Story set in NoP 1 by u/SpacePaladin15
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Memory Transcription Subject: Lyra, Dossur, LakeShore, Twilight Region of Venlil Prime
Date [Standardized Human Time]: 7 January 2137
[[ Dream State Detected ]]
[[ Consult Project Chronicle: Archivist User Manual § 72.5 ¶ 17 for Warnings and Options Related to Dream State Transcriptions ]]
[[ Enabled Options: Skip Gaps, Smooth Interpolation ]]
I flick my tail in irritation while typing on my holopad.
Speh! This job might pay the bills, but it’s sooo boring. It requires no creativity to maintain this brahking warehouse machinery. It’s just an endless tail-chase of diagnostics, updating firmware, running more diagnostics, analyzing operating logs…
I submit my latest diagnostic summary, stand up, and stretch.
Time for a snack while that batch processes.
I step away from my desk and find that I’m completely buried in a large pile of strange looking strayu. It’s much denser and more crumbly than the Venlil strayu, round and somewhat flat, with an unfamiliar grain and dried berries scattered within. I break off a paw-sized chunk and nibble on it while pushing my way out.
This weird flattened grain tastes fantastic! These berries are familiar, I think Rolf called them [dried wine-fruit].
Emerging from the pile of sweet, Terran strayu, I find Rolf curled up on the ground. His voice trembling as he apologizes for dropping the pile of baked goods on me. I place a paw on his knee and try to calm the anxious human down.
“Hey, Rolf, it’s OK. There’s no need to act like a Sivkit. Take a few slow breaths.”
Rolf lifts his head and looks directly at me. I barely suppress a cry of shock at the sight. His head is unusually large, perfectly round, and covered in brown fur. He has long ears, similar to a Farsul and a ball-shaped nose sitting beneath two large forward facing eyes.
“Brahking speh! What’s with the jump-scare, Rolf?”
After a second look at Rolf’s bizarre appearance, I have to stifle a giggle.
“Or should I say Rowlf? You look like that weird Farsul Muppet that plays the odd looking Terran flytser.”
Rolf responds in a deep growling voice. “How in [deity]’s name do you know what a Muppet is? That show is 150 years old! There’s no way the Muppets were included in the public data dump; not with the forward facing eyes, Muppets eating each other, the explosions…”
I wrap my tail around my leg as my ears bloom green.
“I might have… um, borrowed your old Terran tablet. I wanted to see if I could modify it to connect to the Venlil Prime network. After the FTL comms came online between Earth and Venlil Prime, I discovered the tablet had full access to the uncensored Terran internet.”
I look at the ground, signing >embarrassed< with my tail. “Rolf, you know how much I love movies and art. I just couldn’t resist exploring all the fascinating media you humans have created.”
I look up, expecting to see disappointment, or at least exasperation, in Rolf’s face. Instead, I find a Kolshian dressed in federation military regalia glaring at me with one of his eyes.
“I grow tired of asking you to share the hidden Terran media. Perhaps you’ll respond to an alternative form of persuasion.”
My tail drops and my whiskers quiver with outrage. “The more you tighten your grip, Nikonus, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!”
The Kolshian simply signs >smug< with his tail. “Not after we demonstrate the power of this battle station. You have determined the choice of the planet that'll be destroyed first. Since you are reluctant to provide us with the location of the Rebel base Terran media, I have chosen to test this station's destructive power... on your home planet of Mileau.”
The shock from that statement hits me like a kick to the stomach. “No! Mileau is peaceful. We have no weapons. You can't possibly…”
“You would prefer another target? A military target? Then name the system!”
The Kolshian waves a menacing tentacle at me. “I grow tired of asking this. So it'll be the last time. Where is the Rebel base Terran media?”
I collapse to the floor, unable to hold back my tears.
My parents! My brothers! Why is the federation attacking Mileau? How could they develop something like the Death Star without using it to defeat the Arxur? Why did I leave my family?
I feel a familiar hand scratching my neck and back. The fog in my mind starts to clear and my tense muscles relax. I open my eyes and find myself sitting on one of Rolf’s arms as he tries to comfort me.
“It’s OK, Lyra, let it all out. I felt so much better after I allowed myself to cry. I still don’t know if my parents survived the attack on Earth. I spent weeks trying so hard not to cry. That was a mistake – all that emotional turmoil was eating me up inside.”
My trembling voice breaks through my sobs. “Eating…, eating you up inside? Even your gr- grief is pred… predatory!”
I try to laugh, but choke on a sob. Rolf simply gives me a hug.
“I know it’s overwhelming. Just know that I’m here for you.”
I take several deep breaths and try to calm down.
Wait, do I hear music?
I find myself walking to the other side of the dark warehouse, towards the faint music.
I’ve heard this before.
“Rolf! Do you hear this? It’s one of the songs from that movie we watched several herds of paws ago. Before that [religious feast] – um, Christmas? That movie with the elegant leaping and dancing.”
My breath hitches as I see a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness. I shake my head and look again, but there’s nothing there.
Not this again! I thought I was done with that silly nightmare!
I continue walking towards the music. I see two figures in the dim light. One of them is lying on the ground while the other kneels over them. The figure on the ground is covered in grey fur, resembling a large Earth rat the size of a Venlil, a broken crown lying next to his head. The other figure resembles a human, dressed in brilliant red pelts.
The rat king and the nutcracker. Well, that explains the music.
Looking closer, I notice the rat’s eyes are dull and lifeless. The nutcracker is bent down so far, his face appears to be pressed against the rat’s torso. I hear an unusual sound and suddenly, everything feels wrong. It’s that same dreadful feeling of being watched that plagued me a herd ago.
Not this again!
My ears lay flat against my head and I feel my hackles rise as the nutcracker lifts its head from the body of the rat. It turns and stares directly at me; blood and viscera drip from the nutcracker’s mouth as two glowing yellow eyes pierce the darkness.
I can’t move!
My desperate attempts to scurry backwards do nothing. I try to yell, but can’t produce a sound. The music that lured me here is drowned out by the growing intensity of my heartbeats. The nutcracker’s glowing eyes fill my vision, growing larger and brighter until their terrifying light envelopes me completely.
[[ Dream State Ended, Continuing Standard Memory Transcription ]]
I jolt awake with a breathless scream on my tongue.
I’m trapped! Consumed by a bright void. I’m, I’m…
Looking more carefully, I find that I’m surrounded by a smooth, cylindrical, white wall. I’m also buried in a strange kind of fluffy white material. I take a slow breath as recognition slowly ebbs into my confused brain.
Oh speh! Not again… Should I be less embarrassed now that this has happened a pawful of times?
I find my footing underneath the sea of exploded grain, reach up to grab the lip of the bowl, and pull myself out. I brush bits of popcorn and popcorn kernels off my fur as I look around for Rolf.
Apparently, a Star Wars marathon is a terrible idea when my home planet is under siege by those federation brahkasses. Ugh, I’m so tired of stressful dreams!
I shiver from whiskers to tail-tip as I remember the horrifying visage of that nutcracker.
What in Solgalik’s left paw was that? Maybe the pest control job is affecting my mind… I can’t believe the humans were so careless with their ships. Now we have a rat infestation in the food warehouses.
As I stretch, I hear a familiar set of footsteps.
“Sleeping beauty has finally awoken, I see.”
I glare at Rolf as he walks up to the couch. “You knew I fell asleep in the popcorn and you just left me there?”
“You looked so peaceful! What kind of friend would I be if I disturbed your beauty sleep?”
I huff indignantly while signing >outrage< with my tail. “Where did you run off to, anyway? Abandoning your defenseless friend in this den of slobbering predators?”
Rolf raises an eyebrow while brushing an errant popcorn kernel off my head. “Lyra, I’m pretty sure every slobbering predator in this refugee center is terrified of YOU*.*”
I can’t help but chitter at Rolf’s accusation. “You humans can’t handle the simplest of Dossur pranks! Not even a Mazic freaks out that much when a Dossur pops out of a cupboard or the cold box.”
Rolf shakes his head with a sigh. “Lyra, I’m pretty sure giving more anxiety to traumatized humans is not the best way to make friends.”
I flick Rolf with my tail, “It worked great with you!”
Rolf just sighs and sits down on the couch. I climb onto his shoulder and wrap my tail around his neck.
“Rolf, you look more anxious than usual. ^{I didn’t think that was possible.} You were pretty chipper before I slipped into a food coma.”
I flick my ears mischievously and sign >teasing< with my tail. “Is your girlfriend jealous that we spent two claws together watching movies?”
Instead of his usual defensiveness, Rolf just lowers his head and looks tired. “I went to take food to my roommate. But, she wasn’t there…”
I stifle a gasp and place a paw on Rolf’s neck. “Teeya never leaves your apartment. Where would she even go?”
Rolf shakes his head, his voice quivering a little. “I don’t know. She’s not here in the refugee center. I don’t even know when she left. I’m… I’m really worried about her safety.”
I hop down and put a paw on Rolf’s leg, trying to keep my voice level. “I know you’re worried about the exterminators. It’s…, well, it’s been several herds of paws since there was an incident between humans and exterminators here in Lakeshore. I… I’m sure she’ll be OK. She’s been hiding in that apartment for [months]! Maybe she’s finally stretching her legs and getting some air?”
Rolf scratches my neck and sighs. “I hope so. Thank you, Lyra, I appreciate the positive thoughts.”
Rolf stands up with a muffled groan and we walk out of the room.
“Well, I don’t want to make you late for your work claw. Embrace your inner nutcracker and go battle the rat hordes while I search the neighborhood for Teeya.”
I suppress a shiver at the nutcracker reference. We leave the refugee center and I sign >comfort< to Rolf as we part ways. I continue nightward, towards the food storage warehouses.
Rolf is gonna be a nervous wreck when I get back. I should be helping him look for Teeya instead of hunting down rats. I don’t understand why Teeya is so skittish compared to the other humans here in LakeShore.
[[ Memory Fragment, 14 Dec 2136, LakeShore, Terran Refugee Center, Art Room ]]
I splatter some purple paint on my canvas. My tail twitches in agitation as the purple splotches remind me of Kolshian blood. My whiskers shiver as I push that thought away. Rolf walks over and looks at my painting.
“Nice! I can see you’ve been studying Rothko and Pollock.”
I flick my ears and tail appreciatively. “I’ve spent so much time looking at their work in that public data dump. Their creative vision is fresh air through my fur, especially after a lifetime of stale federation art that hasn’t changed in centuries. Thank you again for the art supplies – painting always calms my nerves.”
I flick some green paint onto the canvas, wondering how much Dossur blood has been spilled by the federation attack on Mileau. I take a slow breath and look up at Rolf.
“I know this sounds trivial compared to everything else going on; but, I’m worried about rent. Inflation is already crazy and now that piclil landlord is raising my rent again. With my debt from art school… Ugh, I just feel like I’m drowning!”
Rolf scratches my neck and shakes his head as he sighs. “I still can’t believe student debt is a problem here in the federation, too. Wait, I thought you were a maintenance engineer for a warehouse. Aren’t engineers paid well?”
My tail flicks in frustration as my whiskers quiver with outrage. “Hah! Outside Mileau, it’s standard practice to pay Dossur a fraction of what they pay other species for the exact same work! It’s flagrant brahking specism! Do you know what employee resources said when I pointed out this speh? ‘Dossur eat less food and live in smaller apartments.’ Vyalpic! Do you know how many Dossur apartments even exist in this backwater venpic town? None! That’s how many!”
Rolf frowns as he shakes his head. “So much for taking care of the herd. It’s too bad the UN won’t let you live in the refugee center. We spend enough time here it really wouldn’t make a difference.”
The tip of my tail taps the floor as my ears twitch. “You know, that’s not a bad idea… We spend so much time watching Terran movies together, I should just move into your apartment! My stuff won’t take up much space. I even have a large wall-mount holoscreen. I can build an adapter for your old tablet and we can watch Terran movies from the comfort of your apartment.”
Rolf smiles wistfully. “That would be fun. I would really like that… It’s just, well, my roommate, Teeya. I don’t think it would be safe for you two to live together.”
My whiskers droop. “You’ve mentioned something about that before. Is she allergic to Dossur or something? I haven’t even met her, so it can’t be a grudge from one of my pranks.”
Rolf sighs and sits down. “No, it’s just… with everything, she… Teeya is struggling with this move to Venlil Prime. She never leaves our apartment. I can’t have any visitors over.”
I sigh. “I don’t want to sound insensitive; but, couldn’t Teeya just room with a different human?”
Rolf smiles sadly while shaking his head. “I wish it were that easy. I’ve known Teeya for almost ten years. I promised that I’d take care of her before we left Earth. I’m the only one she trusts here. She’s actually very sweet; I…, I just worry what would happen if she were alone with a Venlil or a Dossur.”
[[ Resuming Standard Memory Transcription ]]
I sigh and push that memory aside.
I know it’s not Teeya’s fault that she’s struggling. It’s just, everything would be simpler if I could room with her and Rolf: I wouldn’t have to work two jobs; I could spend more time with Rolf; I could…
My thoughts are interrupted by a pair of glowing eyes in a shadow off to my left. I stop abruptly, panic rising in my chest. I look again, carefully, but see nothing.
Stupid nightmare! Now I’m jumping at shadows again. I thought I’d moved past this.
I let out the breath I was holding and walk a little faster towards the warehouse complex. A feeling of dread festers in my stomach as my instincts scream that I’m being followed.
This is all in my head. Stupid dream! Stupid prey instincts! I can’t let fear control me. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me…
By the time I reach the warehouse, my heart rate is back to normal. With another sigh, I open my locker and start gathering my gear.
Let’s see: high-visibility vest, safety glasses, helmet, tranquilizer gun, and a jet injector.
I shake my head and sigh at the typical federation hypocrisy.
If an extermination officer saw a human killing a rat, they’d torch the ‘dangerous predator’ faster than I can blink. But, it’s just fine for a Dossur like me to kill rats every brahking paw as long as I’m registered with the local extermination office.
I double check the supply of tranquilizer darts and fill the injector syringe with warfarin.
As a ‘prey species’ I should feel awful about this job. I’d never admit this to my exterminator colleagues, but I find this job comforting: I get to be a psychopomp, taking rats on a peaceful journey to the other side before the exterminators have a chance to burn them to ash.
I shudder, imagining how awful it would feel to be burned alive with a flame-thrower.
Well, which of the many Terran psychopomps should I be today? Freya, perhaps? Yes, Freya with her cat-drawn chariot. Cats are good for a rat infestation.
I power on the motorized transport that acts as my hearse. I configure the autopilot so it follows me through the warehouse as I check the traps hidden in various crawl spaces that only a Dossur can reach. The first quarter claw is quiet; every trap I check is empty. My thoughts drift back to Rolf and Teeya.
Heh, despite my teasing, I’m sure Rolf and Teeya really are just roommates. Rolf is just so adorable when he’s flustered. He reminds me of my brothers. My brothers… I really hope they’re still alive.
[[ Memory Fragment, 16 Nov 2136, LakeShore, Terran Refugee Center, Media Room ]]
What would my brothers think if they could see me right now? Sitting on a predator’s shoulder. Watching a movie created by predators. Inside a building filled with predators of all ages. Distressed predators whose homeworld was attacked. Would my brothers freak out or would they be jealous?
I smile as I think about how much Rolf reminds me of my brothers. I’m constantly amused at how often he acts like a young Dossur. So much fun to tease! I flick my ears mischievously as I search for a suitable topic.
“Rolf? Your head-fur is brown…”
“Excellent observation, Watson!”
I flick Rolf’s neck with my tail. “You didn’t let me finish! Your head-fur is brown, but your pelts are covered with long grey hairs.”
Rolf raises an eyebrow.
“Well, Sherlock, applying that deductive reasoning you always lecture me about, I conclude that you and your roommate spend a lot of time cuddling.”
Rolf blushes slightly and coughs, “No, it’s, it’s not like that!”
“Oh, really? I think the evidence speaks for itself.”
I can hear Rolf’s heartbeat increase as he starts stumbling over his words.
“Look, when I… well, when I brush Teeya’s hair it just, well it kind of, um, just gets everywhere…”
“Ah, so you brush her hair? My deduction that you two are more than roommates still stands.”
“We’re just close friends! We’ve been friends for 10 years. There’s nothing romantic…”
My ears perk up and I flick Rolf with my tail again. “10 years! And the two of you haven’t weaved a vyalkit, yet?”
Rolf looks completely exasperated. “I don’t even know what that means…”
I wrap my tail around his neck and pat the side of his head. “Rolf, just promise that you’ll invite me to the ceremony when you two make things official.”
Rolf shakes his head and sighs. “Lyra, how can I convince you that I have no plans to marry Teeya?”
[[ Resuming Standard Memory Transcription ]]
I chitter out loud at that memory.
Stars, that was funny! Oh, it always feels like home when I’m with Rolf. If Teeya could just work up the nerve to actually meet me, I’m sure we’d get along. Heh, if she’s known Rolf for 10 years, she must have all kinds of great anecdotes.
My thoughts are interrupted as I find a rat inside a trap. As usual, the rat’s almost as large as I am!
What shall I call this one? Remy? Yes, Remy was a rat with good taste.
“Remy, my friend, the reaper has come calling. It’s nothing personal. You just don’t belong here on this planet. When you get to the underworld, give your ancestors an earful on my behalf. They’re the ones who stowed away on the human’s refugee ships.”
Remy the rat simply looks at me curiously as I fire the tranquilizer gun. Once the rat’s unconscious, I inject it with warfarin and pull it from the trap. After resetting the trap, I pull Remy’s corpse out to the hall and load it into the hearse.
[[ Advancing Transcript by 3 Hours ]]
I’m exhausted after a work claw hauling dead rats into the hearse. I put my gear away and bring the hearse outside. I can start sealing up the cargo hold so the autopilot can deliver the corpses to the local extermination office for incineration. I’m interrupted by a loud panicked squeal of a rat.
Huh, did I catch a rat in one of the traps outside the warehouse?
As I walk in the direction of the noise, I briefly see two eyes glowing in the darkness. My heart beats faster as I struggle to get my instincts under control.
Speh! I don’t have the emotional energy for this! It’s just my mind playing tricks on me…
I continue walking until I reach the trap. It’s empty. The next trap is also empty. As I walk to the third trap, I feel my hackles rise. That familiar, dreadful feeling of being watched descends over me. Once again, I see a pair of eyes reflecting light from within the darkness. They’re gone when I look more carefully.
Maybe Rolf is right. I need to stop watching Terran movies that are so intense.
Arriving at the final trap, I’m surprised to find a rat lying on the ground outside of the cage. The rat isn’t moving, its eyes dull and lifeless. As I get closer, I can see that the rat is lying on its back with deep scratches and bite marks on its neck and belly. Blood is pooled around the corpse. I can feel bile rising into my throat as my mind is flooded with memories of that horrifying nutcracker from my dream. I’m brought back to my senses by the sounds of an animal scampering off nightward in the dim twilight.
Shit! Speh! Fuck! What could even do this? A shadestalker? But a shadestalker wouldn’t leave their catch. They certainly wouldn’t hesitate to attack a lone Dossur…
I try and push down the panic welling up inside me. After a couple slow breaths, I take a picture of the eviscerated rat with my holopad and send it to my contact in the exterminator office. I also send the image to Rolf with a note about my suspicions and a warning to be careful.
This is bad! This is so bad. Not even humans are safe from shadestalker attacks. Several [months] ago, a human was attacked and severely injured by a shadestalker that wandered into the Twilight. If shadestalkers are in LakeShore, Rolf needs to find Teeya and get her back to safety!
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I was long fascinated with the Cold War era military psychic programs in the US and USSR.
This is a review of several books I read on the subject in an attempt to piece together what transpired between early 1960s and 2000s. Spoiler alert: it feels like there is a lot to the story but much remains unclear. (I kept delaying it but now when the 60 minutes report is coming out, I want to post it before the report, to see how it stacks up.)
The Star Trek: DS9 quote comes to mind when reading these different accounts. The claims sometimes contradict and sometimes corroborate each other. The origin story claims are always contradictory, so that part is still a mystery to me. As Lyn Buchanan, one of the US "psychic spies" and author of one of the books (The 7th Sense) beautifully put it:

There is also admittedly a great deal of misinformation, disinformation, and misdirection involved in almost everything you will read about the unit and its work. This was, after all, an intelligence unit for the government. Your grandchildren may someday learn the whole, real truth about it, but you never will. There are basically three facts of life you must understand when dealing with the world of governmental and military intelligence:

1. You must remember that in the intelligence world, every truth is part lie and every lie is based on some truth. If you try to separate the two, you will only wind up confused and frustrated. If you are an outsider, you will slowly learn that there is no separation of the two - the lies and the truth are just two of the many sides of the same ever-flipping coin. If you are an insider, you will slowly and often painfully learn that sometimes the coin lands by chance, sometimes the way it lands is rigged and you’ll never know by whom, and sometimes there is not even a coin at all.
   
