The pillar of blackness

Eclipses are in the sync stream. Fellow synchromystic Chris Knowles recently posted about how the upcoming total solar eclipse will pass right over Eagle Pass, Texas, a place that's in the news a lot these days. Apparently it will also pass right over the area of Upstate New York where Joseph Smith had his First Vision and published the Book of Mormon, and will take place on April 8, just two days after the anniversary of the founding of the LDS Church. Followers of Denver Snuffer, a prominent fringe Mormon, are therefore planning a conference there to coincide with the eclipse. I know this because William Wright just posted about it in "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," including this image in his post:

When I was a missionary, we memorized and often had to recite an excerpt from the canonical account of Joseph Smith's First Vision, beginning with the line "I saw a pillar of light." This image, though, seems to show the opposite: a pillar of darkness, caused by the eclipse.

This idea of a "pillar of blackness" made me think of an incoherent story written by one of my brothers when he was very young and preserved in a collection of Tychonievich juvenilia known for historical reasons as the Scarlet Notebook. Here's how it begins, and if you can understand what's going on, you're a smarter man than I am, Gunga Din. Note that the name Wooma rhymes with melanoma, not with Montezuma. You should also know that this story has achieved undisputed classic status in my family. We quote from it as if it were Monty Python.

Wooma was going to a meeting. It was for L.L.L.L. (light, light, light, light) wizards. Wooma was an L.L.L.L.T. (light, light, light, light turquoise) wizard.

When he got to the meeting, he found the cause. The L.L.L.L.L. (a light, light, light, light, light) wizard directed.

"The black wizard is back!" L. said. "He is preparing to ash-storm us!"

"I smoke his cave!" said Emisto, arching smoke from hand to hand.

Erik suddenly darted out the door! Emisto and Enel followed! Then everybody followed -- or at least they tried. A darkness swallowed them. L. lit the room, but darkness continued to get stronger! So did the light! Finally, everyone except Wooma and L. left.

Then a pillar of blackness appeared. Out of the pillar stepped Blander the Black! Death shot from Blander's hand -- a blinding light in return!

A black dragon was made from the roof. Fire flared from its mouth. The building was in flames! Frantically, Wooma turned the flames to turquoise! Flames returned but were turned back to turquoise!

Meanwhile, L. had blinded Blander, and Blander killed L.!

Then the dragon shot, but as it came out of its mouth, it turned to ash! Enraged, the dragon blasted fire at Blander the Black, but Blander vanished into his pillar of blackness.

The building erupted in flames. Wooma turned turquoise for an hour. When the hour was over, so was the fire.

The place was burnt, as were the four closest cottages. The dragon was puffing uselessly at a heap of ash. Wooma looked at his land. It was black. His orchard was gone, his corn was gone, and his home was gone.

He told the dragon to take his land. Then he sat down and slept. When he awoke, the dragon was eating his land!

He went to Emisto's house to have breakfast. Then he set off for Eankerdnosh. He was going to try for king's wizard. The king was called Deornoch Knod.

It goes on like that for a few more pages. I vividly remember the first time I heard this story, when it was read aloud by the author at a student literary club. A friend and I were finally asked to leave because we couldn't stop laughing. We did make a valiant effort to control ourselves, successfully getting through the part where Wooma "hid by changing into a turquoise chair cover" during his job interview and the part where "he clapped his hands together and they both disappeared," but when "he frankly turned all the grass around the entrance to turquoise," we lost it. That "frankly" was the straw that broke the camel's back. For me, the real story ends with Wooma frankly turning the grass to turquoise. Everything after that I read only much later, when it was typed up for inclusion in the Scarlet Notebook, and it therefore feels less canonical.

As I've mentioned before, William Wright has connected eclipses with black holes on his blog. After seeing the pillar of blackness in the Remnant Eclipse Conference logo and thinking about Blander the Black, I randomly decided to run a web search for blander the black. I don't know what I was expecting to get, but what I got was black holes:

Another sync: In "Wolves," the post immediately before "The Heavens speaking through eclipses," William Wright recounts a childhood dream about a monster -- likely a wolf -- on its way to his house:

I began to move very steadily forward, and I was aware that I was moving toward the house.  I could see it in the distance, and I was heading for it.  I became aware that I was seeing things through the eyes of whatever it is that was coming for me, and I was scared.  My vision began to shift between the house itself, and back through the eyes of whatever it was that was coming, and it was getting closer and closer.

