New moon shine

The new moon doesn't shine, at least not perceptibly. I suppose in theory it provides a bit of double-reflected Earthshine, but in practice a new moon is invisible, indistinguishable from no moon at all. Therefore, references to the light of the new moon tend to be few and far between.

Last night, I was reading Koté Adler's Timelock. The main character, Alik, is on board an enormous spaceship, all alone until he discovers, of all things, a small yellow bird flying through it. (This was a minor sync in itself. A few nights ago I watched the 2016 film Arrival, in which humans repeatedly board an enormous alien spaceship to learn to communicate with the aliens and always bring with them a small caged bird. The yellowness of the bird also hints at my tiny yellow pterodactylus; I used to have dreams of following it, like Alik, into the unknown.)

Alik follows the bird:

Eventually the corridor widened wider and wider until the oriented ceiling vanished altogether explosing a vast, unexplored, weightless, void-like space. The bird sailed into the dimly lit abyss, leaving Alik at the mouth of the corridor wondering and staring into the darkness. There was light emanating, somewhere within the blackness, but it was barely perceptible. . . . its soft halide glow washed through the room like the shallow fingers of a pool. It was the light of a new moon, present but just barely (p. 185-186).

This evening I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post, "The Water Is Wide," about the James Taylor song of that name. He mentions the album it is from:

The name of the album is "New Moon Shine".  In terms of links to my topics here, and even about being able to cross this sea, this title could refer to both a stone (The Moon or Ithil Stone shining) as well as a drink (Moonshine is traditionally used in the US to describe liquor that is made and sold illegally).

Also, in the upper left is a symbol like an eclipse that I think has come up before on WJT's blog, and others he has cited, though I can't remember right now in what context or why important; so just pointing it out.

I like James Taylor -- "Sweet Baby James" was my lullaby in infancy -- but I've only posted his music here once. It was "Down in a Hole," from New Moon Shine, with the album cover visible in the post. This was in the November 2020 post "Coming up for air." This same post also featured a page from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, saying, "Mr. Fox! I hate this game, sir." I reposted this image almost exactly three years later, in "'Tim' and The Key," and it was then referenced by William Wright in "A battle of wits."

"The Water Is Wide" is well done, but my own personal favorite version of that song will always be the one sung by Cedric Smith and Loreena McKennitt:

In fact, William's references to stones and moonshine actually fit this version's lyrics better:

Now in Kilkenny, it is reported

They've marble stones there as black as ink

With gold and silver I would transport her

But I'll sing no more now, till I get a drink

I'm drunk today, but then I'm seldom sober . . .

Leaves of gold unnumbered

I was just searching the Internet trying to find if Joseph Smith or any of the witnesses had ever given any indication of approximately how many golden plates there were -- that is, how many leaves or "pages" there were in the metallic codex from which the Book of Mormon was purportedly translated. (I'm trying to figure out the whole "plates" thing; so far failure to do so is holding up my BoM blog.) Apparently not. The best I could find (here) was a newspaper report, 40 years after the fact, of a lecture delivered by Sidney Rigdon (a non-witness who didn't join Mormonism until after the plates were gone) saying that there were "fourteen gold plates." Since this same report says that these plates were buried "together with the sword of Gideon and the spectacles of Samuel the prophet," the degree of reliability is obviously rather low. (I can imagine Rigdon learnedly referencing Samuel as the prototypical "seer," but certainly not confusing Laban with Gideon!) Oh, well.

Immediately after giving up on that wild goose chase, I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post: "'What ship will bear you back across so wide a sea?'" William is a believer in the Book of Mormon and often posts about it, but this one is mainly a Tolkien post. William writes, "There are two songs or poems associated with Galadriel that I will write out here," and then proceeds to do so.

The first poem begins thus:

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:

The second poem is the familiar Namarie, parts of which I can probably quote from memory in the original Elvish (an exception to my otherwise sketchy memory of a book I've only read a few times). William quotes the English translation, explicitly identifying it as such: "It was said that Frodo couldn't understand the words, but Tolkien gives us the English translation right after." The opening lines are:

Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind,

long years numberless as the wings of trees!

Both of these poems are obviously referring to tree leaves, not to the leaves of a book, and William clearly has no thought of connecting them with the golden plates of Joseph Smith. Still, it's quite a coincidence running into these two references to "leaves of gold" immediately after trying to find out how many "leaves of gold" Smith translated. When the second poem says "long years numberless as the wings of trees" (yeni unotime ve ramar aldaron, right?), "wings of trees" is clearly a kenning for the leaves mentioned in the first line -- the long years are numberless, just as leaves of gold are numberless. This is a pretty strong sync with my failed attempt to number some leaves of gold. William's emphasis on the fact that the poem is presented by Tolkien as an English translation from an otherwise unknown language also syncs in a general way with Joseph Smith's plates.

