Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

This album cover has been on my mind lately. No particular reason . . .

Normal service will resume shortly

I have a sense that the recent fire hose of syncs is a temporary phenomenon, having to do with the events of the present week (whatever those may turn out to be), and that shortly hereafter synchronicity will return to its normal background levels in my life.

I know, I know, famous last words.

Joan and the ark

My first mention of Joan of Arc, which set off the present chain of synchronicities, was a reference to "biblical pun correction" in Unsong: "One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is 'corrected' by another: 'Jonah whale; Noah ark.'" That is, one of the characters deliberately "mishears" the name "Joan of Arc" as "Jonah ark."

The first mention of Jonah in Unsong is when a girl meets a rabbinical student in a bar and gets him to agree to kiss her if she knows something about the Bible that he doesn't. She then asks him, "How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?" -- and he walks into the trap, replying "three days and three nights" without noticing that the question is about Joseph rather than Jonah.

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The more usual form of this joke is "How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?" And the punchline, more often than not, is, "None. Moses wasn't on the ark." But of course Moses was in an ark. Here is Exodus 2:3-6.

And when [the mother of Moses] could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.

And his sister [Miriam] stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.

And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.

Ark -- flags -- maid -- remind you of anyone? Many of my recent posts about Joan have centered on her distinctive banner or flag, and I have even had occasion to write (without any thought of Moses), "The word flag, of course, can also refer to a lilioid flower." In fact, when the word flag occurs in the King James Bible, it always refers to a riverside plant, never to a banner.

Joan's flag bore the names Jhesus and Maria. While the intended referents were of course Jesus Christ and his mother, these are also the New Testament forms of the Old Testament names Joshua and Miriam, respectively. Joshua was Moses' lieutenant and successor; Miriam, his elder sister who watched over him while he was in the ark.

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But the main biblical ark is the Ark of the Covenant, created under the direction of Moses. Like Joan's banner, it features God between two angelic beings. Here is Exodus 25:22.

And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.

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In the previous post, I mention my pleasure in discovering that Joan of Arc has had what is described as a "boat-shaped church" built to her name in Rouen (even though the church itself is an outrageous eyesore), because it recalls the joke about Joan of Ark being Noah's wife.

And then I realized that, if a boat-shaped church counts as an ark, "Jonah ark" isn't a mistake after all. Check out Chapters 8 and 9 of Moby-Dick. While the chapel Ishmael visits isn't technically "boat-shaped," it's certainly much more boat-like than your average house of worship. The pulpit is made to look like the prow of a ship, and is ascended by means of a rope ladder "like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." The preacher begins by shouting out nautical commands to the congregants -- "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard -- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" -- and then, addressing them as "shipmates," proceeds to deliver a sermon on -- Jonah.

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While I was in the process of writing this post, and had already made the Moses-Joan connection, Frank Berger left a comment on my previous post: "Check out my comment from your June 17, 2019 post in which you linked a gallery of your sister's fine drawings. The gallery featured thirty drawings, yet I comment on only one . . ."

The one drawing he had commented on was, of course, the portrait of Joan of Arc.

As for myself, in the 2019 post referred to, I had selected two of my sister's drawings as my favorites: one of an unidentified young woman, and the other titled Moses in the Court of Pharaoh.

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After writing all of the above, I suddenly had the idea that I should check Bible passages numbered 20:21 to see is they had any applicability to the year that has just begun. Remembering how my uncle William John had based his interpretation of 9/11 on Revelation 9:11, I thought I'd try Revelation 20:21 -- but there is no such verse. Psalm 20:21, then? No such verse. Genesis? No such verse. Exodus, then? Jackpot.

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

You and me both, Moses.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous!

And now for something completely different -- ha ha, just kidding! When the synchronicity fairies go all in, they go all in.

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On Mondays I teach private English lessons to a local businessman. He subscribes to a magazine intended for students of English, and we begin every lesson by going over what he's read in that magazine and explaining and elaborating as necessary. I don't have a copy of the magazine myself, so I never know in advance what each week's article will be about.

This time it was a two-page travel article called "Rouen: France's Jewel on the Seine" -- and I thought, Rouen? Wasn't that where -- ? Well, yes. Yes, it was.

"Rouen was where Joan of Arc was put to death." (By the way, I never knew that Rouen was where Monet created his Rouen Cathedral paintings. What a coincidence!)

A picture of Joan is included, with her flag.

