Pull out a hair, blow out ten thousand monkeys

I've had this song stuck in my head all day -- and now you will, too. You're welcome. Don't worry, it's in "English."

For you I pine, for you I balsam

In a comment on yesterday's post "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," Bill wrote, "That author's name for that 'Beauty is Truth' book jumped out at me" -- the author's name being Ian Stewart.

In an update I added today to "Shiva as Kala," I posted a screenshot of Bill's blog which included this image:

Balsam Fir, paired with the recent emphasis on the name Stewart, made me think of a scene from the children's novel Stuart Little by E. B. White (Elwyn Brooks -- have fun with that etymology, Bill!), a book I haven't read in over a decade.

Stuart, a talking mouse, is discussing what laws he will make as Chairman of the World. Someone proposes "Absolutely no being mean," but another child says such a law would never work, as "Some people are just naturally mean."

"I’m not saying it'll work," said Stuart. "It’s a good law and we'll give it a try. We'll give it a try right here and now. Somebody do something mean to somebody. Harry Jamieson, you be mean to Katharine Stableford. Wait a minute, now, what's that you’ve got in your hand, Katharine?"

"It's a little tiny pillow stuffed with sweet balsam."

"Does it say 'For you I pine, for you I balsam' on it?”

"Yes," said Katharine.

"Do you love it very much?" asked Stuart.

"Yes, I do," said Katharine.

"O.K., Harry, grab it, take it away!"

Balsam (which I guess is a pun for "bawl some"?) can refer to any number of very different plants -- "sweet balsam," according to my dictionary, is another name for rabbit tobacco, but apparently it's also the common name for a species of Impatiens -- but the juxtaposition of pine and balsam is a pretty direct link to Bill's balsam fir, the fir being a tolerably close relative of the pine.

E. B. White is somewhat linked to the "cold as ice" theme, too. His much anthologized essay "Once More to the Lake" ends with the words "chill of death."

Unicorn Wheel of Fortune motorcycle helmet

No, that's not a password suggestion in the spirit of "correct horse battery staple." It's something I saw this past Sunday afternoon but didn't get around to posting about until now:

Not the best photo ever, but it's what I was able to get. It's a white crash helmet decorated with a version of the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune Tarot card, modified to replace the three creatures around the wheel with unicorns and some of the symbols on the wheel itself with the word UNICORN. For reference, here's the Waite card:

The person wearing this helmet was on a scooter whose plate had three numerals followed by the letters PXY. The artist who drew the Rider-Waite Tarot cards was Pamela Colman Smith, whose nickname was Pixie. Searching for photos of this woman just now led me to an essay called "Pamela Colman Smith and The Erasure of Black Women in Metaphysics," which opens with a random unicorn reference:

I have no idea how a unicornified version of one of Pixie's Tarot cards ended up on a crash helmet in Taiwan, but it seemed like a sync directed at me personally. My first name, William, is etymologically related to helmet; and my last name, Tychonievich, ultimately derives from Tyche, the Greek goddess whose symbol is the Wheel of Fortune. As for the unicorns themselves, I have no idea so far how they fit in.

Shiva as Kala

In a comment on Sunday’s post “The hand of Shiva,” I noted that Kala usually refers to Shiva but that the famous line from the Gita is an exception:

Bill’s post discusses the etymology of cool and notes that it is related to the Old Norse kala. In Hinduism, Kala is the personification of time and death and is often considered an avatar of Shiva, though Krishna also becomes Kala in the Gita, in the line famously quoted by Oppenheimer in connection with the atomic bomb.

The next day, Monday, I found this in the weekly meme post at a well-known hate speech site:

I don’t know where this is from, but it looks to be taken from a comic book or something. It’s clearly supposed to be translation of Gita 11:32, the very text I mentioned as not referring to Shiva, but mangled so that it does refer to Shiva. The original says, “Kala [Death or Time] am I, the great destroyer of the worlds,” to which the meme adds the gloss “Shiva, the Destroyer.” In its original context, these are unambiguously the words of Krishna, who is an avatar of Vishnu and is obviously not claiming to be Shiva. I don’t believe any Hindu would ever consider translating Kala as Shiva here. The confusion probably comes from the popular Western understanding of a “Hindu trinity” in which the role of Destroyer belongs exclusively to Shiva. I don’t see any hint of that in the Gita, which views Vishnu/Krishna not as one-third of the Trimurti but as the Supreme Being plain and simple. That’s how I read it, anyway, but my knowledge of the Gita is superficial, and I am open to correction.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to argue about the theology of an alien religion but simply to note the remarkable coincidence of running into that particular (mis)interpretation of that particular verse just a day after  presenting the opposite interpretation myself. Finding it in a collection of right-wing memes was particularly improbable.