2. If you are lucky and work hard, you will find some of the truth. If you are lucky and work really hard, you might find the whole truth—as someone wants you to know it. If you are phenomenally lucky and really work your tail off, you might even go on to find the real truth. But no outsiders, and in fact very few insiders, ever—ever—learn the whole, real truth.
   
3. All assumptions are wrong.
   

Sadly, Buchanan himself seems to be following these principles to the T. With too much self-aggrandizing and his more recent interviews with WTF grade claims, his book is probably the least reliable source of information of the three.

The books

ESP Wars: East & West by Edwin May, Joe McMoneagle, and Victor Rubel

The most comprehensive and informative of the three, ESP Wars is a compilation of accounts of the participants in the psychic espionage programs in both the US and USSR. The authors made an effort to show differences and similarities between the two programs that ran in parallel. Ed May and Joe McMoneagle tell the story of the US unit, while generals Alexey Savin, Boris Ratnikov, and Nikolai Sham (senior enough to have served as a deputy director of KGB at some point) represent the Soviet/Russian side.
The similarity that stood out to me was that all of them complained. Bureacracy, office politics, looking for sponsors, very long commute, the "giggle factor", and occasional spectacular success. Much of the book is tedious description of procedures and office dynamics. Contrary to the sensasionalized title, there weren't actual "wars". Only a handful of described tasks involved spying on the USSR, most notably, the Typhoon-class submarine report; on the Soviet side, they seemed to focus on domestic issues and regional conflicts (specifically, post-USSR 1st Chechen war) plus esoteric explorations.
The most surprising and disturbing part of the Soviet/Russian program was outsized involvement of their senior officers in major political developments (further below).
It appears that on the US side, the programs were initiated by private parties (SRI) and then "sold" to the government. In the USSR, private parties lobbied the Gorbachev government and the experimental unit was created. But many of my questions regarding the history remained unanswered, sadly.

7th Sense by Lyn Bunchanan

An insider's account of the program by one of the psychics, as well as a discussion of remote viewing in general. Buchanan has axe(s) to grind. Many, many axes. And also many, many spectacular claims. Take the most extraordinary claim you've heard about the secret government UFO programs and multiply it by a factor of 10. Given Buchanan's own disclaimer about lies, and the impression that he is generally a bright dude, my gut feeling is that many of his claims are intentionally introduced fiction.
The part describing the process from the psychic's perspective, however, is surprisingly good. If you ever had some sort of a paranormal experience or even sudden eureka moments, no matter how minor, you will nod along to some of his descriptions. Buchanan compares remote viewing to a martial art:

Once the CRV [=controlled remote viewing] methodology became public knowledge, and people began to find out how much work it really is, a number of quite unscientific “remote viewing” methods began springing up. Most of these claim to be improvements on the original CRV. In reality, they are simplifications of CRV, for the purpose of making training easier and quicker and therefore more appealing to would-be students. Unfortunately, they sacrifice depth and advanced capabilities in the process.
The real thing is very much a martial art, and requires the same diligence, time, and effort as any other martial art. Anyone can go in, sign up, and get their white belt the first week. But it may take years for a person to earn their black belt status, and then only through continued practice, training, further instruction from more experienced experts. Similarly, you can’t get your black belt in a martial art by watching a how-to video or reading a book.

Buchanan described some of these exercises that sound a bit like "wax on, wax off". I suppose it answers a question I heard many times, "if it works, how come the government made the knowledge public".
Buchanan's perspective on why the program got closed is, unsurprisingly, a finger pointing at everyone else. Even Jessica Utts was, according to him, missing the point, even though Buchanan's own narrative sounds very much like the conclusion of Utts: yes, it works, but no one knows how to control or manage it and its usability is a hit and miss.

Mysticism and Philosophy of Special Services (in Russian)

The last book is, AFAIK, not available in English. I found it following a link in the Russian Wikipedia article about Unit 10003. Much of the book made it to the ESP Wars... however, not all. Some of these chapters are worth mentioning.
Overall, it is also a compilation (not too orderly, sadly) of memoirs. The memoirs are less conciliatory than in the ESP Wars; some stuff would normally be classified as conspiracy theories. The milder ones were included in ESP Wars with disclaimers, the batshit insane ones weren't. While May and McMoneagle were talking about how they went to Moscow in 1990s and had a great time with the Russian team, being relieved at no longer being enemies, the bulk of the authors (with some exception) in the Russian book held a hostile attitude toward their counterparts. The chapters are mixed with half a dozen different authors. The attribution is inline only (e.g. "See below Major X's account"), which makes it difficult to keep track who is who and who said what. The foreword is written by someone else (as it seems), who is closer to the batshit insane grade.
The last part is a utopian (or dystopian - if you're not in the camp of Alexander Dugin fans :) ) description how a proper state is to be run. Basically, think today's ruling ideology in Russia with its Messianic traditionalism, "surrounded by enemies", etc. and take it up a notch. Among other categorical and eyebrow-raising statements, "the state must be a dictatorship". (Are you happy now, guys?) My quick searches revealed that people linked to the authors (specifically, Sham) were a strange combo of jingoistic zealots, snake oil sellers, and sometimes persistent researchers of the paranormal.
The two parts I found most interesting are deliberations on how the psi phenomena work, and mentions of the "psychotronic" tech, even though in passing.

Programs

US

Most people talk about the psychic program as "CIA psychics" or Project Stargate. That is an oversimplification and wildly inaccurate. According to multiple accounts, CIA was the entity that got the custody of the program closer to its end, and saw it more like an unwanted headache. They were the ones to start the studies headed by Jessica Utts (as the main advocate) and Ray Hyman (as the main opponent).
Stargate was just one among the different names the program had. Before Stargate there were Project Grillflame, Center Lane, and others. All run by the same team. Many of these papers are now in public domain, and very much in line with the books, the programs were managed by the military (INSCOM). That said, the programs seemed to have been a baby of SRI with the key people constantly looking for government sponsors.
Many people point at Puthoff and his experiments with Uri Geller, but Puthoff joined the psychic program when it was already running. He was instrumental in setting up the protocols, but was not the person who started it.
My impression from both Buchanan's book and ESP Wars was that much honest effort was aimed at repeatability. Some of it was successful, some wasn't. It appears that they could not determine who can be trained better and what determines the magnitude of psychic abilities. So instead, they were recruiting those who already had those.

USSRussia

ESP Wars says that the US program was trying to work out a repeatable protocol based on human training (and, apparently, the result was a hit and miss), while the Soviet/Russian program was trying to come up with actual tech. The Soviet approach seemed less result-oriented and more about chasing various directions and ideas. So-called "psychotronic tech" seems to have been only studied in the USSR; the ESP Wars believes it was due to the "Marxist-Leninist" slant and firm refusal to deal with mysticism. Soviet researchers were supposedly looking for an electromagnetic solution only. In 1990, they invested a lot in researching so-called "torsion fields".
It's not entirely accurate, however. Both ESP Wars and the Russian compilation mention experiments with "querying the collective unconscious" (in a way, similar to the US INSCOM programs). In the post-Soviet period, they engaged in "white elephant" areas like improving the quality of consciousness.
In the US part, everyone is complaining about not being taken seriously, overworking, and general chaos. Seems like on the other side of the fence, it was more chaotic. However, unlike in the US, the psychics seemed to have influence. It's like it was all experiments and no protocols, and good old-fashioned "friends in high places" that kept unit 10003 operational.
While the book stops before Putin's ascent, it appears that today Russia still takes psychics seriously. The unit was dismantled in 2003 under pressure of Eduard Kruglyakov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, but years later, Patrushev himself (Putin's right hand, as they say, even more paranoid and xenophobic), cited a story told by Ratnikov about reading Madeleine Albright's mind as a fact.
The book mangles the history of the US program, and mashes together many different events. It touches the creation of Unit 10003 from the view point of Savin. It doesn't explain why his superiors decided to create the unit and whose initiative it was.

Claims of interest

Some of the claims have nothing to do with paranormal but are interesting from the historical point of view. It appears that at least in the USSR and later Russian Federation, the psychics had (have?) influence much greater than one would expect from an experimental military unit.

Meddling in political decisions: Kuril Island dispute

Source: Russian compilation
The most disturbing case described in both ESP Wars and the Russian book is an episode involving a long-running territorial dispute between Russia and Japan. Kuril Islands are a small group of islands controlled by Japan until the end of WW2. They are tiny and there is some speculation that Russia wants to use them in a future sea route, but apart from that there's not much going on there. Goes without saying, the issue has been a source of tensions between the two countries.
The chapter in the Russian book (ESP Wars tells the story somewhat differently) starts with a "cold open" where Savin describes an attempt to query "energetic-informational field of Earth" to read the mind of then US President George HW Bush. Bush "said", "let Russia produce metal, consumer goods which are harmful to health and energy-intensive in production, let them store nuclear waste, use their cheap manpower, while we're going to advance high technology and build huge national parks". Then they "queried" more and somehow, everyone around was an enemy.
Both books claim that Yeltsin unilaterally decided to resolve the dispute and give the islands back to Japan. He was planning to do that during his visit to Japan in 1992. Russian economy was in a pitiful state, and trading tiny pieces of land barely in use for billions in Japanese investments seemed a no-brainer.
But patriotically-minded psychics in unit 10003 decided otherwise. In addition to their mind-reading sessions that determined that everyone around was an enemy, apparently, there was some sort of a complex plan in place that would provoke a war with China after the Kuril Islands are returned (?). Ratnikov as quoted in ESP Wars:

We prepared a very skilled psychic to connect with the information field. We conducted a session and received information that indicated that as soon as Yeltsin transferred the islands to Japan, China would lay claim to territories they disputed with Russia. This situation would be favorable to many political forces in the world, so their goal was to steer China’s leaders toward a military confrontation with Russia, and have the international community declare China an aggressor. Then the United Nations and a number of countries could apply economic and political sanctions against China as an aggressor that had encroached on the sovereign territory of another state. This would be very advantageous for China’s political and economic competitors. But that wasn’t all—the situation would go much further. China could react to the pressure in this case and undertake local military action against Russia, as it had at the end of the 1960s. However, in 1993 it would have resulted in a large-scale war in Southeast Asia.

So they took on themselves to derail the visit by nitpicking on some sort of technicalities (safety of Yeltsin). While the psychic unit was then classified, and the particulars of the story were not confirmed, an old NYT article from 1992 says:

President Boris N. Yeltsin abruptly put off a visit to Japan today, only four days before he was scheduled to leave, after negotiations throughout the summer failed to resolve a bitter territorial dispute that has haunted Moscow-Tokyo relations since World War II. ... In Japan, officials said they were surprised and somewhat insulted by the Russian leader's sudden action. As late as today, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was meeting with aides to plan for the visit, and a senior diplomat said he would be "very surprised" if rumors of a cancelation proved correct.
The chief Cabinet Secretary, Koichi Kato, said in a statement that the Government "regrets the postponement," but he used a word that also meant "deplores."

It is a loud claim, the circumstances around it sound batshit insane, but given this public knowledge, the mess in the Russian government at the time, and the known influence of these guys on the top brass, I am inclined to believe it.

Psychic discovery of Typhoon-class submarines

Source: ESP Wars / Joe McMoneagle
One of the stories is how Joe managed to dedude and describe an experimental submarine that the USSR was building that was unlike anything every built before. It became known as Typhoon-class submarines, the biggest submarines ever built.

Men in black and Mikhail Gorbachev

Source: Lyn Buchanan.
Of all the claims made in all the books, this one absolutely takes the cake and makes me wonder whether the number of true stories in Buchanan's book is 0.0001% or lower.
Buchanan tells about a visit of "men in black". According to him, they are not otherworldly beings but a special unit of government operatives who operate virtually without oversight.
These ones met him in 1985, when Gorbachev only rose to power. They asked Buchanan to kill Gorbachev, psychically.

The MIBs are not known for their subtlety. He ignored my question and said, “We want you to kill Mikhail Gorbachev.”
“No,” I answered flatly without hesitation.
He sat and stared at me, waiting for me to qualify my statement.
I sat and stared back at him, unflinching. There would be no argument or concession of any kind. He finally motioned to the driver, who took us back to the parking lot.
When we arrived, the man beside me got out. I reached to open my door and found that the inside door handle did not work. He came around the car and opened the door for me. I got out and stood there, waiting for some other instruction or comment. None was given. The man walked back to the front passenger side of the black sedan and opened the door.
“I’ll tell you what I will do,” I called to him. “I’ll try to get Gorbachev to get rid of communism.” He looked at me blankly, then got into the car beside the driver and they were quickly gone.
I was joking, of course. It was a stupid thing to say, but it did relieve the tension. However, throughout the afternoon, I got to thinking of how great an experiment that would be. I dismissed the idea, but over the next couple of weeks, it kept coming back to me. Finally, I decided to at least try it. Over the next two and a half months, I worked repeatedly to instill the idea into Gorbachev’s mind that communism was not working on many financial, social, military, and political levels. I used specific phrases that I had designed to access his subconscious mind, where they would have the most effect. But, after two and a half months of work, nothing happened, so I gave up and began working on other things.
I think that I was probably the most surprised person in the U.S. when Gorbachev made his famous speech that effectively ended Communist rule in Soviet Russia. Had I had some influence on his decision? I did not know. It took me another month, but I finally got a transcript of his speech and within it were all of the subliminal phrases I had been trying to pump into his subconscious during my sessions. I have no grandiose illusions that I brought about the end of communism in Russia. Ending communism was a logical and intelligent thing to do at the time, and I truly believe that it would have happened, had I not been involved. But I still wonder: Did I just pave some subconscious pathways that allowed the thoughts to occur more easily?

Life on Mars?

Source: Lyn Buchanan.
No sailors fighting in the dance hall here. Buchanan was asked to conduct a remote viewing session by one of his least favorite coworkers, who kept breaking protocols. After some reluctance, Buchanan agreed. He saw some worm-like organisms underground.

I can’t really say whether or not there were any aliens hibernating there. However, right before I received the move command, I had already bilocated to a place in which I did perceive forms of alien life much like large segmented worms. They were very active and not at all in hibernation. I had just looked up and realized that there was a way out of the chamber I was in when I received the command to “move up one hundred feet and describe.” How much of that part of the bilocation was accurate, I cannot even guess.

Supposedly, Buchanan was in the vicinity of the "face on Mars", which he recognized later from a poster and claims to have never seen before.

Soviet contact with ET in 1991

Source: Russian compilation
In 1991, a certain Mark Melkhiker with a group of psychics petitioned Gorbachev himself about a planned visit of extraterrestrials. Supposedly multiple psychics in different cities were in contact with these entities. Surprisingly, Gorbachev forwarded it to the minister of defense Yazov, and eventually it was delegated to the head of Unit 10003 Savin.
One of the requirements of the supposed aliens was to disable anti-aircraft artillery around Uzbekistan where the meeting was supposed to take place. Only Gorbachev had the power to disable the AA defenses, so Savin was wondering if the entire thing will take place. Amazingly, Gorbachev approved the request, and they flew to a middle of nowhere, near Zarafshan in Uzbekistan.
They've been waiting and waiting and waiting at the agreed upon coordinates. Nothing happened, the helicopter pilot lost it, and started verbally attacking Melkhiker. Melkhiker suggested to hypnotize the pilot and bring him in contact with the aliens. The pilot agreed. In trance, the pilot acted as an intermediary, and produced, among other things, some sort of scientific data dump which was recorded on a tape. The pilot was told that the landing did not eventuate because not all the conditions were fulfilled.
Savin concludes the story by saying, "while we haven't seen the aliens, we encountered a phenomenon whose nature is not yet understood".