Now I'll go back and give that post a proper read; I'm afraid I was distracted as soon as I saw the leaves of gold.

Temple clothing in reverse, green shooting star, green figs

It's been 22 years since I last set foot in a Mormon temple, and the distinctive clothing worn there isn't something I think about very often. Basically, it's all white, with the exception of a small apron, which is green. The outfit for men includes what looks like a baker's hat.

I like to have some idea of the physiognomy of the authors I read, and so I've been trying, without success so far, to find a photo of Daymon Smith. One correspondent suggested that if I couldn't see his face I could at least hear his voice by looking up an interview he did some time back on the Mormon Stories podcast. I found a four-part series of such interviews, recorded in 2010, and listened to some of them. The third episode dealt with the corporate side of the CJCLDS and ended with a story about how economically motivated decisions had led first to a glut and then to a shortage of temple clothing.

The interviews were very well conducted and interesting, and I realized I'd never listened to anything else from Mormon Stories before, so I decided to give them a try. I started with what YouTube told me was their most popular episode: a two-part interview with Brinley Jensen, who served as a missionary during the birdemic hysteria and was sent home early due to mental health issues. The interview was quite engaging in human-interest terms, and I listened to the whole thing. A few minutes into the second part they mention temple clothing, and specifically that it's all white with a green apron:

John: So you're in white, you're dressed in white.

Brinley: With the green, yeah.

Margi: Apron.

I was listening to this as I washed the dishes, and just then I noticed the logo on my dish detergent:

All green, including a baker's hat, with a white apron -- the Mormon temple color scheme in reverse. The brand is 小綠人, "Little Green Man," and they don't make any food products, so I'm not sure why their mascot is dressed as a baker. Because they use baking soda, I guess?

The Mormon apron is green because it represents the fig-leaf aprons worn by Adam and Eve. Here the whole man is green, so I thought, "I guess he's a fig-man."

Then I noticed the green shooting star that is also part of the logo. Last year I saw a green fireball in the sky, so later, after I'd finished the dishes, I looked up my post about it, called "Once in a red moon?" because my green fireball had been on the same day as a "Blood Moon" eclipse in the U.S. Ben left a comment connecting the red moon and shooting star with figs:

After the blood moon of Rev 6:12

6:13

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind

Untimely figs would of course be green figs, which have come up many times on this blog.

A tower sufficiently high that they might get to Olympus

A couple of months ago, I posted a bit about this meme. See, for example, "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs."

The running man in the meme is Arnold Schwarzenegger in his acting debut, as the title character in Hercules in New York. In the movie, the Greek demigod Hercules spends some time in, you guessed it, New York, where he befriends a Jewish pretzel vendor called Pretzie. Near the end of the movie, Herc and Pretzie are together on a viewing platform near the top of the Empire State Building when Herc disappears, having returned to Olympus. Later he gives Pretzie a farewell message by speaking to him through his radio.

A few days ago, on Christmas Day, an extremely obscure schizo YouTube channel I follow for complex psychological reasons posted a new video, with this as the thumbnail:

Of course I had to click. The video itself is very short (less than a minute) and doesn't include the thumbnail image. Instead it shows Pepe the Frog driving a tractor cab through space and then crash-landing on a shooting star. I looked up the song played at the end of the clip and found that it's the theme from Super Smash Bros., a Nintendo game featuring such characters as Mario and Donkey Kong.

On December 29, William Wright posted "Another Mushroom Planet, monkeys and bananas, and a deadly head in the Empire State Building." The "planet" of his title is the Mushroom Kingdom in a movie featuring Mario and Donkey Kong. One of the clips he posts from the movie has A-ha's "Take On Me" as a soundtrack, and he discusses that song and its original music video:

[W]e have a handshake between the 'drawing' man, and the 'real' woman, where she is then pulled into drawing-land (which strangely brought to my mind the LDS temple endowment, where people are literally pulled through the veil by the hand). 

This juxtaposition of the temple with the idea of escaping reality by entering a drawing obviously syncs with the Schwarzenegger meme.

(Side note: As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I don't approve of "Take On Me." One of the things I have to teach students is that the object of a phrasal verb such as take on can normally go either after the two elements or between them -- take on an assignment or take an assignment on -- but that if the object is a pronoun, it can only go in the latter position -- take it on. Inevitably, someone raises his hand and says, "But what about that one song?" And don't even get me started on the McDonald's slogan! Grammatical reservations aside, though, one line from "Take On Me" has been a longtime personal motto: "Say after me: It's no better to be safe than sorry.")