Update (December 3): Cleaning out some folders today, I found this meme -- downloaded on September 13, 2024, from the same site as the Shiva meme shown above:

I can't remember why I thought that was worth saving, but note how it ends with the line "I am the Great Destroyer" -- a direct quote from Gita 11:32. My recent posts about Shiva have mentioned him as "the god of cool things" in connection with Bill Wright's recent posts on "cool" themes. Another recent theme of Bill's is the fox. Here, for example, we see a "fox" post sandwiched between two "cool" posts:

Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies

On Saturday night (November 30), I finished reading The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Rob and Trish MacGregor. The cover of the book prominently features a blue butterfly against a plain white background:

The next day (Sunday, December 1), I went on a truly-random walk through Taichung, the endpoint of which turned out to be a gigantic metal sculpture of a butterfly outside the National Museum on Natural Science. En route I had passed a closed coffee shop called Café Vanessa, reinforcing the butterfly theme.

Since the museum is not far from a used bookstore I frequently visit, I decided to go there next. On the shelves there, I saw a book with the intriguing title Why Beauty Is Truth on its spine. When I took it off the shelf to look at it, I discovered a cover design strikingly similar to that of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

I am open to correction from readers more entomologically literate than myself, but as far as my untrained eye can judge, the two book covers even feature the very same species of butterfly: the Menelaus blue morpho (Morpho menelaus).

Why Beauty Is Truth is by the mathematician Ian Stewart and has the subtitle A History of Symmetry. Symmetry, from the Greek for "together-measure" is akin to synchronicity, from the Greek for "together-time." Stewart and MacGregor are both Scottish names. (Random thought, not unrelated to the concept of symmetry: If I were a writer named Rob MacGregor, I would find it irresistible to publish under the pseudonym Roger G. Cambor.)

From the Menelaus blue morpho butterfly, my mind turned to the similarly named blue Mormon butterfly (Papilio polymnestor). Besides their shared blueness and the phonetic similarity of Mormon to morpho, both butterflies take their species names from legendary characters associated with the Trojan War. The blue Mormon happens to be an official symbol of the Indian state of Maharashtra, which is home to the Elephanta Caves I mentioned in my last post ("The hand of Shiva").

Late Sunday night, following a link from Adam Boyle, I discovered the relatively new YouTube channel Real Mormonism and listened to their first episode, which advocates the embrace of the term Mormon despite its rejection by current leadership of the Great and Unabbreviable Church.

Near the end of the video, they give a few unwitting shout-outs to a particular Indian butterfly, when they talk about "this idea of being a True Blue Mormon, versus being just a true blue member of our church, or of any church that we belong to."

The hand of Shiva

Last night I was doing some housework and listening to music, letting the algorithm do its thing. “Yellow Light” by Of Monsters and Men came on.

“Just grab a hold of my hand” — the moment Nanna sang that line, my eyes were drawn to a picture of Shiva holding up one hand, with the syllable Om written on his palm.

I’m writing this post the next day, in a coffee shop. Just as I typed the bit above about the holy syllable on Shiva’s palm, I happened to glance up at the television across the room, which had a Formula One race on. There on the screen was a closeup of Nico Hülkenberg’s car, with “Palm Angels” written on it. I had just enough time to snap a photo before the scene changed.

Going back to last night, after being drawn to the hand of Shiva, I looked up at his face and saw behind him a halo of yellow light — “Yellow Light” being the name of the song I was listening to.

A hand and a yellow light — not the most impressive of syncs in objective terms, but it hit me with a powerful sense of the numinous.

I bought that portrait of Shiva in India in 2008. My wife and I had gone there to see a particular statue of that god, in Bangalore, which turned out to be rather underwhelming in person. Much more memorable was an encounter with Shiva in the Elephanta Caves near Bombay, in “the thick darkness where God was.” I was an atheist at the time and had no real way of processing the experience. I still don’t, I suppose. Anyway, last night’s Shiva sync brought it powerfully back to my mind.

Later that night, I finished reading The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity by Rob and Trish MacGregor. Near the end of the book, I was astonished to read this:

Leah Southey, a writer and editor, has a guardian angel, Shiva, who helps her whenever she’s in a tough spot. In March 2007, she and her husband, Neil, visited Jenolan Caves in Australia, where they celebrated their wedding anniversary. They were on a day tour of the caves when her husband realized his keys were missing. They didn’t know how they would get home again. Leah asked Neil if he wanted to find the keys himself or if he wanted someone to hand them to him.

She goes on to ask “Shiva” for help — not Mahadev himself, apparently, but “a guardian angel” by that name — and in the end a stranger hands her husband the missing keys. The Shiva reference alone would have been a sync, but beyond that the story emphasizes Shiva’s working through a hand, and the setting is a cave. Even the characterization of Shiva as an “angel” foreshadows today’s “Palm Angels” sync.

Despite my affinity for Shiva iconography, I really know relatively little about that god. My engagement with Hindu thought has been pretty much limited to the Upanishads and the Gita, which are more focused on Indra and Vishnu, respectively. Following last night’s syncs, I did a bit of reading online, and a trail of links led me to a 2013 article called “Shiva, the god of cool things.” I specially noticed the publication date because of a strange error: The article was supposedly published on April 22 and updated on April 15 of the same year — i.e., a week before it was originally published.