Psychotronic weapons and Havana syndrome lead

Source: Russian compilation
Possibly the most important episode that ties in the upcoming 60 Minutes coverage.
The Russian Unit 10003 compilation has a chapter conspiciously missing from the ESP Wars, describing Yeltsin's sudden maladies. Before that chapter, the book makes eyebrow-raising claims that, even with the rest, make me question the mental health of those who wrote that part.
On pages 275 - 277, the book claims that "in 1985, the Pentagon declassified materials about application of neuro-linguistic programming..., having dedicated much attention to methods of contacting the brain of targets by the operators of informational centers". "Built today in several countries systems, portable with 6 watt power and stationary with up to 10 kW power are called psychogenerators and are probably the most formiddable weapon of 21st century. Having been tested in space, sea, and ground locations, the psychogenerators produce a stable effect of seeing a phenomenon called the UFO, as well as create emotions like gloom, loneliness, hopelessness."
"An example of successful realization by a group of operatives of NLP methods is an information contact of an operator that occurred on December 3, 1988 with the brain of the director of CIA. Over the course of the contact, a "conversation" was conducted about the main directions of the US intelligence towards the former USSR. In March 1991, a similar contact was conducted through an operator with the brain of Robert Gates, who took over the position of Webster as the director of CIA."
Supposedly these technologies are (were?) spreading and developing to the point of developing "mind viruses" similar to computer viruses.
The book claims that these technologies have been in development since mid-20th century. They claim that "the greatest successes were achieved by the US, UK, France, Germany, Denmark. In China, the extra-sensory perception and psychotronics research is conducted by over 100 scientific organizations... Israel focused on research aimed at achieving new capabilities by self-regulation, mind state alternation, and human body potential. In Japan, psychotronics are researched by an institute of religious psychology."
With the compilation being both vague and not too orderly, it is hard to determine who was behind this purported tech. It appears to be a loosely defined group of "in and out of government" actors, likely with the same set of nationalistic esoteric views as the major figures in the book.
The interesting part is this:

From the first days of its existence, the new division faced a number of serious problems. The issue is that in the Soviet years, the ninth directorate of the KGB of the USSR developed a wealth of theoretical and practical experience regarding identifying, developing and preventing a different range of threats against the country’s top leadership. In the event of an operational need, the entire staff of the USSR KGB worked for the "Niner". While the security department of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR, when Yeltsin as its chairman had virtually no such opportunities, and the staff of the department consisted of no more than twenty former state security and law enforcement officers without a lack of relevant experience, except for A.V. Korzhakov.
At the same time, the most unconventional threats sometimes arose, and it was one of them that prompted the leadership of the 175th security service to study unconventional influences on the country’s leaders.
It so happened that the office of the Chairman of the Supreme Council was located on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment in the White House [for the avoidance of confusion: not the one in DC)], the security of which was entrusted to employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And soon, after the occupation of the office by the new Chairman of the Supreme Council, a scandal erupted, provoked by the discovery by employees of the security department above the office of Yeltsin of a whole room, with special eavesdropping equipment. The KGB tried to pass it off as equipment for protecting against unauthorized removal of information from Boris Nikolayevich’s office, but the invited technical specialists put everything in its place.
And a few weeks later, Korzhakov suddenly began to notice that as soon as Yeltsin worked for an hour and a half in his office, elements of inadequacy began to be registered in his behavior: forgetfulness, inappropriate answers, jumping from topic to topic, headaches and general discomfort that literally drove him away from the office. But as soon as he left the office within half an hour, all his health would be restored and he would return to his normal state. This circumstance suggested that some unusual external influence was being exerted on the Chairman of the Supreme Council. To test this assumption, it was decided to thoroughly search the entire office.
The entire office was carefully examined, especially the shelves with political literature. It turned out that the security officers' assumption was correct. A microwave antenna was found behind the bookshelves, which was a flexible rectangular frame measuring 120x120 cm with rubberized fabric stretched over it. In the middle of the structure there was a radio emitter, protruding for about ten centimeters. The antenna was connected to the electricity and was in an active state. An OTO specialist invited by Korzhakov confirmed the fears of the security department, assuring that Boris Nikolaevich’s inadequate condition was explained precisely by the impact of a high-frequency electromagnetic pulse on his body.
So for the first time in practice I became acquainted with a new class of threats - the impact on the human body of electromagnetic radiation of low power and different frequencies.

I am also pasting here Russian original (starting pg 175) for those who need it.

С первых дней своего существования новое подразделение столкнулось с рядом серьезных проблем. Дело в том, что в Советские годы у девятого управления КГБ СССР в плане определения, разработки и предотвращения различного спектра угроз в адрес высшего руководства страны был наработан богатейший теоре- тический и практический опыт. Ведь в случае возникновения оперативной необходимости на 9-тку работал весь штат КГБ СССР. А у отдела безопасности Верховного Совета РСФСР в бытность Б.Н. Ельцина его председателем таких возможностей практически не было, да и штат отдела насчитывал не более двадцати бывших сотрудников госбезопасности и правоохранительных органов без отсутствия соответствующего опыта, кроме А.В. Коржакова.
При этом угрозы порой возникали самые нестандартные, как раз одна из них и подтолкнула руководство 175 службы безопасности к изучению нетрадиционных воздействий на руководителей страны.
Так сложилось, что рабочий кабинет Председателя Верховного Совета находился на Краснопресненской набережной в Белом доме, охрана которого была поручена сотрудникам МВД. И вот вскоре, после занятия кабинета новым Председателем Верховного Совета разразился скандал, спровоцированный обнаружением сотрудниками отдела безопасности над кабинетом Б.Н. Ельцина целой комнаты, с подслушивающей спецаппаратурой. КГБ попытался выдать ее за аппаратуру защиты от несанкционированного съема информации из кабинета Бориса Николаевича, но приглашенные технические специалисты поставили все на свои места.
А спустя несколько недель Коржаков вдруг стал замечать, что как только Ельцин час-полтора поработает в своем кабинете, у него начинают фиксироваться в поведении элементы неадекватности: забывчивость, ответы невпопад, перескакивание с темы на тему, головные боли и общий дискомфорт, буквально гнавший его из кабинета. Но как только он покидал кабинет в течении получаса все здоровье восстанавливалось и он возвращался в свое нормальное состояние. Это обстоятельство наводило на мысль, что на председателя Верховного Совета осуществляется какое-то необычное внешнее воздействие. Чтобы проверить это предположение, было решено тщательно обыскать весь кабинет.
Весь кабинет внимательно осмотрели, особенно стеллажи с политической литературой. Оказалось, что предположение сотрудников безопасности оказалось верным. За книжными полками была обнаружена СВЧ антенна, которая представляла собой гибкий каркас прямоугольной формы размером 120Х120 см. с натянутой на него прорезиненной тканью. В середине конструкции находился радио излучатель, выступавший сантиметров на десять. Антенна была подключена к электросети и находилась в активном состоянии. Приглашенный Коржаковым специалист ОТО, подтвердил опасения отдела безопасности, заверив, что неадекватное состояние Бориса Николаевича объясняется именно воздействием на его организм высокочастотного электромагнитного импульса.
Так впервые я на практике познакомился с новым классом угроз – воздействием на человеческий организм электромагнитного излучения малой мощности и различной частоты.

More related reading: Tom Rogan on Patrushev and Havana syndrome connection

Origin story

My biggest frustration is that none of the books provided a reliable and consistent origin story. Buchanan claims that the US programs started because they found that the Soviets were studying it. The Russian compilation claims otherwise and never explains why the Soviet/Russian unit was formed and what preceded it.
Many name Puthoff as the originator but it's probably not the case. Several sources claim that Puthoff joined the SRI program that already existed because he did some experiments independently and could contribute.

Is it all true?

The Havana syndrome story alone and the rogue elements in KGB installing antennas in Yeltsin's room do not require anything supernatural. If someone found out how to irradiate the brain, it does not break today's traditional understanding of how the mind/brain works.
But the big question is, what's up with the psychic insights that could not have been random? What's up with the well-documented instances of psi insight and non-psi phenomena which is hard to explain with the modern model of mind, like terminal lucidity?
We know next to nothing about how the human mind works. Today's psychiatry today can do as much as the rest of the medical science could do in 19th century: turn off cognitive function, keeping the patient in a permanently altered state without addressing the core reason. Its core concepts are being disputed and dismantled one by one. Even schizophrenia is being disputed as a concept.
My opinion is similar to that of Jessica Utts: psi is real but not usable. It is not reliable, at best being a noisy channel. One of the students of Bob Monroe, Tom Campbell, formulated a "psi uncertainty principle": psi is designed as sort of "cheat codes" not for mainstream use.
Which is why the psychics can tell the truth and indeed tap into remote sources of information, but it is as luck-based as a day of a hunter gatherer looking for game to kill.
The same Joe McMoneagle of the Typhoon fame published a book with predictions; they are mostly off the mark.
Astrophysicist Rudy Schild of Edgar Mitchell's FREE Foundation suggested a dual model of human mind, which may explain it. In a way, it assumes the mind to be similar to a computer connected to the internet: large part of "software" (the conscious mind) runs locally, while the other part (the unconscious, which the psychics use) is connected to the larger network.

In December, I went to the Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend 2023 in San Francisco. I had a lot of fun talking to a bunch of weird and ambitious geeks about the glorious abundant technological future. Here are few things I learned about (with the caveat that this is mostly based on informal conversations with only basic fact-checking, not deep research):

Cellular reprogramming

Aging doesn’t only happen to your body: it happens at the level of individual cells. Over time, cells accumulate waste products and undergo epigenetic changes that are markers of aging.
But wait—when a baby is born, it has young cells, even though it grew out of cells that were originally from its older parents. That is, the egg and sperm cells might be 20, 30, or 40 years old, but somehow when they turn into a baby, they get reset to biological age zero. This process is called “reprogramming,” and it happens soon after fertilization.
It turns out that cell reprogramming can be induced by certain proteins, known as the Yamanaka factors, after their discoverer (who won a Nobel for this in 2012). Could we use those proteins to reprogram our own cells, making them youthful again?
Maybe. There is a catch: the Yamanaka factors not only clear waste out of cells, they also reset them to become stem cells. You do not want to turn every cell in your body into a stem cell. You don’t even want to turn a small number of them into stem cells: it can give you cancer (which kind of defeats the purpose of a longevity technology).
But there is good news: when you expose cells to the Yamanaka factors, the waste cleanup happens first, and the stem cell transformation happens later. If we can carefully time the exposure, maybe we can get the target effect without the damaging side effects.
This is tricky: different tissues respond on different timelines, so you can’t apply the treatment uniformly over the body. There are a lot of details to be worked out here. But it’s an intriguing line of research for longevity, and it’s one of the avenues being explored at Retro Bio, among other places. Here’s a Derek Lowe article with more info and references.

The BFG orbital launch system

If we’re ever going to have a space economy, it has to be a lot cheaper to launch things into space. Space Shuttle launches cost over $65,000/kg, and even the Falcon Heavy costs $1500/kg. Compare to shipping costs on Earth, which are only a few dollars per kilogram.
A big part of the high launch cost in traditional systems is the rocket, which is discarded with each launch. SpaceX is bringing costs down by making reusable rockets that land gently rather than crashing into the ocean, and by making very big rockets for economies of scale (Elon Musk has speculated that Starship could bring costs as low as $10/kg, although this is a ways off, since right now fuel costs alone are close to that amount). But what if we didn’t need a rocket at all? Rockets are pretty much our only option for propulsion in space, but what if we could give most of the impulse to the payload on Earth?
J. Storrs Hall has proposed the “space pier,” a runway 300 km long mounted atop towers 100 km tall. The payload takes an elevator 100 km up to the top of the tower, thus exiting the atmosphere and much of Earth’s gravity well. Then a linear induction motor accelerates it into orbit along the 300 km track. You could do this with a mere 10 Gs of acceleration, which is survivable by human passengers. Think of it like a Big Friendly Giant (BFG) picking up your payload and then throwing it into orbit.
Hall estimates that this could bring launch costs down to $10/kg, if the pier could be built for a mere $10 billion. The only tiny little catch with the space pier is that there is no technology in existence that could build it, and no construction material that a 100 km tower could be made of. Hall suggests that with “mature nanotechnology” we could build the towers out of diamond. OK. So, probably not going to happen this decade.
What can we do now, with today’s technology? Let’s drop the idea of using this for human passengers and just consider relatively durable freight. Now we can use much higher G-forces, which means we don’t need anything close to 300 km of distance to accelerate over. And, does it really have to be 100 km tall? Yes, it’s nice to start with an altitude advantage, and with no atmosphere, but both of those problems can be overcome with sufficient initial velocity. At this point we’re basically just talking about an enormous cannon (a very different kind of BFG).
This is what Longshot Space is doing. Build a big long tube in the desert. Put the payload in it, seal the end with a thin membrane, and pump the air out to create a vacuum. Then rapidly release some compressed gasses behind the payload, which bursts through the membrane and exits the tube at Mach 25.
One challenge with this is that a gas can only expand as fast as the speed of sound in that gas. In air this is, of course, a lot less than Mach 25. One thing that helps is to use a lighter gas, in which the speed of sound is higher, such as helium or (for the very brave) hydrogen. Another part of the solution is to give the payload a long, wedge-shaped tail. The expanding gasses push sideways on this tail, which through the magic of simple machines translates into a much faster push forwards. There’s a brief discussion and illustration of the pneumatics in this video.
Now, if you are trying to envision “big long tube in the desert”, you might be wondering: is the tube angled upwards or something? No. It is basically lying flat on the ground. It is expensive to build a long straight thing that points up: you have to dig a deep hole and/or build a tall tower. What about putting it on the side of a mountain, which naturally points up? Building things on mountains is also hard; in addition, mountains are special and nobody wants to give you one. It’s much easier to haul lots of materials into the middle of the desert; also there is lots of room out there and the real estate is cheap.
Next you might be wondering: if the tube is horizontal, isn’t it pointed in the wrong direction to get to space? I thought space was up? Well, yes. There are a few things going on here. One is that if you travel far enough in a straight line, the Earth will curve away from you and you will eventually find yourself in space. Another is that if you shape the projectile such that its center of pressure is in the right place relative to its center of mass, then it will naturally angle upward when it hits the atmosphere. Lastly, if you are trying to get into orbit, most of the velocity you need is actually horizontal anyway.
In fact, if and when you reach a circular orbit, you will find that all of your velocity is horizontal. This means that there is no way to get into orbit purely ballistically, with a single impulse imparted from Earth. Any satellite, for instance, launched via this system will need its own rocket propulsion in order to circularize the orbit once it reaches altitude (even leaving aside continual orbital adjustments during its service lifetime). But we’re now talking about a relatively small rocket with a small amount of fuel, not the big multi-stage things that you need to blast off from the surface. And presumably someday we will be delivering food, fuel, tools, etc. to space in packages that just need to be caught by whoever is receiving them.
Longshot estimates that this system, like Starship or the space pier, could get launch costs down to about $10/kg. This might be cheap enough that launch prices could be zero, subsidized by contracts to buy fuel or maintenance, in a space-age version of “give away the razor and sell the blades.” Not only would this business model help grow the space economy, it would also prove wrong all the economists who have been telling us for decades that “there’s no such thing as a free launch.”

Mars could be terraformed in our lifetimes

Terraforming a planet sounds like a geological process, and so I had sort of thought that it would require geological timescales, or if it could really be accelerated, at least a matter of centuries or so. You drop off some algae or something on a rocky planet, and then your distant descendants return one day to find a verdant paradise. So I was surprised to learn that major changes on Mars could, in principle, be made on a schedule much shorter than a single human lifespan.
Let’s back up. Mars is a real fixer-upper of a planet. Its temperature varies widely, averaging about −60º C; its atmosphere is thin and mostly carbon dioxide. This severely depresses its real estate values.
Suppose we wanted to start by significantly warming the planet. How do you do that? Let’s assume Mars’s orbit cannot be changed—I mean, we’re going to get in enough trouble with the Sierra Club as it is—so the total flux of solar energy reaching the planet is constant. What we can do is to trap a bit more of that energy on the planet, and prevent it from radiating out into space. In other words, we need to enhance Mars’s greenhouse effect. And the way to do that is to give it a greenhouse gas.
Wait, we just said that Mars’s atmosphere is mostly CO2, which is a notorious greenhouse gas, so why isn’t Mars warm already? It’s just not enough: the atmosphere is very thin (less than 1% of the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere), and what CO2 there is only provides about 5º of warming. We’re going to need to add more GHG.
What could it be? Well, for starters, given the volumes required, it should be composed of elements that already exist on Mars. With the ingredients we have, what can we make?
Could we get more CO2 in the atmosphere? There is more CO2 on/under the surface, in frozen form, but even that is not enough for the task. We need something else.
What about CFCs? As a greenhouse gas, they are about four orders of magnitude more efficient than CO2, so we’d need a lot less of them. However, they require fluorine, which is very rare in the Martian soil, and we’d still need about 100 gigatons of it. This is not encouraging.
One thing Mars does have a good amount of is metal, such as iron, aluminum, and magnesium. Now metals, you might be thinking, are not generally known as greenhouse gases. But small particles of conductive metal, with the right size and shape, can act as one. A recent paper found through simulation that “nanorods” about 9 microns long, half the wavelength of the infrared thermal radiation given off by a planet, would scatter that radiation back to the surface (Ansari, Kite, Ramirez, Steele, and Mohseni, “Warming Mars with artificial aerosol appears to be feasible”—no preprint online, but this poster seems to represent earlier work).
Suppose we aim to warm the planet by about 30º C, enough to melt surface water in the polar regions during the summer, and bring Mars much closer to Earth temperatures. AKRSM’s simulation says that we would need to put about 400 mg/m3 of nanorods into the Martian sky, an efficiency (in warming per unit mass) more than 2000x greater than previously proposed methods.
The particles would settle out of the atmosphere slowly, at less than 1/100 the rate of natural Mars dust, so only about 30 liters/sec of them would need to be released continuously. If we used iron, this would require mining a million cubic meters of iron per year—quite a lot, but less than 1% of what we do on Earth. And the particles, like other Martian dust, would be lifted high in the atmosphere by updrafts, so they could be conveniently released from close to the surface.
Wouldn’t metal nanoparticles be potentially hazardous to breathe? Yes, but this is already a problem from Mars’s naturally dusty atmosphere, and the nanorods wouldn’t make it significantly worse. (However, this will have to be solved somehow if we’re going to make Mars habitable.)
Kite told me that if we started now, given the capabilities of Starship, we could achieve the warming in a mere twenty years. Most of that time is just getting equipment to Mars, mining the iron, manufacturing the nanorods, and then waiting about a year for Martian winds to mix them throughout the atmosphere. Since Mars has no oceans to provide thermal inertia, the actual warming after that point only takes about a month.
Kite is interested in talking to people about the design of a the nanorod factory. He wants to get a size/weight/power estimate and an outline design for the factory, to make an initial estimate of how many Starship landings would be needed. Contact him at [edwin.kite@gmail.com](mailto:edwin.kite@gmail.com).
I have not yet gotten Kite and Longshot together to figure out if we can shoot the equipment directly to Mars using one really enormous space cannon.
***
Thanks to Reason, Mike Grace, and Edwin Kite for conversations and for commenting on a draft of this essay. Any errors or omissions above are entirely my own.
Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/vision-weekend-2023-writeup