"Fans of history can visit the Church of Saint Joan of Arc, where in 1431, English soldiers burned St. Joan at the stake during the Hundred Years' War."

By the way, I've looked up this church, and yes, "modern look" means what you think: It's a deliberately ugly monstrosity. Still, after those "Noah's wife was Joan of Ark" puns, I take some pleasure in knowing that she has a "boat-shaped church" to her name. Hey, speaking of that . . .

A reading comprehension question suggests that perhaps Monet painted Rouen Cathedral so much because "He was very interested in history, especially Joan of Arc." A total of three mentions and one picture in a two-page article about tourism.

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So, has everyone got the message now? Can the sync fairies take a break? The message is: JOAN OF ARC.

Repeat after me: Maid of Heaven, pray for us!

Good, now keep doing that.

"Dark" ambiguity

My tolerance for talking video is very low, but when Bruce Charlton sent me a link to a YouTube video of someone discussing his (BC's) ideas about Lucifer, Ahriman, and Sorath, I actually watched the whole thing.

And then, even more uncharacteristically, I decided to watch another talking video by the same guy, who uses the interesting moniker HeavyRain.

This second video begins (after a brief prologue) with the rhetorical strategy of applying the adjective dark to everything associated with President Trump.

One of [Robert] Cialdini's primary persuasive contributions we can see in liberal journalism today is the use of the phrase dark -- Donald Trump's dark vision of America, the dark future, the dark this -- it's the word dark, because dark lets you conjure in your own mind every image and terror that exists in your subconscious. Its engineered non-specificity allows you to project your own unconscious fears onto President Trump, and so creating negative emotion towards the man and preventing you from actually investigating his policies and performance in the real world.

The video then moves on to its main theme: the use of "ambiguous images" as a form of psychological warfare for the purpose of polarizing people. In introducing this idea, the video shows a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for "Ambiguous image" -- featuring, in addition to the familiar duck/rabbit and vase/faces, one of Gustave Verbeek's reversible drawings. 

This is the very same image that I used in my December 22 post, in which I related how my suddenly thinking of Verbeek for no reason had led me to discover the Grateful Dead's new music video for "Ripple" just two days after it had been released.

So, the word dark and ambiguous images. As regular readers will know, this blog has been dwelling of late on the homophony of dark and d'Arc and the ambiguity of the "dark rainbow" and the rainbow flag. In my post "Black crow, black rainbow" (Dec 28), I wrote

In 1978, the gay pride Rainbow Flag made its debut in San Francisco. While the colors officially represented various things (red for life, orange for healing, that kind of crap), in practice the rainbow stands for the spectrum of sexual neuroses and perversions, with the whole explicitly representing the cardinal sin of pride. Spiritually speaking, "all of the colors are black."

I then added in a comment, "Ah! How did I miss the Joan of Arc connection? Arc = rainbow, and d’Arc = dark. The black rainbow!" Two days later, my post "The first rainbow flag" discussed Joan's flag, and the rainbow on it, in detail. Then, in "In the cards" (Jan 1), I discussed how ostensibly Satanic ("dark") imagery contained hidden allusions to Joan of Arc.

Should we be thinking about a d'Arc vision of America? A d'Arc future? And should we think of that in terms of unparalleled spiritual purity and perfection -- or of a corrupt church burning all that at the stake? Talk about ambiguity!

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!

Look out

A personal motto of mine, and a frequent tag on this blog, is "The highway is for gamblers." It comes from the Bob Dylan song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence

I'd never given any particular notice to the two lines before "The highway is for gamblers" -- until now.

Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue

That flag again!

Once you've noticed something, it's everywhere. Found this flipping through a random children's book (Flying Colors by Robert G. Fresson) at a secondhand bookstore.

Sound familiar? That's how I began a December 6, 2020, post at The Magician's Table. What I found was an illustration of a red sun and a yellow sun, a theme which I had been exploring at that time. I can repeat the same intro verbatim today. I happened to go back to the same secondhand bookstore, for the first time since December 6, and happened upon the still-unsold Flying Colors again. I thought I'd try to find the red and yellow suns again, but instead I opened up to this:

Yes, that's Joan of Arc's flag, discussed in detail in my recent post The first rainbow flag and then again in In the cards. This is a very incomplete "guide to flags from around the world," omitting numerous countries -- but it includes this, and I happened to open up to it.

A week ago I didn't even know there was any particular flag associated with Joan of Arc, but once you've noticed something, it's everywhere.