Though I never saw whatever it was in the dream, I have always associated it with a wolf.

In "The Heavens speaking," William links to an old Salt Lake Tribune article about Denver Snuffer and his movement. I followed the link and read the article on my phone, and at the end I found this:

In case you missed it, wolves are on their way.

One last sync note: The first I ever heard of Denver Snuffer (about whom I still know very little) was in a comment on this blog by Ben Pratt, dated April 6, 2021. The second mention of Snuffer by anyone I know was the post by William Wright, about a conference planned for April 6, 2024. April 6 as an anniversary is a big thing among Mormons; besides being the date the Church was formally organized, it is also held by many to be the true date of both Christmas and Easter.

One-eyed × purple people eater

On February 2, William Wright posted "Purple People Eaters," and I followed up with my own post on the One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater theme, "I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough." In a comment on my post, WanderingGondola wrote that she has a purple hoodie which a family member has nicknamed the Purple People Eater. She included a link to a photo of this hoodie, which is portrays a Pokémon called Gengar:

Interestingly, one of the Gengar cards I found online just now shows the creature with a long red tongue, a feature recently seen here in my January 25 post "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires":

This evening I was wandering around an unfamiliar part of Taichung and passed one of those claw-crane machines. I belatedly noticed that it prominently featured a one-eyed monster -- the Monsters Inc. character Mike Wazowski -- which made me go back and look to see if there was anything else in there suggesting the Purple People Eater. Sure enough:

I have zero experience with Pokémon and can't tell a Snorlax from a Slowbro, and I certainly wouldn't have recognized Gengar had WanderingGondola not just brought it up.

The universal eclipse

Spotted on the street this afternoon:

This eclipse imagery has come up a lot both on my blog and on William Wright's. Specifically, I have had references to l'éclipse universelle -- the universal eclipse -- in "17 years ago our eyes were opened" and "One and forty-four." The jacket says "BLACK" with the letter A turned upside down. Anyone who has taken any symbolic logic will recognize the turned-A symbol as what is called the universal quantifier, usually verbalized as "for all" -- e.g. ∀xPx is read as "for all x, Px," i.e. everything is P. This universality or all-ness is reinforced by "BLACK IS EVERYTHING" at the bottom of the jacket.

"WHITE & BLACK" is also relevant, as William Wright has connected eclipse imagery with black holes and their opposite counterparts, white holes.

Healing a fever by the laying on of hands, simply by wanting to

Here's a pretty specific sync. I've been on a bit of a Mormon Stories kick lately, and last night I listened to an interview with Nick Jones, a Mormon bishop who recently stepped down. One of the things Mormon bishops are often called on to do is to "give blessings" -- which consists of laying one's hands on a person's head, invoking the power of the Melchizedek Priesthood, and praying over them. One of the most common uses of these blessings is to heal the sick. In the interview, Bishop Jones explains that he believes these blessings have real power but that that power has nothing to do with the priesthood; it's something we can all do by the power of love:

Can I tell you about blessings real quick? Yeah, I had a sick daughter a few weeks ago. I went upstairs, and I gave her a blessing. I didn't use the priesthood power, I just blessed her with love. Her fever broke. There's power in us, period. [The Church is] trying to take it from you and tell you that they gave it to you, and they're trying to give it a name. It's in all of us, and you don't need a title, and you don't need to have somebody tell you that you can or cannot do that.

This morning, less than 12 hours after listening to that, I started reading Colin Wilson's sixth Spider World novel, Shadowland. Niall's brother Veig is seriously ill and is expected to die in a matter of weeks. Having observed spiders transferring vital energy to one another, Niall proposes a similar method of treating his brother:

Niall said: "Sidonia has plenty of courage and energy. . . . don't you think she might be able to convey some of it to Veig?"

"How?"

"Simply by wanting to -- perhaps laying her hands on him. . . . Don't you believe that people can give energy to those they love?"

They then proceed to try it, and it works. Sidonia and a few others lay their hands on Veig, with the result that "his fever disappeared, and he sank into a normal sleep."