December 17
Save Ontario Science Centre Rally
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/save-ontario-science-centre-rally-tickets-774382949247?aff=ebdsshother
Author Talk: Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World with Matthew Biggs @ TBG
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/author-talk-garden-exploring-the-horticultural-world-with-matthew-biggs-tickets-748747262217
Opening weekend for skating @ The Bentway
https://thebentway.ca/event/winter-skating/
Holiday Brunch @ HOTHOUSE w/Meetup
https://www.meetup.com/toronto-movies-and-social-group/events/296349357/
Christmas Lights of Toronto: The Beaches history walk
https://www.meetup.com/the-history-of-parkdale/events/296183492/
Snowflake Walk at High Park Zoo @ High Park Zoo. $10 per family. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/2023-fhpz-snowflake-walk-presented-by-friends-of-high-park-zoo-tickets-748028933677
Horse racing @ Woodbine. Free parking and admission
https://woodbine.com/
Bata Shoe Museum free admission all day
https://batashoemuseum.ca/visit-us/
McMichael Gallery free admission all day
https://mcmichael.com/general-admission/
$20 unlimited evening bowling @ Splitsville
https://splitsville.ca/special-events-bowling-packages/
Parkdale Sunday Market
https://theparkdalehall.ca/new/tag/sunday-market/
Trivia @ 99 Bottles
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/trivia-sunday-afternoons-at-99-bottles-tickets-558319066357
Die Hard @ Fox Theatre
https://www.foxtheatre.ca/schedule/
Cyrus International Film Festival @ Innis Town Hall
https://cift.ca/
$5 each. A Christmas Story/Die Hard @ Imagine Cinema Carlton
https://imaginecinemas.com/cinema/carlton/
$5 Black Christmas @ Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema
https://hotdocs.ca/whats-on/films/black-christmas
The Last Boy Scout @ Revue Cinema
https://prod3.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/list.aspx?epguid=9416d3bf-ad16-479c-9d40-f0abda7cb4e9&
Stars Wars Holiday Special @ Drake Underground
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-goodtimes-present-the-star-wars-holiday-special-tickets-746203764547
TSO - Messiah @ Roy Thomson Hall
https://roythomsonhall.mhrth.com/
Jenie Thai @ Cameron House
https://www.thecameron.com/shows
Happy Sundays @ The Baby G
http://thebabyg.com/
The Menzingers @ Danforth Music Hall
https://thedanforth.com/
Cormega @ Velvet Underground
https://thevelvet.ca/events/
Apricity, The Masquerade, Crisis Ctrl Club, Android Meme, Gypsy Brydge @ The Rockpile
https://therockpile.ca/event/apricity-the-masquerade-crisis-ctrl-club-android-meme-gypsy-brydge/
Tafelmusik presents: singalong Messiah @ Koerner Hall
https://www.rcmusic.com/events-and-performances
La Gratitud @ Rivoli
https://www.rivolitoronto.com/shows
Samba Holiday Edition @ Lula Lounge
https://www.lula.ca/calendar
Majid Jordan @ History
https://www.historytoronto.com/
QSO Roasted Chestnuts @ Opera House
https://theoperahousetoronto.com/
Baroque Brilliance – the Spirit of Christmas
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/baroque-brilliance-the-spirit-of-christmas-tickets-748173556247
Karaoke @ Capone's
https://caponestoronto.com/entertainment/
Karaoke @ Toby's
https://www.instagram.com/jasonrolland/?hl=en
Karaoke @ Tail of the Junction
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=391854129942973&set=gm.10168379021990445&idorvanity=28317670444
$10 unlimited travel on GO Transit
https://www.gotransit.com/en/partners-and-promotions/weekend-passes-with-go
Casino bus to Niagara Falls
https://safewaytours.net/en/casino-tours/
Bus to Casino Rama
https://www.casinorama.com/vip-coach/
Hollywood Suite . Free preview until Jan 5
https://hollywoodsuite.ca/
ZWILLING CANADA WAREHOUSE SALE @ International Centre. Until Dec 17
https://www.zwilling.com/ca/zwilling-warehouse-sale.html
Winter Blooms Festival & Holiday Market @ Toronto Botanical Gardens. Free admission. Until Dec 17
https://torontobotanicalgarden.ca/enjoy/special-events/winter-blooms/
Allan Gardens Conservatory Winter Flower Show. Until Jan 9. Free
https://gardendistrict.ca/garden-district-residents-association/143-annual-allan-gardens-conservatory-winter-flower-show
Holiday Trees @ High Park Zoo. Free admission. Until Jan 1
https://www.highparkzoo.ca/holiday-trees-at-high-park-zoo-2/
Tranzac Holiday Gift Fair on Sat Dec 16 - Sun Dec 17 @ Tranzac. Free admission. https://www.instagram.com/tranzacholidaygiftfair
The Christmas Story @ Church of the Holy Trinity. Annually since 1938, choir and organ music. Free admission but tickets required and donations encouraged. Until Dec 24
https://www.thechristmasstory.ca/
2023 TORONTO GINGERBREAD FESTIVAL. Until Dec 18
https://yongestclair.ca/gingerbread2023/
Distillery Winter Village. Until Jan 7
https://www.thedistillerywintervillage.com/
Holiday Fair @ Mel Lastman Square. Until Dec 23
https://fairinthesquare.ca/
Winter Market at Evergreen Brick Works @ Evergreen Brick Works. PWYC. https://www.evergreen.ca/evergreen-brick-work/events/the-winter-market/
BlogTO events
https://www.blogto.com/events/
TodoToronto events
https://www.todotoronto.com/
Bruce Dow - Beautiful Things performance @ Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. $25. https://buddiesinbadtimes.com/event/bruce-dow-beautiful-things/
Six the Musical . On until Dec 17. $39 rush tickets may be available
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/mirvish-toronto-39-rush-tickets-new-mirvish-musical-six-2641388/
Free rentals @ Bay St Video
http://www.baystreetvideo.com/films_for_free.php
Free Christmas trees for those in need
https://www.reddit.com/toronto/s/OE35jmjpwr
Free walks w/Toronto Greeters
https://internationalgreeter.org/destinations/toronto
Downtown Toronto Free Tour
https://www.meetup.com/downtowntorontofreetours/events/
Disney Animation: Immersive Experience Toronto
https://tickets.lighthouseimmersive.com/toronto/?#/
Toronto Public Health launches ‘Fight the Flu & COVID-19’ vaccination campaign
https://www.toronto.ca/news/toronto-public-health-launches-fight-the-flu-covid-19-vaccination-campaign/
Registration continues for JAM sports leagues
https://toronto.jamsports.com/index.php
Indoor swimming pools
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/recreation/swimming/
YMCA free 7-day trial pass
https://trythey.ymcagta.org
GoodLife Fitness free 7-day trial pass
https://try.goodlifefitness.com/raptors?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MSLE-Partnership&utm_source=Partner
Ontario Legislature. Free tours (M-F)
https://www.ola.org/en/visit-learn/tours
The Power Plant. Free admission Wed-Sun
https://www.thepowerplant.org/visit
Toronto History Museums free admission
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/history-art-culture/museums/
Presto discounts. Various attractions, shows, restaurants, etc
https://www.prestocard.ca/en/about/presto-perks
Self guided Discovery Tours
https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/sidewalk-tours-wayfinding/self-guided-tours/discovery-tours/
Volunteer to save Ontario Place
https://www.progresstoronto.ca/volunteer-to-save-ontario-place
Volunteer w/Bike Brigade
https://www.bikebrigade.ca/
Fetish Fantasy @ M4
https://clubm4.com/events/
Swordplay @ Oasis
https://members.oasisaqualounge.com/sessions/new
Nubian Show @ Yuk Yuks
https://www.yukyuks.com/toronto
Matt Bergman @ Absolute Comedy . Until Dec 17
https://www.absolutecomedy.ca/toronto
Troy Bond @ The Great Hall
https://thegreathall.ca/calenda
Random Forest Comedy Album Taping @ Comedy Bar Toronto Bloor
https://comedybar.ca/shows/random-forest-a-shawn-hou-comedy-hour
JOKER’S WILD: AN XXX ROAST BATTLE SHOW
https://comedybar.ca/shows/jokers-wild-an-xxx-roast-battle-show
Shticks in the 6ix Comedy Show on Sun Dec 17 @ Tallboys Craft Beer House. $10 admission. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shticks-in-the-6ix-comedy-show-tickets-768958965967
101 Holiday Movie Moments comedy theatre @ Comedy Bar. Features Ann Pornell of the Great Canadian Baking Show. $25 admission. Until Dec 31
https://comedybar.ca/shows/101-holiday-movie-moments
Holiday! An Improvised Musical - Running Dec 13-17th at The Assembly Theatre
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/holiday-an-improvised-musical-tickets-751804907717
Gila Münster's 5th Annual 8 Gays of Channukah Queer Jewish variety show
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/gila-munsters-5th-annual-8-gays-of-channukah-queer-jewish-variety-show-tickets-692018795847
50% off wings @ Crown and Dragon. Drink purchase required
https://www.crownanddragon.com/
$27.99 AYCE pork ribs @ St Louis. Ends today
https://www.stlouiswings.com/ribsanity/
$25 Endless AYCE Shrimp @ Red Lobster
https://www.redlobster.ca/menu/specials
Birthday freebies. Denny's , Marble Slab, and more
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/birthday-freebies-version-2017-2022-1719925/
​

FRIDAY

• Downtown Raleigh Tree Lighting, Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts - Lichtin Plaza, Raleigh
• NC Chinese Lantern Festival, Koka Booth Amphiteare, Cary
• Moonlight in the Garden, J. C. Raulston Arboretum, Raleigh
• Third Friday, Downtown, Durham
• The Monti: Dirty Little Secrets, Carolina Theatre, Durham
• NC State Men’s Basketball vs. Charleston Southern, PNC Arena, Raleigh
• UNC Men's Basketball, Dean E. Smith Center, Chapel Hill
• Bush, DPAC, Durham
• Goodnights Special Event: Tip “T.I.” Harris featuring Haha Mafia, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• Jurassic Quest, Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh
• An American in Paris, Meymandi Concert Hall at Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh
• Carolina Ballet presents Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh
• Moses Storm, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Outdoor Adventures, Fred Fletcher Park, Raleigh
• Room 861 at Goodnights: Andrea Jin, Room 861 at Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• Skate The Square at Fenton, Fenton, Cary
• Spaced Angel w/ AUGURS, Saturnalias, The Pour House Music Hall & Record Shop, Raleigh
• The ComedyWorx Show, ComedyWorx, Raleigh
• Waverly Place Christmas Tree Lighting, Waverly Place, Cary
• 32nd Annual Pasca Pottery Studio Show and Sale, Outdoors under Tents in American Village, Durham
• St. Nick's: Raleigh Jolly Pop-Up House, Art of Yess!, Raleigh
• King Nobuyoshi Godwin: Third Friday Opening Reception, 5 Points Gallery, Durham
• Skate The Square, Fenton, Cary
• Durham Community Incubator Dinner, American Underground, Durham
• Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope & Spaceballs, The Carolina Theatre of Durham, Durham
• Wailin’ Storms / Tooth / Scrape, The Pinhook, Durham
• UNC Faculty Jazz with Special Guest, Rufus Reid, Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham
• Vincent Neil Emerson with Nat Myers, Motorco Music Hall, Durham
• Jess Klein & the Berlin Brothers Record Release Show, The Blue Note Grill, Durham
• AYO VIP PRESENTS: INTO THE VAULT, Rubies on Five Points, Durham
• Carrboro Film Festival, ArtsCenter, Carrboro
• WXYC Decades Dance - Pump Up the Jam, Cat's Cradle, Carrboro
• Carlos (Movie Showing), The Cary Theater, Cary

​
SATURDAY

• NHL Carolina Hurricanes vs. Pittsburgh Penguins, PNC Arena, Raleigh
• Jerry Seinfeld, DPAC, Durham
• 79th Annual ABC11 Raleigh Christmas Parade, Downtown, Raleigh
• 28th Annual American Indian Heritage Celebration, North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh
• Annual Christmas Tree Lighting Celebration at North Hills, Commons of North Hills, Raleigh
• Lighting of the Tree at Lafayette Village, Lafayette Village, Raleigh
• Light the Square, Fenton Square, Cary
• Skate The Square at Fenton, Fenton, Cary
• THE RINK presented by UNC Health, Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh
• Roshambo Holiday Market, Transfer Co. Food Hall, Raleigh
• Art Bash, Artspace, Raleigh
• Geek and Grub Market (Steampunk Edition), Mordecai Historic Park, Raleigh
• 2023 Quail Hollow Neighborhoods ArtWalk, Quail Hollow Neighborhood, Raleigh
• NC Chinese Lantern Festival, Koka Booth Amphiteare, Cary
• Harvest Fest, Good Hope Farm, Cary
• Goodnights Special Event: Tip “T.I.” Harris featuring Haha Mafia, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• 6LACK - Since I Have A Lover Tour, The Ritz, Raleigh
• Steve Treviño – America’s Favorite Husband Tour, Carolina Theatre, Durham
• An American in Paris, Meymandi Concert Hall at Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh
• Busy Vintage Pop Up, Raleigh Iron Works, Raleigh
• Caitlin Krisko & The Broadcast X Jamie McLean Band, The Pour House Music Hall & Record Shop, Raleigh
• Carolina Ballet presents Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh
• Dix Park History Hike, Dorothea Dix Park, Raleigh
• Family Volunteer Day, Marbles Kids Museum, Raleigh
• Jump for the Children II, Hunt Horse Complex at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, Raleigh
• Moses Storm, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Room 861 at Goodnights: Andrea Jin, Room 861 at Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• The Cocktail Classic, The Exchange Raleigh, Raleigh
• 32nd Annual Pasca Pottery Studio Show and Sale, Outdoors under Tents in American Village, Durham
• Janice Carissa, Baldwin Auditorium, Durham
• PARADOX: A 90's Rave Experience, The Fruit, Durham
• DECIDUUS ft Auntie Boy, Durham Fruit, Durham
• UNC Women's Basketball, Carmichael Arena, Chapel Hill
• Chapel Hill High School Tiger CHill Carnival, Chapel Hill High School, Chapel Hill
• Carrboro Film Festival, ArtsCenter, Carrboro
• Dixie Gun & Knife Show, NC State Fairgrounds- Jim Graham building, Raleigh
• Marcus Anderson, Wake Forest Renaissance Centre, Wake Forest
• Saint Augustine's University Men's Basketball vs. Belmont Abbey College, Emery Gymnasium, Raleigh
• NCCU Football vs Delaware State University, O'Kelly-Riddick Stadium, Durham
• Messiah Sing-Along, Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham
• Tails at Twilight - Animal Protection Society of Durham’s Well-Groomed Event, Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham
• A Nerdy Drag / Burlesque Show!, The Pinhook, Durham
• Jambalaya Soul Slam Annual Women's Poetry Slam, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham
• Depths of Wikipedia, Motorco Music Hall, Durham
• Kate McGarry & Keith Ganz w/Ariel Pocock, Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham

​
SUNDAY

• Winter Festival, City Market, Raleigh
• Straight No Chaser, DPAC, Durham
• Ashley Gavin, Carolina Theatre, Durham
• NC Chinese Lantern Festival, Koka Booth Amphiteare, Cary
• Downtown Cary Park Opening Day, Downtown Cary Park (Opening Fall 2023), Cary
• Moses Storm, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Carolina Ballet presents Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh
• Bach Cantata Series: A New Heaven and a New Earth, Duke University Chapel, Durham
• Pop Swap Fest, Durham Central Park, Durham
• Fall Arts on Market, Southern Village Green, Chapel Hill
• Carrboro Film Festival, ArtsCenter, Carrboro
• Electric Frankenstein / Night Night / The Temp Agency, KINGS, Raleigh
• Cardinal's Inn Presents, The Fall Bawl at The Night Rider, Raleigh
• Ryan Montbleau Band w/ Brooks Forsyth, The Pour House Music Hall & Record Shop, Raleigh
• Skate The Square at Fenton, Fenton, Cary
• THE RINK presented by UNC Health, Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh

​
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# Today In Phishstory - November 2nd Brought to you by tiph-bot. Beep.
All data extracted via The Phishnet API.