This morning, I checked Bill’s blog and found the latest post was called “Keeping things ‘Cool’: Refrigeration as a clue?” My original intention was simply to note the “cool” motif, but when I revisited the post just now to get the link, I found that two comments had been added. In the second of these, Bill

writes, “The date is interesting. My dream of the Being and the Refrigerator happened on April 22.” The dream is discussed in the body of the post, but no date is given. Bill says he thinks the Being in the dream, who is caught sneaking food out of a refrigerator, represents me.

Update: Just 22 minutes after I published this post, my truly-random peregrinations through the city led me to an Indian restaurant of whose existence I had been entirely unaware. It was closed, but the front door was open, revealing a large Om on the inside wall.

The White Saint Valentine, pi, 11, and the bees of Thérèse

After the "Wreck of the Titan" sync in Whitley Strieber's interview with Rob and Trish MacGregor, I downloaded and started reading one of several book the MacGregors have written on synchronicity, 2010's The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, part of the sync awakening of 2009-2010.

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading the MacGregors' book in a café and got to the part where they talk about syncs involving seeing the same number again and again. They mentioned that 11, 11:11, 111, and other numbers of that type are a particularly prevalent theme for this sort of "cluster sync." The moment I read that, I noticed that the time was 3:14, and I had a very strong impression that that number, 314, was about to become a focus of synchronicity for me that day.

My first thought regarding 314 was the date March 14, which is the day before my birthday ("Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?") and is observed in Taiwan as "White Valentine's Day." I recast this in my mind as "the Feast of the White Saint Valentine" and began imagining what a saint of that description would have looked like. The common or garden St. Valentine was himself a White man, so someone distinguished from him as the White Saint Valentine must have been an even whiter shade of pale.

A football game was playing on the TV in the café, and the score was Steelers 3, Browns 7. Would the Browns score another 7 points, bringing the score to 3-14? I watched the game for a while, until the Steelers scored again and made the anticipated number impossible, though 3-14 did appear on the field a couple of times when the Steelers players with those respective jersey numbers happened to be next to each other. It began to snow heavily on the football field, reinforcing the "white" theme.

I left the café and walked a few blocks to a used bookstore. On my way, I passed this scooter parked on the sidewalk:

The above photo was taken at 3:30, just 16 minutes after my strong hunch that I'd start seeing 314 syncs. The numerals are written in white, too. Four minutes later, I passed a drugstore with this banner hung out in front of it:

Lots of repetitions of the numeral 1, just as I had been reading about when I had the 314 hunch. It's a promotion for November 11, which retailers have been trying to establish as Singles' Day, when you're supposed to buy gifts for yourself. It's illustrated with a whiter-than-White person, just like our imaginary saint.

As I continued walking, a poem randomly popped into my head: Saint Thérèse's bee poem, which I had translated into English back in May. I recited it in my mind as I walked:

See the little insect which is

Gathering its daily riches

In the morning hour.

Joyful, it the petals waketh,

Enters and the honey taketh,

Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,

Taking love in place of nectar,

All that thou canst hold.

Gather thou of all that pleases,

Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,

Little bee of gold!

At the bookstore, two books caught my eye. One was a book about Lenormand cartomancy, which I flipped through a bit. I noticed that in the Lenormand system, the Six of Hearts represents Stars. This made me think of the Rider-Waite Six of Cups (Cups being the Italian equivalent of the Anglo-French suit of Hearts), which features white star-shaped flowers. About a week ago, I had done a read for the next two months, which had indicated that the Six of Cups was a sign I should be on the lookout for.

This mental image of the Six of Cups, with the children gathering love and joy from flowers, like Thérèse's little golden bee, seemed to harmonize with the poem I had just been reciting to myself.

The other book that caught my eye was a novel by Lidia Yuknavitch called The Book of Joan, which looked to be a sci-fi reworking of the story of Joan of Arc. Joan always gets my attention, of course, and this was another link to the poem by Thérèse, who had a special devotion to Joan and wrote and starred in a play about her. (According to the Internet, the photos of Thérèse playing Joan are “the only known photographs of a canonized saint cosplaying as another saint.”)

I picked up The Book of Joan and, by chance, opened up to page 11. The first words on the page were, "See? This is pi." Pi, of course, is 3.14 -- the number that had attracted my attention as I was reading about syncs involving the number 11.

Recall that my first association with 314 had not been pi but rather the idea of a White Saint Valentine, who must have been whiter even than an ordinary White person. Now look what else is on that page, the page that begins with pi and ends with 11:

What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.

I'm not sure if the narrator is the "Joan" character or not, but if so we even have a whiter-than-White saint.

When I got home, I had a random craving for ice water with honey in it, which is not at all the sort of thing I normally drink. When I found the honey in a kitchen cabinet, the illustration on the bottle really caught my eye:

The flowers are white and shaped like five-pointed stars, exactly like those on the Six of Cups. There are three open flowers and three buds, for a total of six -- again the same number as on the Six of Cups. The position of the two bees mirrors that of the two children on the card. The honey label has a black triangle with a red circle at its base, while on the card the boy's red hood is right under the triangle-shaped roof of a building. I had already connected the Six of Cups with Thérèse's poem about a bee, and now here was a picture of actual bees closely paralleling the Six of Cups.

To top it all off, as I was writing this post I decided to look up Saint Valentine himself. He is, among other things, the patron of beekeepers.