As I said, it's a pretty specific sync. In each case, love is the source of the healing power, which you can exercise "simply by wanting to," and in each case a fever breaking is the sign that the healing has been successful. Niall even uses the "laying on of hands" language typically used to talk about Mormon blessings.

I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough

Yesterday William Wright posted "Purple People Eaters," referencing the 1958 Sheb Wooley novelty song, a nickname used by the Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s, and a character called the People Eater in the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road. The People Eater character has a false nose made of metal, and William links to my mention of Tycho Brahe's metal noses in my January 27 post "Worm Jacob." What he doesn't mention is that in that same post I talk about having once had the nickname Woolly -- pronounced the same as Sheb's surname.

The Minnesota Vikings reference was interesting, too, since earlier the same day I had posted about another Minnesota sportsball team, the Timberwolves, in "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan." William had already read my Timberwolves post when he posted about the Vikings, and he himself lives in Minnesota, but his Vikings reference was independent of either of those facts. He was wondering where he had heard the phrase "Purple People Eater" before, and that's the first thing that came up in his online search. (He must have searched for the plural, which does in fact yield the Minnesota Vikings as the first result.)

Back in July 2022, the Jordan Peele film NOPE began to come up in the sync stream; see for example "Pythagoras, NOPE, and the green tube-man." That was shortly before the movie even came out, but I didn't get around to watching it until about a month ago. I almost never watch movies or TV except with my wife (I bought my first TV after we got married), and she's unwilling to watch anything that shows animals being killed. NOPE features a flying monster that eats people and horses, plus a chimpanzee being shot, so that was out. Last month though, while she was out of town, I decided to watch it on my own as a sort of belated synchronicity homework.

There's a scene where one of the characters dramatically recites some of the lyrics from the Sheb Wooley song:

As William Wright notes in his post, when the Purple People Eater says the singer is "too tough" to eat, it presumably means "old and sinewy." The recitation in NOPE, though, clearly gives it more "tough guy" connotations.

When your name is Tychonievich, it's inevitable that a lot of people are going to shorten it to T. Two people have independently decided to take it a step further and make the T stand for tough. The first was my banjo teacher, Lee Ruff, who used to joke that we should perform together as Ruff 'n' Tuff. Later, in Utah, fellow missionary Boyd McKinnon used to call me "Elder T -- and the T stands for tough!" So it's interesting to have the Purple People Eater telling a guy named Wooley that he's too tough.

William connects the Purple People Eater with my William Alizio story, in which

the aliens had a lot of purple things (including their ship).  William remembers having written the aliens themselves as wearing purple, but it turns out he actually wrote them as wearing blue robes.

This is interesting because the Purple People Eater in NOPE is a reference to a UFO which the characters first assume to be a spaceship but later discover is a flying monster. It's not actually purple, but they connect it with the Wooley song because it flies and eats people. William also mentions the aliens' blue robes. In my November 22 post "Two cunning wise ones, 'wizards,' Blue gowned," I connect the aliens' blue robes with the blue denim clothing worn by Jay Leno, and I discuss the etymology of the word jean. In NOPE, the characters give the flying monster the nickname Jean Jacket.

One last sync note: William mentions that the People Eater in Mad Max: Fury Road is "the mayor of a place called Gas Town." A week ago, I was tutoring a junior high school student. He had taken a reading comprehension test, and we were going through what he had gotten wrong and why. This was one of the questions:

The correct answer was "Chinatown," but he had chosen "Gas Town." After we had gone through the reading together and he understood, I said, "Trust me, you wouldn't want to have dinner at a place called Gas Town." He didn't get it, so I explained the intestinal meaning of gas, and after that he couldn't stop laughing.

Thumbs as art

My January 30 post "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air" included a video montage of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set to the song "Dirty Paws." At one point, the video shows someone holding a black-and-white photo of a thumb:

In today's post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan," Alph came up, as both the name of the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the word for "swan" in one of Tolkien's Elvish languages. This made me think of Tintin and Alph-Art, the unfinished 24th Tintin book -- Hergé's "swan song"? -- which I had heard of but never read. I checked the summary on Wikipedia, which ends with this sentence:

Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.