Phish

Phish, Friday 11/02/2018 (5 years ago) MGM Grand, Las Vegas, NV, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 2018 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Cavern , Beauty of My Dreams , If I Could , Weigh , Sand , Back on the Train , Martian Monster , Mercury > Suzy Greenberg
Set 2 : Soul Planet > Down with Disease ¹ > Guyute , Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley > Light > Slave to the Traffic Light
Encore : Hold Your Head Up > Bike > Hold Your Head Up , Good Times Bad Times
1 Unfinished.
Jamchart Notes:
Mercury - The first segment consists of strong and varied "Mercury" style jamming, highlighted by a hypnotic groove in the 13th minute. After regrouping at 15:30 the song's theme returns but in a major key and propels the jam to a peak and a bit of echoey play at the tail end before > "Suzy".
Show Notes:
if I Could was played for the first time since July 29, 2014 (159 shows). DWD included In the Summertime and Oye Como Va teases from Trey and was unfinished. Trey quoted Everything is Hollow in Sneakin' Sally. The first HYHU contained a The Final Hurrah quote. Bike was played for the first time since September 4, 2015 (113 shows).
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Sunday 11/02/2014 (9 years ago) MGM Grand, Las Vegas, NV, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 2014 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Runaway Jim , Foam , Mexican Cousin , Ocelot , Sugar Shack , A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing , Halfway to the Moon , Bathtub Gin > Free , Walls of the Cave
Set 2 : Chalk Dust Torture ¹ > Piper > Theme From the Bottom > Wombat , David Bowie , The Line , You Enjoy Myself ²
Encore : The Moma Dance > Slave to the Traffic Light
1 Unfinished. 2 Trey used his megaphone siren; all four band members were on percussion.
Jamchart Notes:
Bathtub Gin - A second and rocking section of strong "Type I" jamming helps to strengthen and elevate the build up and peak, giving this solid version a significant boost.
Free - Strong "Type I" version with lots of amusing quoting from the previous night's "Martian Monster."
Chalk Dust Torture - After some "CDT"-like musings, the jam shifts after 6:00 to melodic major mode playing. At 9:30, the jam moves to lower octave, funky and semi-dissonant play, which continues until 13:40 when the upbeat theme returns, starts to boil over, then recedes into "Piper."
Piper - A solid and "complete" version, breaking first to some growly, echo-filled play, which settles to a rhythmic foundation for Page and Trey to play off. At 7:45, the jam brightens in tone, but remains low intensity, then mellows further with quiet musings led by Page.
You Enjoy Myself - While there's no Trey-led jam nor even a Bass & Drums section, the full band contributes, especially Page, to a raging improvisation that culminates with everyone on drums before the vocal jam concludes the festivities.
Show Notes:
Mexican Cousin was played for the first time since June 19, 2012 (110 shows). Page teased Rhapsody In Blue at the end of Halfway to the Moon. Free, Walls of the Cave, Bowie, and the YEM vocal jam contained Martian Monster quotes. Chalk Dust was unfinished and ended with Fish teasing The Wedge. Toward the end of the YEM jam, Trey picked up his megaphone and began using the siren on it as he ran around the stage. Mike joined him, and Trey held the megaphone up to Mike's bass. Mike then began playing his fight bell with drum sticks while Trey went to the drums and played along with Fish. Finally, Mike and Page joined in, so that all four were playing on Fish's kit. After Page thanked the audience and crew, Mike teased The Load-Out.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Saturday 11/02/2013 (10 years ago) Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, NJ, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 2013 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Wilson > Rift , Ocelot , Water in the Sky > Sample in a Jar , Funky Bitch > 46 Days , Theme From the Bottom , Yarmouth Road > Limb By Limb , Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove
Set 2 : Down with Disease ¹ > Piper > Roggae > Waves > Tweezer > Julius > Backwards Down the Number Line > Character Zero
Encore : Sleeping Monkey > Tweezer Reprise
1 Lyric changed to "swinging on my bush." Unfinished.
Jamchart Notes:
Theme From the Bottom - As a standard "Theme" jam draws to a close, it morphs into a jam on the "Theme From Shaft" with amusing banter from Trey and Fish. Some good funky jamming follows the banter before returning to "Theme" to end.
Down with Disease - The jam breaks into a good percussive and rocking groove, then it lightens and brightens, re-energizes, and -> to "Piper."
Roggae - A delicate and beautifully played version with a dreamy quality to it, but which also builds to a powerful peak. > to "Waves."
Tweezer - Very repetitive, melodic, spirited, funky jam... check. this. OUT!
Show Notes:
Prior to the start of the first set, Trey brought out a jack-o'-lantern with the Wilson logo carved into it and set it down before beginning Wilson. Theme contained a funk jam with quotes of the Theme from Shaft ("Who's the Chuck Norris-looking private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks?"), and banter about Fish's least favorite and second-least favorite presidents ("Bush"), and favorite beer ("Busch"). DWD contained teases of Tears of a Clown and Fuego by Mike, lyrics changed to "swinging on my bush," and was unfinished. Trey teased the Odd Couple Theme in Tweezer and Page teased Rhapsody in Blue in Tweezer Reprise.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Monday 11/02/1998 (25 years ago) The “E” Center, West Valley City, UT, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1998 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Tube -> Drowned -> Jesus Just Left Chicago , Driver ¹ , Bittersweet Motel ¹ , Limb By Limb , Wading in the Velvet Sea > Sample in a Jar
Set 2 : Down with Disease , The Mango Song > The Moma Dance , You Enjoy Myself , Harpua ² > Speak to Me ³ -> Breathe ³ > On The Run ³ , Time ³ > The Great Gig in the Sky > Money ³ > Us and Them ³ -> Any Colour You Like ³ -> Brain Damage ³ -> Eclipse ³ > Harpua
Encore : Smells Like Teen Spirit ³
1 Trey on acoustic guitar. 2 Narration picked up where December 6, 1996 Harpua ended; Jimmy hitched a ride from Vegas to Salt Lake City and the driver was playing Dark Side of the Moon. 3 Phish debut.
Jamchart Notes:
Tube - A good mix of funk and ambient elements in the first jam, but the jam reprise is where the band really shows their jamming acumen. Beginning with a darkeambient feel, Trey gradually increases the intensity and leads the group into some jubilant jamming before the -> to "Drowned".
Drowned - Shredfest.
Jesus Just Left Chicago - -> in from "Drowned." Contrasting with 7/19/98, this version has a genuine blues sentiment to it, enhanced by Page's organ playing.
Limb By Limb - Beautiful, serene playing. At about 8:00, the jam amps down into delicate, contemplative playing.
You Enjoy Myself - Exceptionally long opening segment (11:30!).
Show Notes:
Trey teased San-Ho-Zay in Drowned. Driver was dedicated to "Wendy and Lisa," and Bittersweet Motel was dedicated to the folks at The Dead Goat Saloon (the site of an open mic night appearance by Trey and Mike one night earlier). Driver and Bittersweet Motel featured Trey on acoustic guitar. Bittersweet Motel also contained a Free Bird-style ending. Moma Dance included Monkey Man (Rolling Stones) teases. The Harpua narration picked up where the December 6, 1996 Harpua ended; Jimmy hitched a ride from Vegas to Salt Lake City and the driver was playing Dark Side of the Moon . Dark Side was reportedly chosen the day of the show, partially based on sluggish ticket sales for this one venue compared to the rest of the tour. All the Dark Side songs were Phish debuts except for Great Gig (last played July 5, 1994, or 332 shows), although the original album version of Speak to Me was piped through the P.A. on Halloween, 1994 and Breathe was jammed on October 25, 1995. Smells Like Teen Spirit was also a Phish debut.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Saturday 11/02/1996 (27 years ago) Coral Sky Amphitheater, West Palm Beach, FL, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1996 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Ya Mar ¹ , Julius ¹ , Fee ² -> Taste ¹ , Cavern ¹ > Stash ¹ , The Lizards ¹ , Free ¹ , Johnny B. Goode ¹
Set 2 : Crosseyed and Painless ¹ -> Run Like an Antelope , Waste ¹ , Harry Hood ¹ > A Day in the Life ¹ , Sweet Adeline
Encore : Funky Bitch ³
1 Karl Perazzo on percussion. 2 Karl Perazzo on percussion. Trey sang verses through megaphone. 3 Karl Perazzo on percussion, Butch Trucks on drums, Fish on Trey's percussion rack.
Jamchart Notes:
Ya Mar - Karl Perazzo on percussion. Great version with a "tropical" feel.
Fee - Karl Perazzo on percussion. -> to "Taste."
Crosseyed and Painless - With Karl Perazzo on percussion. One of the most energetic and exciting jams in Phish's career.
Run Like an Antelope - Karl Perazzo on percussion. -> in from a 20+ minute "C&P.;" Straightforward but an intense and spirited version.
Harry Hood - Karl Perazzo on percussion. Wonderfully celebratory "Hood" in which Trey hits on a cool riff at 9:45 and Page is rock solid.
Funky Bitch - Extended improvisational version with Karl Perazzo.
Show Notes:
Karl Perazzo sat in on percussion for the entire show. Trey sang the verses of Fee through a megaphone. Mike repeatedly teased the bass line of Dave's Energy Guide in the C&P jam and then Trey very briefly teased it as well. The lyric "Norton Charlton Heston" replaced "Marco Esquandolas" in Antelope. Butch Trucks joined the band on drums for the encore while Fish played Trey's percussion rack. Portions of this performance were released to the syndicated radio program The Album Network . This show was released as the Coral Sky DVD in 2010 and is available as a download from L ivePhish .
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Wednesday 11/02/1994 (29 years ago) Bangor Auditorium, Bangor, ME, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1994 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Suzy Greenberg , Foam , If I Could > Maze , Guyute , Stash , Scent of a Mule , While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Set 2 : Halley's Comet > Tweezer > The Mango Song > Axilla (Part II) , Possum , The Lizards , Sample in a Jar
Encore : The Old Home Place ¹ , Foreplay/Long Time ¹ , Tweezer Reprise
1 Acoustic.
Jamchart Notes:
Foam - From a show loaded with improvisation ("Tweezer," "Possum"), this version includes moments of uncharacteristic dissonance, and unusual chord progressions and melodic content, particularly in the build-up, which is scorching.
Maze - For a show filled with improvisational versions (see "Tweezer," "Possum," "Foam"), it should come as no surprise that this "Maze" is also both inspired and exploratory. It's also just insanely loaded up with tension, Tension, TENSION!
Stash - An unexpected and largely upbeat groove emerges from the typically chaotic jam for this time period.
Tweezer - Version from "A Live One." A "type II" version that is "all over the map" and "off the charts" (despite being on this one).
Possum - Must-Hear stormy exploratory jam with a descending melodic theme in parts, several sections that challenge the limits of standard "Possum," and "I'm A Man" (Spencer Davis Group) teases in the intro.
Show Notes:
The Old Home Place and Foreplay/Long Time were performed acoustic. While Mike tuned up for Foreplay/Long Time, Trey talked about the fact that the Bangor Auditorium and Nectar's are both on Route 2, so the band had been playing on that road for eleven years. This version of Tweezer appears on A Live One . Trey teased Stairway to Heaven in Suzy Greenberg and Possum contained I'm a Man (Spencer Davis Group) teases. The second Old Home Place in the soundcheck was acoustic.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Saturday 11/02/1991 (32 years ago) Lory Student Center Theatre, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1991 Fall Tour
Set 1 : Suzy Greenberg , The Curtain > Llama , Reba , Paul and Silas , Foam > Bouncing Around the Room , Colonel Forbin's Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird > Possum
Set 2 : Golgi Apparatus , Run Like an Antelope , The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday , Sparkle , Guelah Papyrus , Walk Away , The Landlady , Runaway Jim , You Enjoy Myself ¹
Encore : Contact , Big Black Furry Creature from Mars
1 Vocal jam included the themes "Big Poop Slide" and "Step in the Pile."
Show Notes:
The YEM vocal jam included the themes "Big Poop Slide" and "Step in the Pile."
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Friday 11/02/1990 (33 years ago) Glenn Miller Ballroom, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1990 Tour
Set 1 : Golgi Apparatus , The Landlady > Bouncing Around the Room > Divided Sky , The Sloth , Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove , Esther > Cavern , The Asse Festival > Possum ¹ -> Buried Alive ¹ -> Possum ²
Set 2 : Suzy Greenberg , Colonel Forbin's Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird , My Sweet One , Foam , You Enjoy Myself , The Lizards , I Didn't Know ³ , David Bowie
Encore : Lawn Boy > La Grange
1 Charlie Chan and I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart signals. 2 Charlie Chan and Oom Pa Pa signals. 3 Fish on trombone.
Jamchart Notes:
Possum - "Possum" -> "Buried Alive" -> "Possum." Great song pairing and an excellent, improvisational, and fiery jam.
Buried Alive - -> in from "Possum." "Buried Alive" is played in the intro. Awesome combination and one of the best "Possums" ever. -> back to "Possum."
Possum - -> in from "Buried Alive," which is played in the intro. The jam in this "Possum" is awesome, and the "Buried Alive" sandwich is just the icing on the cake.
You Enjoy Myself - Very good pre-'91 jam segment.
David Bowie - Tease-fest intro (see Setlist). The jam itself is pretty ripping and gets beyond "Bowie" with great tension building, nasty guitar licks from Trey, and teases or little jams on "Rocky Mountain Way," "DEG," "Fluffhead," and "Wipe Out." Released on Live Bait 6.
Show Notes:
An emcee announced before the show that Phish would not be performing since they broke up in the dressing room beforehand. Instead, he announced that the show would be performed by "Phish 2000." Trey teased Buried Alive in Landlady. Possum contained two Charlie Chan signals as well as I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart and Oom Pa Pa signals, while Buried Alive also contained Charlie Chan and I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart signals. My Sweet One contained Mockingbird teases. I Didn't Know featured Fish on trombone. The Bowie intro featured a medley of mostly songs played earlier in the show: Possum, Fly Famous Mockingbird, Forbin's, Divided Sky, Landlady, Mike's Song, The Asse Festival, Lizards, Foam, Harry Hood, and Makisupa. Bowie also included Fire On the Bayou and Wipe Out teases from Mike.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Thursday 11/02/1989 (34 years ago) Memorial Union Building, Durham, NH, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1989 Tour
Set 1 : Bathtub Gin , Foam , Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove , Fee > The Curtain > Reba , Split Open and Melt , Esther > Good Times Bad Times
Set 2 : The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony > Golgi Apparatus , You Enjoy Myself > Kung , Rhombus Narration > Divided Sky , McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters > Who Do? We Do! > AC/DC Bag > My Sweet One > Highway to Hell
Jamchart Notes:
You Enjoy Myself - "LOCK IT" VJ, segue into "Kung."
McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters - In Fall '89, the band was re-tooling "Fluffhead," and for a period tacked the "Who Do? We Do!" section onto the back end of "McGrupp." This date is a good example, and the band nicely rocks along with Page in "McGrupp" proper.
Who Do? We Do! - For a brief period, this section of "Fluffhead" was added to the ending of "McGrupp." This show features a good example of the "McGrupp"/"Who Do? We Do!" combination.
Show Notes:
The Rhombus Narration contained a Green Grass and High Tides (Outlaws) quote. Mike's Song was dedicated to Matt Hawke. The band extended happy birthday wishes to "Tina" before Esther. This show was sponsored by the UNH Outing Club.
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, 1985-11-02 Slade Hall, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/phish-november-02-1985-slade-hall-university-of-vermont-burlington-vt-usa.html
Tour: 1985 Tour
Show Notes:

Trey Anastasio

Trey Anastasio, 2017-11-02 Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, CA, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2017-barker-hangar-santa-monica-usa.html
Tour: Not Part of a Tour
Show Notes: This acoustic performance was part of the 2017 Spirit Of Life Gala honoring Coran Capshaw. Miss You was dedicated to Chip Hooper, Phish’s booking agent who died in 2016. Dave Matthews, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Joseph also performed.
Trey Anastasio Band, 2015-11-02 Warner Brothers Studios Stage 15, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2015-warner-brothers-studios-stage-15-los-angeles-ca-usa.html
Tour: Not Part of a Tour
Show Notes: Trey Anastasio Band was the musical guest on Conan. The episode first aired on November 18, 2015.
Trey Anastasio Band, 2006-11-02 New Daisy Theatre, Memphis, TN, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2006-new-daisy-theatre-memphis-tn-usa.html
Tour: TAB - Fall 2006 Tour
Show Notes: Before Push On, Trey noted that his friend Mary (from the song) was in the audience. Heavy Things was also played for Mary, as it too is about her. In keeping with the “Mary” theme, Trey repeatedly teased Mary Had a Little Lamb before Heavy Things. Trey teased San-Ho-Zay in Money, Love and Change.
Trey Anastasio Band, 2005-11-02 The Orpheum Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2005-the-orpheum-theatre-minneapolis-mn-usa.html
Tour: TAB - 70 Volt Parade Fall 2005 Tour
Show Notes: Tea Leaf Green opened. This setlist is unconfirmed as recordings of the performance do not circulate. Trey performed "Driver" through "Wilson" solo acoustic.
Trey Anastasio Band, 2002-11-02 Pompano Beach Amphitheater, Pompano Beach, FL, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2002-pompano-beach-amphitheater-pompano-beach-fl-usa.html
Tour: TAB - The Dectet Fall 2002 Tour
Show Notes: This version of "Magilla" appears on the live Plasma CD.
Oysterhead, 2001-11-02 Aragon Ballroom, Chicago, IL, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/trey-anastasio-november-02-2001-aragon-ballroom-chicago-il-usa.html
Tour: Oysterhead - The Grand Pecking Order
Show Notes: Drums and Tuba opened.

Mike Gordon

Mike Gordon and Leo Kottke, 2005-11-02 9:30 Club, Washington, DC, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/mike-gordon-november-02-2005-930-club-washington-dc-usa.html
Tour: Mike Gordon & Leo Kottke Fall 2005 Tour
Show Notes:

John Fishman

Pork Tornado, 2002-11-02 The Roxy Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/jon-fishman-november-02-2002-the-roxy-theatre-los-angeles-ca-usa.html
Tour: Fish - Pork Tornado Fall 2002 Tour
Show Notes:
Jazz Mandolin Project, 2001-11-02 Tipitina's Uptown, New Orleans, LA, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/jon-fishman-november-02-2001-tipitinas-uptown-new-orleans-la-usa.html
Tour: Fish - Jazz Mandolin Project Fall 2001 Tour
Show Notes:

Page McConnell

The Meter Men with Page McConnell, 2012-11-02 Howard Theatre, Washington, DC, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/page-mcconnell-november-02-2012-howard-theatre-washington-dc-usa.html
Tour: Page - The Meter Men w/Page McConnell Fall 2012
Show Notes: Cissy Strut and Cardova were performed as a medley.

Other

Ratdog, 2007-11-02 Memorial Auditorium, Burlington, VT, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/guest-appearance-november-02-2007-memorial-auditorium-burlington-vt-usa.html
Tour: Not Part of a Tour
Show Notes: Mike joined Ratdog on bass for "Stuff," "Bird Song (Reprise)" and "Cassidy (Reprise)."

