The Craft

When poets write constrained by rhyme,

They use the language to divine.

And when they cheat and bend the rules,

They slough the suits and play the Fools.

A burden light

What if each idle thought and word

Is by recording angels heard,

And every action fills a page

In Bibles of a future age?

I say what if, but it is so.

The question is: What if you know?

The Tree yet bears the Sibyl’s leaves.

I tell you now, but none believes.

On Edge

I woke up in the middle of the night with this bit of verse in my head. I wasn’t going to post it, but a recent comment from Bill about "tart wine" makes me think sour grapes may be synchronistically relevant.

The grapes were theirs,

The teeth are ours.

Our palate bears

Their sweets and sours.

'Twas theirs to tell

But I that spoke.

'Twas night that fell,

But morning broke.

The Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment

I dreamt that I was in a bookstore flipping through a new book that seemed to belong to the same broad genre as Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc. I read, “We decided to test this hypothesis with what we dubbed the Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment.”

Cora Ylang-Ylang, I gathered from skimming the next several pages, was the pen name of an extremely prolific author of chick lit, each of whose novels included a reference to a particular day of the week in the title. Two examples I remember were Deuce Day (referencing Tuesday) and O Friday, My Friday! The authors reported the finding that the Tuesday novels focused more on female characters and the Friday novels on male ones, and they took this as confirmation of whatever hypothesis they were testing. It was supposed to be funny and cool that the “experiment” had taken that particular form.

Another chapter was about which forms of exercise were most effective and was illustrated with some simple line drawings of what looked like Pilates techniques.

Always be the best dreamers

Spotted on a T-shirt this morning (reconstructed, since I couldn't photograph it without being creepy).

By this standard, I do think my dreaming technique is improving.

Note added: If I can't photograph a T-shirt, Plan B is usually to try to find a photo of it online by searching for the text. This time I couldn't find anything, hence the use of Plan C: MS Paint. Just now I decided to try the search one more time, but all I got was further proof of how messed up Google is these days:

Those are the only two results it gave me. So Google knows that phrase appears on my blog, but instead of giving me this post or, failing that, the blog's homepage, it returns two completely random posts, from 2019 and 2021. Why those two posts in particular? It makes no sense at all. Neither of them even contains any of the key words, other than be and the.

If I add site:narrowdesert.blogspot.com to the search prompt, I still get the same two irrelevant posts. This despite the fact that putting "always be the best dreamers" in the search bar on the blog itself -- which is hosted by Google! -- brings this post right up.

I been Art Garfunkeled

My last post, "Sly St(all)one" was about a dream in which First Blood, the first Rambo movie, was mentioned. The Rambo character was named after Arthur Rimbaud, the idea being that Rambo's time in Vietnam had been "a season in hell," which is the title of one of Rimbaud's major works. Knowing I had posted about Rimbaud multiple times before, I searched the blog for his name. The first result was, somewhat surprisingly, last June's "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi," which, though it does include my verse translation of a few lines from A Season in Hell, is primarily about the 1973 Art Garfunkel song from which the post takes its name.

In a comment on the "Sly St(all)one" post, Debbie brought up the Earth, Wind & Fire song "In the Stone," which I then looked up. Seeing that it was released in my birth year of 1979, I had the random thought, "Hey, maybe it was released on the exact same day I was born!" I checked, and it wasn't, but the hunch was specific enough that I proceeded to google albums released on 15 march 1979. The first result was Fate for Breakfast by none other than Art Garfunkel. (Some additional digging turned up two more albums that were released on the day I was born: Half Machine Lip Moves by Chrome and There's Always Me by Ray Price.)

The "Sly St(all)one" post, which has now led me to Art Garfunkel by two different routes, also discusses Bill Wright's "Rose Stone . . . a 30-pound red stone." Not sure why I thought it necessary to mention its weight and color, since the only thing that was relevant to the post was the name Rose Stone itself. Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the word carbuncle, which it characterizes as "an archaic term for a number of red gemstones."

Fate for Breakfast includes the track "Sail on a Rainbow." In "What shall we do with the drinking salesman late in the morning?" -- which, before "Sly St(all)one" was my only post to mention the name Rambo -- I mention both that Rambo is named after Rimbaud and that Rimbaud sounds like rainbow. That post also prominently features sailors, so we have both elements of "Sail on a Rainbow."

Incidentally, the title of the present post as an allusion to "A Simple Desultory Philippic" from the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Rose Stone -- Sly Stone's sister and bandmate, whose name is what occasioned my mention of Bill's red stone -- was born Rosemary Stewart.

Note added: To the meaning of carbuncle mentioned above, etymonline adds that it was "also the name of a semi-mythical gem from the East Indies formerly believed to be capable of shining in the dark." Sounds like Gazelem.

Sly St(all)one

In a brief dream just before waking this morning, I was sitting at a computer searching IMDb for the name Sly Stone because I wanted to find the first movie he had been in, but nothing was coming up. I expressed my frustration, and a person standing behind me -- who seemed to be a White woman but was not otherwise clearly defined -- said, "Well, why don't you just look up the name of the movie? It was First Blood. Everyone knows that." With that, I woke up.

First Blood (1982) of course features Sylvester "Sly" Stallone, not the psychedelic funk-soul musician Sly Stone. It's not Stallone's first movie, either, though it's the one that introduces his iconic character John Rambo. (Rocky would have been more relevant, I would have thought, if we're going to be conflating the actor with someone named Stone.)

I know essentially nothing about Sly and the Family Stone. My mother has mentioned a few times that she used to listen to them back in the day, but I believe it was her brother Eli who was the big fan and owned all the records. There were no Family Stone albums in the house when I was growing up, and prior to doing the preliminary research occasioned by this dream I wouldn't have been able to name a single one of their albums or songs or to have recognized Sly in a police lineup.

Since I obviously should have been searching the Internet for Sly Stone's first album, not his first movie, I went ahead and did that. The band's debut album, released in 1967, was A Whole New Thing. I thought I might get a picture of the album cover and one of the First Blood poster and put them together as an illustration for this post. Looking up A Whole New Thing on Wikipedia, though, I found that there were two different covers to choose from. The caption accompanying the second of these caught my eye:

Rose Stone, for those who have been -- or rather, for those who haven't been living under that particular Rock -- is the name of the central MacGuffin in the story being developed by Bill Wright, a 30-pound red stone which is a palantir-like object and has lots of important information and stories stored on it. (I suppose the title of this post suggests that "all" is contained within the Stone.) Bill has also been insisting lately that adjectives like cunning and wily can have a positive meaning, so sly fits right in.

Another interesting coincidence is that Sly Stone (who died just last month, it turns out) happens to share my birthday, the Ides of March.

Note added: After posting this, I had a vague memory of having seen a T-shirt in Taiwan that said something like "I would never try to stab you. If he'd stop being so shady, he could find a nice young lady. You don't have to die before you live."  I had googled the text and found that most of it (minus the stabbing bit) was from a Sly and the Family Stone song. I don’t think I photographed the shirt, or if I did I can’t find the photo, but repeating the search confirms that the source is indeed Sly Stone, the song "Life."

"You don't have to die before you live" is directly relevant to my last post, in which I wrote, "You can't really reincarnate without dying first, but people somehow tend to overlook that."