the sentence "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm."

This morning, while I was reading Mike Clelland's book The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, that palindrome came back into my mind, and it occurred to me to wonder if it might mean anything.

For starters, what's a "metal worm"? Well, worm can mean "dragon." In D&D, "chromatic" dragons (black, blue, green, red, etc.) are evil, and "metallic" dragons (gold, silver, bronze, etc.) are good. The king of the metallic dragons -- the Metal Worm par excellence -- is the Wyrmking Bahamut. The name Bahamut is taken from Arabic mythology and is cognate to the Hebrew Behemoth. In the Arabic version, though, Bahamut is a giant fish, and Kuyutha (generally assumed to be a corruption of Leviathan) is a giant bull, reversing the Hebrew identities.

So the Metal Worm corresponds to Behemoth, but Behemoth-as-Leviathan, Behemoth as a whale. The name Bahamut evokes both of these mythical monsters as one.

Regular readers will get where I'm going with this. In my April 1 post "Call me Ishmael," I discussed a D&D monster called a behemoth, described as "a killer whale with four stubby legs," and connected it to the then-ongoing sync-stream relating to the many-eyed whale of John Dee.

This little train of thought, taking me from "Mr. Owl" to a killer whale, had taken place while I was reading The Messengers. At this point I returned my attention to the book, turned the "page" (virtually; I was using the Kindle app), and saw that -- completely unexpectedly in a book about owls and UFOs -- the next section bore the heading "Orcas in Puget Sound." It related a story about how "approximately three dozen orcas surrounded a commuter ferry as it crossed Puget Sound . . . carrying sacred tribal artifacts" from a Seattle museum back to the homeland of the Suquamish tribe. What was this story even doing in this particular book? The owl connection was tenuous indeed:

The orcas, like the owls, are animals considered devoid of any higher consciousness by the watchdogs of our consensus reality. But nonetheless they are showing up as totems at an important moment, they are presenting themselves as a beautiful example of this attuned symbolic power. This wasn't a dream vision of orcas, they were physically there, playing the role of escort for something sacred on its journey home.

In other words, this story is inserted more or less randomly in a book about owls. Whales are never mentioned again, although their similarity to owls may be deeper than Clelland himself notes. The book is called Messengers because that is one of the traditional roles of the owl in mythology: The owl flies into the dark, representing the unseen realm, and returns with a message. Likewise, the whale dives deep into the sea and, unlike most marine animals, returns regularly to the surface. It, too, would make a good mythological "messenger."

If the Metal Worm is Bahamut, alias Leviathan, the statement that "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" takes on an added significance -- because one of the things the Bible says about the Leviathan is that God will give it to his people to eat. "Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness" (Ps. 74:14). "Rabbi Johanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed by He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan" (Bava Batra 75a).

Those who eat the Metal Worm are (a) the people inhabiting the wilderness and (b) the righteous in the Messianic Age. The owl is a proverbial creature of the wilderness in the Bible. The Psalmist laments, "I am like an owl of the desert" (Ps. 102:6). Jeremiah says, "Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein" (Jer. 50:39). And who shall inherit the Messianic Age? According to Daniel, "they that be wise" (Dan. 12:3).