November 5
Daylight savings time change
https://www.blogto.com/city/2023/11/daylight-saving-time-ontario-2023/
Bloor Street Bike Lane Rally/Group Ride. 1PM @ High Park main entrance
https://x.com/TheBikingLawyestatus/1720058303588237747
Brickworks/Broadview city hike w/TBN
https://tbn.ca/event-5448866
Forest Hill morning hike
https://www.meetup.com/foresthillwalkclub/events/296771878/
Hiking at the Royal Botanical Gardens HIIT Format
https://www.meetup.com/2hr-advanced-hikes-toronto/events/296740732/
Autumn Urban Hike
https://www.meetup.com/torontosocialgroup/events/297081853/
Glen Stewart Ravine and Beach Boardwalk city walk
https://www.meetup.com/toronto-movies-and-social-group/events/296466875/
The PATH System: Specialist Course and Guide
https://www.meetup.com/the-history-of-parkdale/events/296657328/
Patterns from Nature - Artists talk & ArtSci Roundtable
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/patterns-from-nature-artists-talk-artsci-roundtable-tickets-742948026547
Messy's Bingo Brunch
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/messys-bingo-brunch-tickets-750888506737
In-Studio Paint Night – Northern Lights on the Water
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/in-studio-paint-night-northern-lights-on-the-water-tickets-738131901387
Royal Winter Fair @ Exhibition Place. Until Nov 12
https://www.royalfair.org/
Good Mourning Festival @ Evergreen Brickworks. Free admission. https://www.evergreen.ca/evergreen-brick-works/the-good-mourning-festival/
Art Guild of Scarborough Fall Art Show and Sale @ Centennial Recreation Centre. Free admission. https://theartguildofscarborough.com/upcoming-shows/
Art of Lost Conversation: Historical Teas, Treats & Interactive Talk @ Toronto's First Post Office. https://ArtofLostConversation.eventbrite.ca
Ecofair Toronto @ Artscape Wynchwood Barns. Free admission.
https://ecofairtoronto.org/
Beaches Artisan Market @ Kew Gardens. Free admission.
https://www.queenstmarketplace.com/
MOCA. Free admission all day
https://moca.ca/visit/
Bata Shoe Museum free admission all day
https://batashoemuseum.ca/visit-us/
Horse racing @ Woodbine. Free parking and admission
https://woodbine.com/
Volleyball Double Header Windsor vs TMU @ Mattamy
SOCCER ⚽️ All Genders Welcome! All Skill Levels Welcome!
https://www.meetup.com/mracx-multisport/events/297127443/
$20 unlimited evening bowling @ Splitsville
https://splitsville.ca/special-events-bowling-packages/
Parkdale Sunday Market
https://theparkdalehall.ca/new/tag/sunday-market/
Your All Time Classic Hit Parade. Free taping @ Zoomerplex
https://www.universe.com/events/your-all-time-classic-hit-parade-november-05-08-09-13-15-16-tickets-LSJXDK
Karaoke @ Capones
https://caponestoronto.com/entertainment/
Karaoke @ Toby's
https://www.instagram.com/jasonrolland/?hl=en
Karaoke @ Harp &Crown
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2619159774928376&set=gm.10168259164585445&idorvanity=28317670444
Karaoke @ Rose & Crown
https://www.facebook.com/events/3545714922342778/?ref=newsfeed
Karaoke @ The Rockpile
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10160472023063884&set=gm.10168258259490445&idorvanity=28317670444
Karaoke @ Tail of the Junction
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=369940622134324&set=gm.10168258739960445&idorvanity=28317670444
$10/$15 unlimited travel on GO Transit
https://www.gotransit.com/en/partners-and-promotions/weekend-passes-with-go
Casino bus to Niagara Falls
https://safewaytours.net/en/casino-tours/
Bus to Casino Rama
https://www.casinorama.com/vip-coach/
Trivia @ 99 Bottles
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/trivia-sunday-afternoons-at-99-bottles-tickets-558319066357
Reelworld Film Festival and Summit
https://www.reelworld.ca/
Holocaust Education Week: "Nathan-ism" film screening @ Leah Posluns Theatre. $18 admission. https://torontoholocaustmuseum.org/events/nathan-ism
$5 Eyes Wide Shut @ Imagine Cinema Carlton
https://imaginecinemas.com/cinema/carlton/
V for Vendetta @ Revue Cinema
https://prod3.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=824626~fc639be0-110c-4035-a588-842aceff5ef6&epguid=9416d3bf-ad16-479c-9d40-f0abda7cb4e9&
Mary Poppins @ Fox Theatre
https://www.foxtheatre.ca/schedule/
Priscilla @ Fox Theatre
https://www.foxtheatre.ca/schedule/
Royal Winter Fair @ Exhibition Place. Until Nov 12
https://www.royalfair.org/
The Kiffness @ Velvet Underground
http://thevelvet.ca/events/
Lords of the Trident @ Rivoli
https://www.rivolitoronto.com/shows
Press Play @ Axis Club
https://theaxisclub.com/venue/the-axis-club/
Sampha @ Danforth Music Hall
https://thedanforth.com/
Depeche Mode @ Scotiabank Arena
New Orford String Quartet @ Walter Hall, UToronto. $25 admission. https://www.mooredaleconcerts.com/
Stick to Your Guns @ Opera House
https://theoperahousetoronto.com/
Whoreible Decisions @ Phoenix
https://thephoenixconcerttheatre.com/
The Tiger Lillies @ Lula Lounge
https://www.lula.ca/calendar
Open mic w/Chuck Coles @ Bovine Sex Club
https://www.bovinesexclub.com/
The Tea Party w/I Mother Earth @ The Concert Hall
https://888yonge.com/
Alexz @ The Drake
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/alexz-live-in-toronto-tickets-701783050997
Ben Kunder @ Cameron House
https://www.thecameron.com/shows
Happy Sundays @ The Baby G
http://thebabyg.com/
Chrysanthemum flower show. Free @ Centennial Park Conservatory. Until Nov 30
https://x.com/TorontoPFstatus/1720486443271761927
BlogTO events
https://www.blogto.com/events/
TodoToronto events
https://www.todotoronto.com/
Six the Musical . On until Dec 17. $39 rush tickets may be available
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/mirvish-toronto-39-rush-tickets-new-mirvish-musical-six-2641388/
Downtown Toronto Free Tour
https://www.meetup.com/downtowntorontofreetours/events/
Because News. Free tapings until Nov 30
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/becausenews/get-tickets-to-cbc-s-because-news-1.4411955
Disney Animation: Immersive Experience Toronto
https://tickets.lighthouseimmersive.com/toronto/?#/
Toronto Public Health launches ‘Fight the Flu & COVID-19’ vaccination campaign
https://www.toronto.ca/news/toronto-public-health-launches-fight-the-flu-covid-19-vaccination-campaign/
Registration continues for JAM sports leagues
https://toronto.jamsports.com/index.php
Indoor swimming pools
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/recreation/swimming/
YMCA free 7-day trial pass
https://trythey.ymcagta.org
GoodLife Fitness free 7-day trial pass
https://try.goodlifefitness.com/raptors?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MSLE-Partnership&utm_source=Partner
Ontario Legislature. Free tours (M-F)
https://www.ola.org/en/visit-learn/tours
$10 admission to Aga Khan Museum. Until Nov 9
https://agakhanmuseum.org/visit/tickets-hours.html
The Power Plant. Free admission Wed-Sun
https://www.thepowerplant.org/visit
Toronto History Museums free admission
https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/history-art-culture/museums/
Presto discounts. Various attractions, shows, restaurants, etc
https://www.prestocard.ca/en/about/presto-perks
Self guided Discovery Tours
https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/sidewalk-tours-wayfinding/self-guided-tours/discovery-tours/
Volunteer to save Ontario Place
https://www.progresstoronto.ca/volunteer-to-save-ontario-place
Volunteer w/Bike Brigade
https://www.bikebrigade.ca/
Ages 55+ Single Seniors Speed-Mixer
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/ages-55-single-seniors-speed-mixer-tickets-733517138507
Spurs. Queer line dancing @ Owls Club
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/spurs-tickets-734785181257
Deviant Playground @ Oasis
https://members.oasisaqualounge.com/sessions/new
Ladies choice gang bang party @ M4
https://clubm4.com/events/
Jason Allen @ Absolute Comedy . Until Nov 5
https://www.absolutecomedy.ca/toronto
Late Night Comedy @ Bar Cathedral
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/late-night-comedy-tickets-746228077267
Sunday Comedy Showcase at The Ace of Spades Lounge. Free admission
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/sunday-comedy-showcase-at-the-ace-of-spades-lounge-tickets-670819748927
Mommy Needs a Drink . Comedy @ Tallboys
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/mommy-needs-a-drink-tickets-620804361557
Inflatable Unicorn. An Improv Comedy Show @ SoCap
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/inflatable-unicorn-an-improv-comedy-show-tickets-731584788797
Harry Potter Vs The Hunger Games @ Comedy Bar. $23 admission. https://comedybar.ca/shows/nerd-wars-a-pop-culture-roast-battle
50% off wings @ Crown and Dragon. Drink purchase required
https://www.crownanddragon.com/
$25 Endless AYCE Shrimp @ Red Lobster
https://www.redlobster.ca/menu/specials
Birthday freebies. Denny's , Marble Slab, and more
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/birthday-freebies-version-2017-2022-1719925/
​
​

Happy birthday to Tanyon Sturtze, the swiss army knife of the Yankee pitching staff during the tail end of the Joe Torre years.
Sturtze could start, he could relieve, he could be your long man, he could be your short guy. Sturtze could do whatever you asked, but unfortunately, Joe Torre asked him way too often. Making 18 appearances in the first 34 games of the 2006 season, pitching almost literally every other day, the "Grand Tanyon" hurt his shoulder and was never the same.
Tanyon James Sturtze was born October 12, 1970, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended St. Peter-Marian High School in Worcester and then to Worcester's Quinsigamond Community College.
Sturtze was drafted by the Oakland A's in the 23rd round (#636 overall) of the 1990 draft. He slowly worked his way up the A's ladder, never really standing out, but nonetheless holding his own. In 1994, he repeated Double-A and the second time around was a pretty good 6-3, 3.22 ERA, earning a promotion to Triple-A, where he went 4-5 with a 4.04 ERA in the high-offense Pacific Coast League.
It was good enough to get him claimed by the Cubs in the Rule 5 draft, and thus began Sturtze's odyssey as a journeyman. Between 1995 and 2003, Sturtze pitched for the Cubs, Rangers, White Sox, Devil Rays, and Blue Jays, and went 29-39 with a 5.20 ERA and 1.564 WHIP in 628.2 innings. During that same stretch, he also pitched more than 400 innings in the minors.
In Spring Training 2004, it looked like Sturtze's career was coming to an end. The Dodgers released him at the end of spring training, and he signed with the Marlins, but was released after just three days. He re-signed with the Dodgers on a minor league contract.

“You’re sitting in Triple-A, you’re 33 years old and you’re trying to get out of there as quick as possible. You suck it up, you get your work in and hope you do well enough that someone notices." -- Tanyon Sturtze

The Dodgers put Sturtze into the rotation in Triple-A and he excelled, going 3-0 with a 2.50 ERA and 1.056 WHIP in six starts. Meanwhile, the Yankees needed pitching help with injuries to Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, Jon Lieber, Steve Karsay, Felix Heredia, and Jorge De Paula, and the release of 35-year-old Donovan Osborne after giving up 16 runs in 17.2 innings.
So on May 15, 2004, Sturtze was traded to the Yankees for minor league hitter Brian Myrow. He made his Yankee debut on May 21, 2004 against the Texas Rangers.
To this point in his career, Sturtze had done a little of everything... starting, closing, and everything in between... and the Yankees kept using him that way. In 2004, his first season in pinstripes, he started three games, finished seven games, and pitched 18 other times at various points in games. He went 6-2 with a save despite an ugly 5.47 ERA. It helps when you're pitching for a team that averaged 5.54 runs per game!
Sturtze proved valuable enough for the Yankees that he had six appearances in the 2004 playoffs... two against the Twins, giving up two runs on four hits and three walks in 2.2 innings, and four against the Red Sox, giving up one run on two hits and two walks in 3.1 innings. His two best outings in that series are illustrative of how Torre could use him anywhere: In Game 4, he entered in the 6th inning of a game the Yankees were winning, 4-3, in relief of Orlando Hernandez, and didn't allow a run in two innings; and in Game 6, with the Red Sox up 4-2, Sturtze entered in the top of the 9th with one out and a runner on 1st, and escaped the inning without any damage to keep it a two-run game. (The Yankees had the winning runs on base in the bottom of the 9th, but Tony Clark struck out against Keith Foulke to end it.)
Sturtze returned in 2005 in the same jack-of-all-trades role, usually pitching in the 6th or 7th inning, but also getting used as the mop-up man in blowouts, and even getting a start. Between May 5 and June 8, he had a stretch where he gave up just one earned run in 20.2 innings, allowing 12 hits and one walk while striking out 12. But he had an ugly second half of the season, with a 6.07 ERA and 1.719 WHIP in 29.2 innings. He later admitted he'd been battling a sore shoulder.
Once again he was on the post-season roster, making two appearances against the Angels. He pitched in Game 1, giving up a 7th inning home run to Bengie Molina in a game the Yankees won 4-2. In Game 3, he entered in the 6th inning of a game tied 6-6, and retired the only batter he faced. But the Yankees lost that game, 11-7.
In 2006, Sturtze started the year with three scoreless appearances, but his heavy usage -- 18 appearances in the first 32 games of the season -- took its toll. He again tried to pitch through a sore shoulder, to disastrous results: he gave up 10 runs (9 earned) on 17 hits and six walks in 10.2 innings, and went on the Disabled List on May 14.

“He’s a player’s player. Managers love him because he never makes an excuse and stuff like that. The only thing that bothered me about him was he felt this thing for a while and he didn’t do anything about it.” -- Joe Torre

It turned out to be a torn rotator cuff requiring surgery, and Sturtze missed the rest of the 2006 season. A free agent, in 2007 he returned to the Dodgers on a minor league contract. He spent the last two seasons of his career in the minors, save three appearances with the Dodgers in August 2008. He didn't allow a run in 2.1 innings, and hung 'em up after the 2009 season.
Sturtze Spurts:

• Sturtze's nickname, at least in the tabloids, was "The Grand Tanyon." He's 6'5"!
  
• Sturtze wore #56 all three seasons with the Yankees, a number he'd never worn before: He wore #34 with the Cubs, #47 with the Rangers and White Sox, #49 with the Devil Rays, and #31 with the Blue Jays. After the Yankees, he'd wear #37 with the Dodgers. #56 was most recently worn by reliever Lou Trivino (2022), and before that, Darren O'Day (2021) and Jonathan Holder (2018-2020). It also was worn by previously forgotten Yankees Rex Hudler and Dave Pavlas. The longest-tenured wearer of #56 was Jim Bouton, who wore it from 1962 to 1968. Bouton also was the first Yankee to wear it.
  
• Sturtze's most memorable moment may have come on July 24, 2004 -- the infamous brawl between the Yankees and Red Sox that began when Jason Varitek, still wearing his catcher's mask, shoved his glove into Alex Rodriguez's face. Naturally that led to the famous brawl. There was the usual pile-up of people wrestling on the ground, and Sturtze tried to pull off Boston's Gabe Kapler. "I remember being pulled out from the middle of the pile by Tanyon Sturtze and not knowing who it was at the time, but kind of hearing him. I don’t know if it was, 'Calm down, Gabe,' or 'Relax, Gabe,' or something like that as we were all right in the middle of the field. But then feeling him become aggressive. It was a bit chaotic." Sturtze said he grabbed Kapler trying to get everyone off of A-Rod. "I just grabbed the closest guy, it just happened to be Gabe Kapler. So I grabbed him and tried to get him off the pile, then it escalated to a little more than that." Indeed it did: Kapler, Trot Nixon, and David Ortiz triple-teamed Sturtze. According to Kevin Millar, "Sturtze was getting choked out by Trot." After the fight, blood was dripping down the side of Sturtze's face and onto his jersey.
  
• Sturtze had actually started that game, and was perfect over the first two innings. The fight came in the top of the 3rd inning. Sturtze came back out to pitch in the bottom of the 3rd inning, despite his bloody ear, and gave up hits to Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller. Back-to-back groundouts then knocked in both baserunners. Juan Padilla replaced Sturtze in the bottom of the 4th, and the Yankees lost the game, 11-10.
  
• As a Massachusetts native, Sturtze grew up a Boston Red Sox fan, but after the brawl and then the Red Sox comeback against the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs, he said he no longer could be. “I’ll never enjoy the Red Sox winning again,” he told the New York Daily News in February 2005. “Those days are over for me and I’m very happy to say they’re over. That doesn’t mean I can’t root for my Patriots, though.” Ten years later, he told Bleeding Yankee Blue that he hadn't changed his mind. "I really despise the Red Sox," he said. "I would never become a fan of them ever again."
  
• Sturtze said he knew he was officially a Yankee, not when he put on the pinstripes or when he made his Yankee Stadium debut, but when his dad, a lifelong Red Sox fan, wore a Yankee cap to Fenway Park for a Yankees-Red Sox game. "It wasn't that easy of a purchase," Sturtze said.
  
• Sturtze told Bleeding Yankee Blue it felt like the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry had mellowed since 2004. "I think it's a bad thing because it's always great to have hated rivals in a sport. I played in LA, and they all talked about LA/San Francisco. They didn't hold a candle to Boston/New York. 2004 was pretty heated. I mean, people were at the old Stadium at noon for a 7 o'clock game, chanting 'We Hate Boston' as you walk into the clubhouse. It was pretty special. I have gone back to a couple of games now, I really don't feel like it's the same. Obviously everyone still knows it's a rivalry. But I just don't think it was as heated once they won the World Series a couple of times. I think it's calmed down a little bit."
  
• Sturtze's best moment as a Yankee, at least in the regular season, may have been June 6, 2004, in a big win over the Baltimore Orioles. Yankee starter Jose Contreras gave up five runs on two hits, three walks, a wild pitch, and two errors, and was pulled in the 1st inning. Sturtze got the final out of the 1st, then pitched four more scoreless innings. The Yankees battled back on a three-run home run from Gary Sheffield and a solo home run from Derek Jeter to make it 5-4, then took the lead in the 6th on an RBI groundout by Hideki Matsui followed by a Ruben Sierra sacrifice fly. Bret Prinz got the win, Tom Gordon the hold, and Mariano Rivera the save -- but the credit should go to Sturtze.
  
• In 2006, the usually placid Joe Torre uncharacteristically exploded at Sturtze. Under a classic New York Daily News headline, "Joe Jab Hits Him Where It Sturtze", Torre trashed Tanyon for loading the bases on two walks and his own error while pitching with a five-run lead. "I wanted to wring his neck," Torre snapped after the game, which the Yankees won 8-5. The following day, Torre sought out Sturtze and apologized for the comment. He wouldn't tell reporters what he said, only: "I un-wrung his neck."
  
• Tanyon's favorite Yankees, according to the Bleeding Yankee Blue interview, were Ron Guidry, Derek Jeter, and Mike Mussina. In other interviews, he also credited Mariano Rivera, Paul Quantrill, Tom Gordon, and Mel Stottlemyre with improving him as a pitcher. And finally, he praised Hideki Matsui as a genuinely nice guy, warm and welcoming to everyone "whether you had been with the team for 10 years or 10 days."
  
• The only other graduate of St. Peter-Marian High School in major league history is Rich Gedman, a catcher for the Red Sox in the 1980s. The Yankees signed the 33-year-old Gedman to a minor league contract in 1993, and he hit a respectable .262/.345/.447 in Triple-A Columbus, but with Mike Stanley (150 OPS+) and Jim Leyritz (154 OPS+) crushing it in the majors that year, there was no need for him.
  
• Quinsigamond Community College has produced just one other major leaguer, Richie Barker, who pitched in five games for the Chicago Cubs in 1999 (5.0 IP, 6 H, 4 ER, 4 BB, 3 K). Quinsigamond is a Native American word meaning "the long nose fishing place." Long nose referred to pickerel, a freshwater fish related to pike.
  
• Sturtze was drafted by the A's with the 636th pick in 1990. Ten picks later, the Yankees drafted a shortstop they'd turn into a catcher... Jorge Posada.
  
• In 2002, Sturtze started every fifth day for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, making 33 starts and pitching 224.0 innings. He led the league in batters faced with 1,008. Unfortunately for Sturtze, he also led the league in losses, hits allowed, and walks allowed. He went 4-18 with a 5.18 ERA and 1.607 WHIP.
  
• According to a story told by a deleted Reddit user, during Spring Training 2004, Sturtze wouldn't sign a ball for a kid who didn't know who he was. Jorge Posada and Willie Randolph intervened, and Sturtze came back and signed balls for the kids.
  