William goes on to write about the Percy Jackson books, in which "the way to get to Olympus is through the Empire State Building." He mentions that the ESB has come up in my recent writing as well as his own, but I think he missed the fact that I had specifically written about someone ascending to Olympus from the Empire State Building.

In the same post, he mentions a sync regarding hamsters and the name Herbie. This got my attention because in my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert'" I had also mentioned the name Herbie in connection with a rodent:

Back when I lived in Maryland, . . . 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. . . . 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.

The "outer space" messages we picked up on the old radio sync with Hercules talking to Pretzie from Olympus through his radio. In the same post I also mention "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven" (a phrase from the Book of Mormon), which obviously syncs with the idea of using the Empire State Building to get to Olympus.

The "Big Herbie" bomb, in case you were wondering, was about the size and shape of a coffee can and appeared to be made of balsa. At least, that's how it appeared in the visual images that sometimes accompanied the radio transmissions. I had serious doubts as to whether it was really explosive.

I suppose Herbert and Hercules are related names, each consisting of Her- followed by an element meaning "fame."

William, meet Nile

Notes on a dream I had on August 3, 2011:

I'm in a car, driving down the road very fast. The scenery is so covered with clouds that it looks like the view from a plane, except that the clouds are occasionally broken by wooded hills and crags.

Two voices -- apparently of people in the car with me, but I don't see them. In these notes I'll call them A and B.

A says, "In Chinese we say 'foothills' -- is it the same?"

I say, "Yeah, for the small ones." (We just passed an enormous crag with a couple of very, very tall trees.)

A says, "The small ones?"

B, referring to me, says, "Yeah, he believes in much bigger things, like that tree." (When he says "much bigger things," I understand him to be insinuating that I believe in God.)

After a pause, I say, as if making a difficult but necessary confession, "I once saw a bear as tall as that tree." (The bear I picture when I say this is black.)

They say, "What? No way! Come on…"

"I saw it," I insist.

"Are you sure?"

"I saw it. I was there. And it was standing right by the tree."

They still don't believe me, but I still insist: "Come on, why is it so hard to believe? Why can't a bear be that tall? Dinosaurs were that tall!" (Actually, dinosaurs were not that tall. The tree in question is a good 30 meters high.)

Later, in a hypnopompic state, I discovered the name of one of my interlocutors:

After I woke up (or so I thought), I did as Dunne recommends and, with my eyes still closed, reviewed the details of my dreams so as to establish them more firmly in my memory before they disappeared. Realizing that I didn't know who I had been talking to in the car, I thought to myself, "I don't know his name."

In response, another mental voice immediately said, "I don't know his name. Hey, what's your name?"

A third mental voice answered. What he said was originally garbled and hard to understand, but after a second it became clear: "My name is -- Nile."

Why am I thinking of a dream I had more than 12 years ago? Because I just read this little exchange in The Tower, Colin Wilson's second Spider World book:

Niall asked: "What are you called?"

"Bill."

"That is a strange name."

"No, it's not. Where I come from it's a perfectly normal name. What's yours?"

"Niall."

"That's not a name, that's a river!"

This appearance of a character named Bill who knows of the River Nile is the first clear indication of a connection between Spider World and the world we know.

Incidentally, a slightly earlier dream, on July 7, 2011, had also featured the name Nile in the context of driving a car with two unknown speakers:

I'm driving my car down a broad, slowly winding road in a slightly hilly, grassy rural area. The different areas I drive through are physical spaces but are also different schools of philosophy and perhaps also literary or artistic movements. (My general impression was clearly that I was driving through schools of philosophy, not literature, but when I try to remember any of the specific areas I drove through, the first thing that comes to mind is "Romanticism.")

Someone asks, "Did you find the solution of the Nile?"

Someone else answers, "No, I didn’t get that far yet." (It's not at all clear who is speaking or even whether or not I am one of the speakers.)

I think to myself, "That's appropriate, because the Nile is a geographic place, but a solution is something you find in philosophy."

 Actually, the Nile itself might be termed a "liquid solution":

Note added (1:50 p.m.): One of the first comments under that King Friday video is "Mr. Rogers, I presume" -- a reference to Dr. Livingstone and his quest to find the source of the Nile. When I wrote my "Milkommen" post a few days ago, I looked up references to the "milk of the word" in the New Testament and found this:

As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:1-5).

A helmet for Tolkien

Today I carelessly set a key down on top of a stack of books. Later I noticed that I had just happened to put it in the perfect position:

Merry Christmas

William Blake, The Descent of Peace

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me; and he said unto me: Nephi, what beholdest thou?

And I said unto him: A virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins.

And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?

And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.

And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the God, after the manner of the flesh.

And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto me, saying: Look!

And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms.

And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?

And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.

And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.

-- 1 Nephi 11:14-23