I'd never heard of that particular artist, so I clicked through to his Wikipedia article. One of his famous works is called Le Pouce ("The Thumb"):

Note added: In the song "This Country's Going to War" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, there's a bit where they sing, "They got guns / We got guns / All God's children got guns" -- but, due to the poor audio quality, as a child I always thought that what they were saying everyone had got was thumbs. This was reinforced by the body language as they sing that part, holding out their hands with thumbs extended:

Yes, I know thumbs doesn't make any sense in that context, but come on, was I supposed to be surprised at the Marx Brothers saying something that doesn't make sense?

I think I've mentioned before on this blog my uncle's half-serious opinion that Groucho Marx was the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. When I asked him where that idea had come from, he said the thing that originally suggested it to him had been Groucho's duck-like walk, which made him think of Zeus taking the form of a swan when he seduced Leda, fathering Helen of Troy and Pollux. (Castor was a twin half-brother, fathered by Tyndareus, as was Helen's twin half-sister Clytemnestra.)

Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan

As regular readers will know, reading in restaurants is something I like to do. Sometimes total silence is best, but sometimes background noise is a must. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Unless I happen to be reading a big hardback that's bulky enough to stay open on its own, it's not convenient to read a physical codex while actually eating. What I usually do is read a book while I wait for my order, switch to reading something on my phone while I eat, and then switch back to the book after I finish. Today the book I brought was William Weaver's English translation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I read this before my meal:

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox (pp. 36-37).

Hidden Treasures (the breakfast cereal) have come up on this blog before, so that got my attention. I also thought it a bit surprising that wolf was the first item on the list, a list of words presumably chosen because they reflect universal experience and would evoke some memory or other in just about everyone. Do you have any tales of wolves to tell, reader? Neither do I. But I suppose things were different in the 13th century, when Invisible Cities is set.

When my food arrived, I switched to reading the Book of Isaiah on my phone. I read this:

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations (Isa. 61:4).

At that moment, I happened to glance up at the television on the wall, and the screen was filled with the phrase "RAISED BY WOLVES" repeated many times. Since I had just read about wolves in Calvino and raising-up in Isaiah, this caught my attention. There followed a rapid series of wolf- and moon-related images, interspersed with images of basketball players, and it became apparent that the whole thing was about an NBA team called the Minnesota Timberwolves. At one point, there was a city skyline along the bottom of the screen, an upside-down version of the same skyline at the top, and a full moon suspended in the sky between them. The whole thing then rotated 180 degrees, with the moon remaining stationary, until the city and its gravity-defying inversion had traded places.

The idea of being "raised by wolves" synched in a general way with something I had read the night before in Colin Wilson's Spider World novel The Magician, about how "Human babies were taken from their parents and brought up as spiders." This idea of being raised by animals other than wolves made me think of Raised by Swans, a rock band prominently featured in a not-very-good Liam Neeson movie I had seen some years ago. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, so I looked it up. It's called Chloe.

After I'd finished eating, I went back to the Calvino book, only to find myself reading, "In Chloe, the great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. . ." (p. 51). Then, just two pages later:

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake . . . . Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside-down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror . . . (p. 53).

The name Chloe, juxtaposed with the mirrored-city imagery seen in the "Raised by Wolves" spot, made me think again about Raised by Swans. I remembered that I had mentioned swans recently, in "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes." I had mentioned that Alph, the name of the "sacred river" in Kubla Khan, is also an Elvish word meaning "swan," and that I remembered this from childhood without having to look it up. Kublai Khan is one of the two main characters in Invisible Cities, and I mention that at the end of the post.

This restaurant is located near a used bookstore, and I rarely patronize the one without visiting the other. The synchronistic context described above made me pick up a book that would not otherwise have interested me at all: a very long novel called Swan Song by Robert McCammon. The teaser on the back cover begins "In a wasteland born of rage and fear," echoing the Isaiah passage quoted above, and it introduces a character called Swan and another called Sister. Sister, you will recall, comes right after wolf in Calvino's list.

Just now, as I was writing this post, I ran a search for timberwolves raised by wolves and clicked on the first result. I was greeted by this image:

I suppose that's a reference to the "alpha" as the leader of a pack of wolves, but it's also pretty close to the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the Elvish for "swan."

Note added: Just after posting this, I checked a few blogs. A recent Vox Day post mentions Minnesota and High Elves and links a site called Alpha News.