• But was that story accurate? In an interview in August 2023, Sturtze said as a kid he would go to Fenway Park and try to get autographs, and always remembered which players couldn't be bothered. (Greg Luzinski, for one.) "I said if I ever made it, you dream of playing the game your whole life, I said I would never be that guy. I would sign anything I possibly could. Once I got drafted I always kept that in my mind. I would sign for everybody as long as I could."
  
• When Sturtze was on the A's, he told a teammate about Luzinski not signing autographs for him when he was a kid. Luzinski, now a coach on the A's, heard about it. He cornered Sturtze in the locker room while holding a bucket of balls and snapped: "How many do you want me to sign?"
  
• On the eve of the 2004 post-season, Sturtze told the New York Post that he had been living in a Manhattan hotel since his call-up. "I never knew how long I was going to be here, so I never got a place," he said. "You can’t really make too many mistakes with this team because you’ll probably be back in Columbus. There’s a bigger turnover here than there is in Tampa or Kansas City, where they let you make your mistakes. Here, a few mistakes, and you’re a Clipper."
  
• Who is Brian Myrow, the guy the Yankees gave up to get Tanyon Sturtze from the Dodgers? After going undrafted, Myrow signed with the independent league Winnipeg Goldeyes and hit a ridiculous .386/.549/.830 in 122 plate appearances. The Yankees signed him to a minor league deal and he continued to hit. During the 2003-2004 off-season, there was speculation that Myrow -- coming off a season in which he hit .306/.448/.525 in Double-A, playing mostly third base -- would replace the injured Aaron Boone. Instead, the Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez and dealt Myrow for Sturtze. Once again he kept hitting... in the minors. In the majors, he hit .157/.279/.255 in 61 plate appearances spread across three seasons. In 10 years in the minors, though, he hit .297/.417/.486, including .300/.413/.500 in 2,496 plate appearances in Triple-A.
  
• The Hardball Times reported in 2005 that Sturtze's fastball was clocked at 95 mph, which, in 2005, was well above league average. The problem was he didn't have good enough secondary pitches, but after joining the Yankees, he learned how to throw a better cutter from the master himself, Mariano Rivera. "I throw it the same way he does," Sturtze told The Daily News in 2004. "I just can't throw it as hard as he does. Mine's a lot shorter, but it's much better than the cutter I used to throw." How much shorter? Mo's cutter was clocked in the mid 90's; Sturtze's, in the mid 80s.
  
• A year after his playing days were over, on August 28, 2010, Sturtze got into a bar fight in his hometown of Worcester. According to the Telegram & Gazette newspaper, the 39-year-old Sturtze got into an argument with a 22-year-old man and his 21-year-old friend. Apparently Sturtze could still bring it as both men were reportedly injured.
  
• In 2015, the Hall of Fame inducted Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and John Smoltz. Sturtze, in a post on Facebook, said: "The HOF inductees were exactly what everyone thought would be this year and all deserve it but we need to be careful. I think this group had some guys in it that def took something along their career to help their production, and if that's the case we need to open it up to others who are suspected of the same. We want to be fair but their are guys with better numbers then these inductees and are getting snubbed because of the same accusations." The comments may have been in support of Jason Giambi, one of Sturtze's closest friends when they were on the Yankees together. They likely met before that though -- they never played together in the minors, but they were coming up through that system at the same time, as Sturtze was drafted by the A's in 1990 and Giambi in 1992.
  
• In 2015, Sturtze had a son, Maverick. He's 8 now!
  
• On August 7, 2015, Tanyon Sturtze Night was held at Yankee Stadium to raise funds for the Pinstripes Sports Dreams Foundation. In the bleachers were Sturtze along with Jim Leyritz, Charlie Hayes, and Fritz Peterson. Here's the Bleacher Creature Roll Call, led by Bald Vinny!
  
• After baseball, Sturtze tried his hand at a few different endeavors -- public relations, pitching instruction, financial advising, and most recently, insurance. In March 2023, Hotaling Insurance Services announced Sturtze had joined Hotaling Insurance Services as an insurance specialist. "Sturtze, who now resides in Delray Beach, will play an integral part in Hotaling’s expansion in the Florida market and sports and entertainment sector." So if you're looking for insurance, go to hotalinginsurance.com and ask for the Grand Tanyon.
  

"New York is the best. There is nothing better than there. There is nothing better than playing for the Yankees. I wouldn't know what it's like playing for the Mets, being in New York, but I know that the Yankees rule the city. We rule until someone takes it from us. It was the best time of life. I love going back there. I love doing everything for the Yankees. I do some fantasy camps for them in the winter. I do some autograph signings up in the suites. I just love going back." -- Tanyon Sturtze

Hello All,
I have a customer bike I'm attempting to repair, where the connector between the controller and the hub motor has suffered a minor thermal event. Both halves are damaged and the controller end is potted in, so I can't access it to do a replacement. I can get the motor side, but this doesn't help solve the entire problem.
Rather than splicing pig tails onto the existing harness (difficult and messy), I'm trying to find a wire to wire connector, preferably with removable crimp terminals, so I can snip both halves off the harness and install a new connector (should be enough cable slack). The connector has 3 Phase (higher current) and 6 hall effect (low current) terminals. Water resistance highly desirable.
I've considered two connectors, but it becomes messy as the existing harness is a single cable with 9 cores. Potentially easier just to splice in the correct over-moulded connector.
Extensive googling has only found over-moulded connectors with pig tails, typically terminated at the motor and controller board, or 9 pins of equal current capacity (which makes for a very large connector in this case).
Anyone have any suggestions, must be available in the EU.
I referred to this already.
I also tried removing some of the potting, just to see how good a job they did, it's far too much to be successfully removed without doing some damage.

PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1563-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-vale-chapter-5/
PROMPTS: Absolutely unbearable, inexcusable drivel.
Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:

V

The fire was now burning brightly, and I recalled my memories one by one till the three months we had spent in the studio became visible.
The first week my drawing was no worse than Lewis's; indeed, it was rather better, but the second week he had outstripped me, and whatever talent I had, the long hours in the studio wore it away rapidly, and one day, horrified at the black thing in front of me, I laid down my pencil: saying to myself, I will never take up pencil or brush again, and slunk away out of the studio home to the Galerie Feydeau to the room above the umbrella shop, to my bed, my armoire à glace, my half-dozen chairs; and on that bed under its green curtains I lay all night weeping, saying to myself: My life is ended and done. There is no hope for me. All I wanted was Art, and Art has been taken from me. Je suis fichu, fichu, bien fichu, I repeated, and the steps of the occasional passer-by echoed mournfully under the glass roofing.
The Galerie Feydeau had never seemed a cheerful place to live in; it was now as hateful to me as a prison, and Lewis was my gaoler. He went away every morning at eight o'clock, and I met him at breakfast in the little restaurant at the end of the Galerie Feydeau. After breakfast he returned to the studio, and I was free to wander about the streets or to sit in my room reading Shelley. He came home about five, and we went for a walk, and he told me what was happening in the studio. Everything that happened seemed to be for his greater honour and glory. He had won the medal and the hundred francs that Julian offered every month for the best drawing—an innovation this was to attract custom—and a little spree had to be given to commemorate his triumph. He organised the spree very well; of course it was my money that paid for it; and the best part of the studio came to the Galerie Feydeau one evening, and we sang and smoked and drank punch and played the piano. Lewis played the violin, and Julian, drawing his chair up to mine, told me that in ten years hence Lewis would be hors concours in the Salon, and living in a great hotel in the Champs Élysées painting pictures at thirty thousand francs apiece. Les grandes tartines we used to call the pictures that went to the Salon, or les grandes machines: I am forgetting my studio slang. Julian had a difficult part to play. If he were to depreciate Lewis's talent I might throw up the sponge and go away; he thought it safer to assure me that my sacrifices were not made in vain; but man is such a selfish and jealous animal that it had begun to seem to me I would prefer a great failure for Lewis to a great success. Not a great failure, I said to myself; for if he fail I shall never get rid of him. There will be no escape from the Galerie Feydeau for me, so I must hope for his success. He will leave me when he begins to make money. When will that be? and the cruel thought crossed my mind that he was laughing at me all the while, looking upon me as the springboard wherefrom he would jump into a great Salon success. It seemed to me that I could see us both in the years ahead—myself humble and obscure, he great and glorious, looking down upon me somewhat kindly, as the lion looks upon the mouse that has gnawed the cords that bound him. I think I was as unhappy in the Galerie Feydeau as I had been in Oscott College. I seemed to have lost everybody in the world except the one person I wished to lose, Lewis. I was a stranger in the studio, where I went seldom, for every one there knew of my failure; even the models I feared to invite to my rooms lest they should tell tales afterwards. At last the thought came of my sister's school friend, and at her home I met people who knew nothing of Julian and L'École des Beaux-Arts, and at a public dinner I was introduced to John O'Leary and his Parisian circle, and all these people were interested in me on account of my father. One can always pick one's way into Society, and three months later I was moving in American and English Society about the Place Wagram and the Boulevard Malesherbes, returning home in the early morning, awaking Lewis frequently to describe the party to him, awaking him one morning to tell him that a lady whose boots I was buttoning in the vestibule had leaned over me and whispered that I could go to the very top button ... if I liked. A very pretty answer it had seemed to Lewis, and it was clear that he was affected by it, though he resisted for a long time my efforts to persuade him to allow me to introduce him to my friends. I had intended only an outing, an exhibition of my cousin, after which he was to return to his kennel. But I had interrupted his life, and fatally; invitations came to him from every side; he accepted them all, and we started to learn the Boston before the armoire à glace. He learnt it quicker than I did, and when he returned from Barbizon, whither he had gone to meet the wife of an American millionaire, I told him I could live no longer in the Galerie Feydeau and was going away to Boulogne to meet some people whom I had met at Madame Ratazzi's, into whose circle I had happily not introduced him, and wishing to take him down a peg I mentioned that I had acted with her in La Dame aux Camélias. He flew into a violent rage. I was going away with swagger friends to enjoy myself, careless whether he ate or starved. He was right from this point of view. I was breaking my promise to him. But is there anybody who would be able to say he would not have broken his in the same circumstances? None! It was at once a shameful and a natural act; he was my friend; it was shameful, it was horrible, but there are shameful and horrible things in other lives beside mine. His presence had become unendurable. But why excuse myself further? Let the facts speak for themselves and let me be judged by them. They have already been published in The Confessions of a Young Man, but I wonder now if I told in that book enough of the surprise that I experienced on finding him still in the appartement in the Galerie Feydeau when I returned from Boulogne? He should have moved out of my rooms after the quarrel, but instead of that he had converted the sitting-room into a workshop, and his designs for lace curtains occupied one entire wall. He'll go tomorrow, of course, I said, but he did not go on the morrow or the day after, and at the end of the week he was still there, and annoying me by whistling as he worked on his design. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I opened the door of my bedroom and begged him to cease, and it is to this day a marvel to me how he restrained himself from strangling me. He looked as if he were going to rush at me, and on the threshold of my room indulged in the most fearful vituperation and abuse, to which I felt it would be wiser not to attempt an answer, for his arms were long and his fists were heavy; he was always talking about striking out, and it is foolish to engage in a combat when one knows one is going to get the worst of it, so I just let him shout on until he retired to his lace curtains, and I resolved to give notice.
He can't stay after quarter-day.
But the quarter was a long way off, and every day I met him in the Passage des Panoramas among my friends, flowing away in a new ulster past the jet ornaments and the fans; a splendid fellow he certainly was with his broken nose and his grand eyes, and the ulster suited him so well that I began to regret a quarrel which prevented me from asking him questions about it. He came and went as he pleased, passing me on the staircase and in the rooms, his splendid indifference compelling the conclusion that however lacking in character a reconciliation would prove me to be, I could no longer forego one, and after many hesitations I called after him and begged that he would allow bygones to be bygones. I think that he said this was impossible; he must have been counting on my weakness; however this may be, he played with me very prettily, forcing me to plead, practically to ask his forgiveness, and when we were friends again he related that he was looking out for a studio, and in the effusion of reconciliation I very foolishly asked him to tell me if he should happen upon an appartement that he thought would suit me, for live another quarter in the Galerie Feydeau I couldn't. He promised that he would not fail to keep his eyes open, and a few days after he mentioned that he had seen a charming appartement in the Rue de la Tour des Dames—the very thing that would suit me. As there was not nearly enough furniture in the Galerie Feydeau to fill it, he entered into negotiations with an upholsterer, and dazzled me with a scheme of decoration which would cost very little to carry out, and which would give me as pretty an appartement as any in Paris. He was kind enough to relieve me of all the details of un déménagement, and what could I do in return but invite him to stay with me until he had painted a picture?
We had a friend at that time who painted little naked women very badly and sold them very well, and it occurred to Lewis that if Faléro could sell his pictures there was no reason why he should not, so he borrowed a hundred francs from me to hire a model, and painted a nymph; but though better drawn than Faléro's nymphs, she went the round, from picture-dealer to picture-dealer, never finding a purchaser, which did not matter much, for Lewis began at this time to please a rich widow who lived in Rue Jean Goujon. She was not, however, very generous, refusing always de le mettre dans ses meubles, and he continued to live with me, wearing my hats and neckties, borrowing small sums of money, and what was still more annoying, beginning to cultivate a taste for literature, daring even to seek literary advice and help from Bernard de Lopez, a Parisian despite his name—Parisian in this much, that he had written a hundred French plays, all in collaboration with the great men of letters of his time, including Dumas, Banville, and Gautier.
I had picked him up in the Hôtel de Russie very soon after my arrival in Paris. He dined there every Monday, an old habit (the origin of this habit he never told me, or I have forgotten)—a strange habit, it seemed, for anything less literary than the Hôtel de Russie ... for the matter of that anything less literary than Bernard de Lopez's appearance it is impossible to imagine: two piggy little eyes set on either side of a large, well-shaped nose; two little stunted legs that toddled quickly forward to meet me, and two little warm, fat hands that often held mine too long for comfort. So small a man never had before so large a head, a great bald head with a ring of hair round it, and his chin was difficult to discover under his moustaches; roll after roll of flesh descended into his bosom, and, by God! I can still see in my thoughts his little brown eyes watching me just like a pig, suspiciously, though why he should have been suspicious of me I cannot say, unless, indeed, he suspected that I doubted the existence of the plays he said he had written in collaboration, a thing which I frequently did, unjustly, for he was telling the truth. He had collaborated with Gautier, Dumas, and Banville, and having assured myself of this by the brochures, I began to think that he could not have been always so trite and commonplace.
Men decline like the day, and he was in the evening of his life when I met him, garrulous about the days gone by, and in the Café Madrid, whither I invited him to come with me after dinner at the Hôtel de Russie, he told me that Scribe had always said he would like to rewrite La Dame Blanche. Rewrite a piece that has been acted a thousand times, Lopez would gurgle, and then he told me about la scène à faire. The morning he had brought Dumas the manuscript of Le Fils de la Nuit he had said to him: Nous aurons des larmes. He used to speak about a writer called Saint-George, whose rooms were always heavily scented, and scent gave the little man des maux de tête. There was another man whose name I cannot recall, with whom he had written many plays, and who had an engagement book like a doctor or a dentist, qui ne l'empêche pas d'avoir beaucoup d'esprit. It pleases me to recall Lopez's very words: they bring back the 'seventies to me, and my own thoughts of the 'seventies and the intellectual atmosphere in which these men lived, going about their business with comedies and plays in their heads—an appointment at ten to consider the first act of a vaudeville; after breakfast another appointment, perhaps at the other end of Paris, to discover a plot for a drama; a talk about an opera in the café at five, and perhaps somebody would call in the evening—no—not in the evening, for they wrote on into the night, tumbling into bed at three or four in the morning.
Of the wonderful 'seventies Lopez was le dernier rejeton; and talking about Le Fils de la Nuit, the first play that had ever run two hundred nights, we strolled back to his lodging in the Place Pigalle—a large room on the second floor overlooking the Place with a cabinet de toilette. And as time went on I learnt some facts about him. He had been married, and received from his wife the few thousand francs a year on which he lived, and the Empire bed with chairs and a toilet-table to match must have come from her; he would not have thought of buying them, and still less the two portraits by Angelica Kauffmann on either side of the fireplace. A man who had outlived his day! a superficial phrase, for none can say when a man has outlived his day. He had not outlived his when the managers ceased to produce his plays, for he drew my attention to literature, and it is pleasant to me to remember the day that I hurried down to Galignani's to buy a play, for one evening while we talked in the Café Madrid it had occurred to me that with a little arrangement Lewis and Alice would supply me with the subject of a comedy. But never having read a play I did not know how one looked upon paper. Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh (Leigh Hunt's edition) were my first dramatic authors, and my first comedy, in imitation of these writers, was composed and written and copied out and read to Bernard de Lopez within six weeks of its inception. His criticism of it was, I thought at first we were going to have a very strong play, a man that marries his mistress to his friend, and I understood at once that the subject had been frittered away in endless dialogue after the manner of my exemplars, and it was as likely as not in the hope of getting all this dialogue acted that I returned to England, remaining there some time, writing a long comedy which Lopez did not like. Drama was abandoned for poetry, and Lopez encouraged me to tell him of my poems, advising me as we ascended the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette or the Rue des Martyrs to choose subjects that would astonish the British public by their originality—for instance, if instead of inditing a sonnet to my mistress's eyebrows I were to tell the passion of a toad for a rose.
Not that, of course not that, but poems on violent subjects.
A young man's love for a beautiful corpse, I interjected.
He introduced French poetry to me, and through him I read a great deal that I might not have heard of, and wrote a great deal that I might never have written; and it was to him that I brought my first copy of my first book, Flowers of Passion, together with an article that had appeared in The World, entitled, A Bestial Bard. The article began: The author of these poems should be whipped at the cart's tail, while the book is being burnt in the market-place by the common hangman. It filled the greater part of a column, and the note struck by Edmund Yates was taken up by other critics, and, much impressed by the violence of their language, Lopez said: They seem to have exhausted the vocabulary of abuse upon you, and he began to sound me regarding the possibility of an English and a French author writing a play together for the English stage. Martin Luther seemed to us a character that would suit Irving, then at the height of his fame.
But shall we present both sides of the question impartially like Goethe? Or shall we write as ardent Protestants?
As ardent Protestants, I answered. Lopez acquiesced, and one day when I called to discuss a certain scene between Catherine Bora and Luther with my collaborator, I came upon Lewis reading a sonnet to him. Always thrusting himself into my life! are words that will let the reader into the secret of my annoyance. He rose abashed, and the sight of Lewis abashed was a novel one. Lopez continued to explain:
Mon cher monsieur, ce n'est pas pour vous contrarier, mais 'd'où suintent d'étranges pleurs' est un vers de sept; suintent n'a que deux syllabes.
C'est ma mauvaise prononciation flamande, Lewis said, and he bundled up his papers, adding: You have come to talk Martin Luther, so I'll leave you.
But what right does he come interrupting you?
He only came to show me a sonnet.
But what the devil does he want to write sonnets for? Isn't it enough that he should paint bad pictures?
He merely came to inquire out the prosody of a certain line, Lopez answered, and he tried to calm me.
No, there's no use, Lopez. I can't fix my thoughts. Perhaps after dinner. What do you say to the Rat Mort?
He raised no objection to the Rat Mort, but the moment we entered the café he rushed up to a dishevelled and wild-eyed fellow. I thought I had lost him. Let me introduce you, he said, to Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Lewis was forgotten in the excitement of dining with a real man of letters, in the pleasure of confiding to Villiers the scene that I had come to talk to Lopez about.
It is to Martin Luther himself, I said, whom she has never seen, that she confesses in a wood her love of Martin Luther.
I must introduce you to Mallarmé, said Villiers, and he wrote a note on the edge of the table. You'll find him at home on Tuesday evenings.
Mallarmé spoke to me of Manet, and he must have spoken to Manet about me, for one night in the Nouvelle Athènes Manet asked me if the conversation distracted my attention from my proofs. Come and see me in my studio in the Rue d'Amsterdam. And not very many evenings later Mendès was introduced to me between one and two in the morning. He asked me to the Rue Mansard, where he lived with Mademoiselle Holmès, whereupon, before I had time to realise the fact, I was launched on Parisian literary and artistic society, and six months afterwards Manet said to me, There is no Frenchman in England who occupies the position you do in Paris. Perhaps there isn't, I answered mechanically, my thoughts turning to Lewis, who was certainly going down in the world. I should have done better to have left him in the Mont Rouge to get his living as a workman, for he'll never be able to scrape together any sort of living as a painter, and my spirits rose mountains high against him. An old man from the sea, I said, whom I cannot shake off.
But the courage to fling him into the street was lacking, and I continued to bear with him day after day, hoping that he would leave me of his own accord. He was well enough in Julian's studio or in the Beaux-Arts or in English and American society, but he would seem shallow and superficial in the Nouvelle Athènes, and I always avoided taking him there; but one night he asked me to tell him where I was dining, and I had to tell him at the Nouvelle Athènes. He pleaded to be allowed to accompany me, and I will admit to some vanity on my part; or was it curiosity that prompted me to introduce him to Degas, who very graciously invited us to sit at his table and talked to us of his art, addressing himself as often to Lewis as he did to me. He opened his whole mind to us, beguiled by Lewis's excellent listening, until the waiter brought him a dish of almonds and raisins. Then a lull came, and Lewis said, leaning across the table:
I think, Monsieur Degas, you will agree with me that, more than any other artist among us, Jules Lefebre sums up all the qualities that an artist should possess.
My heart misgave me, and Degas's laughter did not console me, nor his words whispered in my ear as he left:
Votre ami est très fort.... Il m'a fait monter l'échelle comme personne. And a few days afterwards in the Rue Pigalle he said:
Comment va votre ami? Ah! celui-là est d'une force.
Mais, cher ami, le pauvre garçon n'a jamais su se dégager—
Pas du tout; il est très fort.
Son esprit n'a jamais su dépasser certaines bornes ... la Rue Bonaparte.
But no explanation pleased Degas as much as his own: Il m'a tiré les vers du nez ... et comme personne. I resisted this explanation till, feeling that I was beginning to show myself in a stupid light, I accepted it outwardly, though convinced inly that Lewis had been guilty of the unpardonable sin—lack of comprehension. He must go and at once, and as soon as I returned home I begged him to leave me. At the end of the month, when my mother sends me my money, he answered, and my heart sank at the thought of having him with me so long. I think I must have answered, For God's sake go! and a few days afterwards the concierge mentioned to my great surprise that Monsieur Hawkins had left, and had paid her the few francs he owed her. A good trait on his part, I thought, and my heart softened toward him suddenly, and continued soft until a lady told me that Monsieur Hawkins had been to see her and had borrowed a hundred francs from her.
I didn't dare refuse, she said, but I thought it rather mean of him to come to ask me for the money.
We sat looking at each other, the lady thinking no doubt that I should not have told Lewis I was her lover, and myself thinking that I had at length caught Lewis in deliberate blackmail; and, going round to the studio in which he had settled himself, I said, before looking round the walls to admire the sketches:
I have just come from Miss ——, and she tells me you borrowed a hundred francs from her.
If I did, you borrowed from Alice Howard, my mistress, he answered.
I had forgotten, and sat dumbfounded. But why had I borrowed this money? I never wanted for money. Perhaps to put Alice to the test, or to get back some of my own, for she had borrowed often from me, and finding her in affluent circumstances.... She asked me some days after to repay her, and I gave her the money that was in my pockets—a hundred francs; the other hundred I forgot all about till one evening at Alphonsine's I saw her rise up from her place and walk toward me, a vindictive look round her mouth and eyes.
Have you come, she said, to pay me the money that you owe me?
To admit that I had borrowed money from Alice at Alphonsine's was impossible; lies happen very seldom in my life, but they have happened, and this was an occasion when a lie was necessary. But I lied badly from lack of habit, and Lewis had heard from the women there that I had not stood up to Alice; and now to pass off the matter on which I had come to speak to him, I asked him how I should have answered Alice.
You should have answered her ironically: Toi, tu m'as prêté de l'argent? Où ça? Quand tu venais me trouver à l'hôtel de toutes les Russies et que tu pleurais pour un déjeuner? Quand tu n'avais pas deux mètres d'indienne à te coller sur les fesses? Non, mais vrai: y avait-il une maquerelle rue de Provence qui voulait de ta peau? Tu dis que tu m'as prêté de l'argent? C'est-il quand ton tôlier te reprenait ta clé tous les matins, ou quand tu demandais aux michés cinquante centimes pour aller aux chiottes?
Splendid! I cried.
Faut pas se laisser marcher sur le pied, dis. Je ne lui aurais par parlé autrement.
You have l'esprit prime-sautier, but any wit I have is l'esprit de l'escalier ... et de la dernière marche.
Je ne lui aurais pas parlé autrement.
Patter always excites my admiration; we get back to origins—to the monkey. And looking round the studio the number of sketches that I saw everywhere in oil and water-colour put the thought into my mind that Lewis must have discovered a patron and was living as comfortably as he had ever done with me. So all my sacrifices were in vain, I said to myself, and aloud to him: You are doing a great deal of work. I have discovered a patron, he answered, and he told me of an old man living in a barred house in a distant suburb who never opened his door except to a certain ring—an old man in gold-rimmed spectacles who would buy any drawing that Lewis brought him at a price: thirty francs for a flower in a vase, for an apple, a pear, for a street corner, for a head sketched in ten minutes. He is your banker? I said. Yes; it's just like cashing a cheque. And I left the studio hoping that the old man who looked at Lewis's drawings through gold-rimmed spectacles would live for many a year. His death would certainly bring back Lewis to me asking for fifty, for a hundred francs; and if I could not lend him so much he would ask for twenty, and if I could not manage twenty he would ask for ten, and if I could not manage ten he would ask for five, perhaps coming down to the price of his omnibus home. But the old man continued in the flesh, and weeks and months passed away without my seeing or hearing from Lewis. Years must have gone by before we met at Barbizon, whither he had gone intent upon investing all his savings on a Salon picture.
An old graveyard full of the lush of June had taken his fancy, and after many sketches he was still certain that he had hit on a good subject for a picture. A critic pointed out that two children looking at a gravestone would balance the composition; another said that a yellow cat coming from the cottages along the wall would complete it. Both were right; all that now remained for Lewis to do was to paint the picture. But he lacked touch, and his picture would have remained very tinny if Stott of Oldham had not arrived at Barbizon suddenly.
You mustn't rub the paint like that. See here; and taking the brush from Lewis's hand he mixed a tone and drew the brush slowly from right to left. Almost at once the paint began to look less like tin, and Lewis said, I think I understand, and he was able to imitate Scott sufficiently well to produce a picture which Bouguereau said would attract attention in the Salon if the title were changed to Les Deux Orphelins.
L'Amour renaît de ses Cendres is not a title that will appeal to the general public.
Lewis tried to explain that what he meant was that the love of the parents is born again in their children; but he allowed Bouguereau's good sense to prevail, and the picture drew from Albert Wolf an enthusiastic notice of nearly half a column in the Figaro, after which it became the fashion to go to the Salon to see Les Deux Orphelins and Monsieur Hawkins, un jeune peintre anglais de beaucoup de talent, for Lewis could not separate himself from his picture, and every day he grew bolder, receiving his friends in front of it and explaining to them, and to all and sundry, the second title, L'Amour renaît de ses Cendres. His conduct was not very dignified, but he had been waiting so long for recognition of his talent that he could not restrain himself. He sold Les Orphelins for ten thousand francs, and next year the Salon was filled with imitations of it, and there was a moment when it seemed that Julian's prophesy was about to come true. The hotel in the Champs Élysées was being sought for when Lewis's first patron, the old man to whom he had sold his sketches for twenty-five or thirty francs apiece, died suddenly; and for nearly two years Welden Hawkinses were being knocked down at the Hôtel de Vente for fifty and a hundred francs apiece.
Fifteen hundred or two thousand pictures thrown upon the market was no doubt a misfortune, I said as I stirred the fire, but if Lewis had been a man of healthy talent he would have painted other pictures. But his talent was the talent of un détraqué, and a recollection of a naked man looking at a naked woman through a mask was remembered. The hereditary taint was always there, I said, and I began to turn over in my mind all that Lewis had told me about his father. My father left mamma some three or four years after their marriage. I think I was twenty before I ever saw him. I was given an address of a lodging-house in St James's, and found my father in a small back room, sitting on a bed playing the flute. Oh, is that you, Lewis? Just a moment. Lewis had heard from his mother many stories of his father's eccentricities, and he had an opportunity of verifying these in St James's Street, for when the elder Hawkins laid aside his flute and engaged in perfunctory conversation with his son he allowed a fly to crawl over his face. Every moment Lewis expected his father to brush the insect away. It had been round one eye several times, and had descended the nose, and was about to go up the eye once again when Lewis, who could contain himself no longer, cried out:
Father, that fly!
Pray don't disturb it, I like the sensation.
My thoughts passed from Lewis to Jim, and I sat for a long time asking myself if Jim would have succeeded better than Lewis if he had gone to Paris in the 'fifties. He had more talent than Lewis, but his talent seemed still less capable of cultivation. There is a lot of talent in Ireland, but whether any of it is capable of cultivation is a question one can ponder for days, and my thoughts breaking away suddenly I remembered how, soon after my return from Ireland when I had settled in Cecil Street in the Strand, and was trying to make my living by writing for the papers, the desire to see Jim again in the old studio in Prince's Gardens had come upon me, and I had gone away one night in a cab to Kensington; but the appearance of the footman who opened the door surprised me, and I asked myself if Jim had sold some pictures, or had let the house. He had sold the house, and any letters that came from him were sent to Arthur's Club, where I could obtain news of him. The porter told me that any letter would be forwarded, but I wanted to see Jim that very night, and addressing myself to the secretary of the club, who happened to be passing through the hall at that moment, I begged of him to authorise the porter to give me Mr Browne's address, which he did: and I went away in a cab certain that the end of the drive would bring me face to face with my old boon companion. The cab turned out of Baker Street and we were soon in Park Road driving between Regent's Park and a high wall with doors let into it. Before one of these the hansom stopped and I saw a two-storeyed house standing in the midst of a square plot. A maid-servant took me up a paved pathway, mentioning that Mr Browne was on the drawing-room floor, and I found him waiting expectant in his smock, a palette and a sheaf of brushes in his left hand, the thumb of his right hand in his leather belt.
My dear Jim, I've been to Prince's Gardens.
We've sold the house and Pinkie and Ada have gone to live with friends and relations.
There was a feeling in the room that nobody had called to see him for many a month, and I noticed that a good deal of colour had died out of the thick locks of flaxen hair and that his throat was wrinkled.
And all your pictures, Jim?
Your mother was kind enough to hang them up in Alfred Place when we left Prince's Gardens, and when she left the house at the end of her lease the pictures were taken away.
And you didn't make any inquiries?
Well, you see, I haven't room for many canvases.
The moment had come when I must show some interest in his pictures, and turning from the one on the easel I picked one out of the rows, hoping that the design might inspire a few words of praise.
You must have painted a dozen or twenty times upon it. I don't know how you can work over such a surface, a thick coagulated scum. Why don't you scrape? Manet always scrapes before painting, and he never loses the freshness; his paint is like cream after twenty repaintings.
Jim did not know anything about Manet, nor did he care to hear about Monet, Sisley, Renoir, the Nouvelle Athènes and its litterati. He knew nothing of Banville's versification and had not read Goncourt's novels, so I told him that Catulle had thought well of my French sonnet, for having written a drama on the subject of Luther it was necessary to write a French dedicatory sonnet, and I recited it to Jim to revenge myself upon him for his having told me that he knew French as well as English.
My landlady's daughter, he said, pointing to a small portrait on the wall, and some time afterwards a young girl was heard singing on the stairs. There she is. Shall I ask her in?
I begged of him to do so, and a somewhat pretty girl with round eyes and a vivacious voice, came into the room and chattered with us; but her interest in the fact that Jim was my cousin was a little high-pitched, and it was obvious that she took no interest in his pictures, or indeed in any pictures; and it was a relief when she turned to Jim to ask him if he was staying to dinner.
Let us go out together and dine somewhere, I said.
Yes, ask him out to dinner. It will do him good. He hasn't been beyond the garden for weeks.
Yes, Jim; we will go up town and dine together.
I have no money.
But father will lend you any money you want. It will go down in the ... you can settle with father when you like.
She left the room and Jim spoke of the people in whose house he was lodging, a dancing master and his wife, and he gave me a mildly sarcastic account of Mrs —— coming up to see him in the morning to tell him that he might have the use of the parlour for ten shillings extra; my ears retain his voice still saying something about coals and gas not being included, and what tickled his fancy was the way the old lady used to linger about the drawing-room trying to draw the conversation on to his sisters, where was Miss Ada living now, and was Miss Pinkie still living with Lord Shaftesbury? He continued talking, moving the canvases about, and I was willing to appreciate the designs if he would only say that he would come out to dinner. At last he said:
You see, I haven't been to my tailor's for a long time, and my wardrobe is in a ragged and stained condition. I dare say they'll be able to find some cold beef or cold mutton or a sausage or two in the larder. You don't mind?
Of course I did not mind. It was for a talk about old times that I had come, and after the cold meats we returned to the drawing-room. Jim showed me all his latest designs and we discussed them together, mingling our memories of the women we had known. The names of Alice Harford, Annie Temple, and Mademoiselle d'Anka came into the conversation; I told him about Alice Howard, hoping he would ask me if she were as big as Alice Harford, and then, determined to rouse him, I said the great love affair of my life was a small, thin woman. Still he did not answer.
If a woman be sensual—
Beauty is better than bumping, he answered with a laugh, and it seemed that we were to have one of our erstwhile conversations about Art and that Jim would draw forth a canvas and say, This has all the beauties of Raphael and other beauties besides; but he seemed to have lost nearly all his interest in painting, allowing me, however, to search round the room and discover behind the sofa a new version of Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts, and I spoke of the design and the conception and the movement of the man about to hurl a spear at a great lion approaching from behind a rock. He took up his palette but forgot to roar like a lion, and when he laid it aside he did not sing Il balen or A che la morte, nor did he tell me that Pinkie had a more beautiful voice than Jenny Lind, and when we walked across the garden and he bade me goodbye at the gate, I felt that he had worn out himself as well as his clothes—his hopes, his talent, his enthusiasm for life, all were gone, an echo remained, an echo which I did not try to reawaken. I never saw him again; he was for me but an occasional thought, until one day I found myself sitting next a showily dressed woman at luncheon, the daughter of Jim's landlady, and it was from her I learnt that Jim had died about two years back in Park Road. She said he had become quite a hermit in the later years of his life, never leaving the house except for a stroll round the garden.
Painting always, I said.

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II

Myself, an elderly man, lying in an armchair listening to the fire, is a far better symbol of reverie than the young girl that a painter would place on a stone bench under the sunlit trees; myself trying to remember if it were on our way back from Prince's Gardens or a few days afterwards that I begged money from my father to buy drawing materials, remembering everything but the dates-that a pencil was never out of my hand, and that as soon as family criticism was exhausted, professional criticism was called in. Jim was invited to dinner. But a bad cold kept me in bed, terrified lest my drawings should be forgotten. As he descended the staircase, voices reached me, and when the front door closed I listened, expecting somebody to come up to tell me what Jim had said. But nobody came, and when I went shyly to my mother next morning her news was bad; after dinner my sketches had been shown to him, but he did not seem to think much of them, and on my pressing my mother to tell me more I dragged the truth from her that he considered girls riding bicycles showing a great deal of stocking a low form of art.
He only likes Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Rubens, my father said, and he invited me to come to the National Gallery, and I followed him from masterpiece to masterpiece, humble and contrite, but resolute in my persuasions that he must come with me to Drury Lane and buy some plaster casts. He seemed to look upon the money thus expended as wasted, and when he came to the bedroom that I had converted into a studio he glanced round the walls shocked at my crude attempts to draw the Venus de Milo, the Discobolus, and some busts. He did not refuse to send me to the Kensington School of Art, but he sent my brother with me, and this jarred a little, for I looked upon my wish to learn drawing as a thing peculiar to myself, and my brother was so subaltern to me and seemed so utterly unlikely to understand a work of art that I looked pityingly over his shoulder until one day the thought glided into my mind that his drawing was as good as mine, if not better. And if that were so, what hope was there for me to become an artist, an exhibitor in the Royal Academy? an exhibitor of pictures like Jim's Julius Caesar overturning the altars of the Druids? For even if I did learn to draw and to stipple, it did not seem to me that I should ever be able to imagine figures in all positions as Jim did, and I despaired.
Youth is a very unhappy time, Art and sex driving us mad, and our parents looking upon us with stupid unconscious eyes. My father must have been ashamed of his queer, erratic son, and could have entertained little hope that eventually I would drift into a respectable and commonplace end. We all want our children to be respectable, though we may not wish to be respectable ourselves, and as he walked to the House of Commons, a short, thick-set man with a long, determined mouth set in a fixed expression, his hands moving in little gestures to his thoughts, he must have often asked himself what new caprice would awaken in me. Would I tell him that I had decided to take up literature or music as a profession? There was no knowing which would be my next choice, and either was equally ridiculous, for in me at that time there was as little idea of a tune as there was of a sentence. It was impossible for me to grasp the different parts of speech or the use of the full stop, to say nothing of the erudite colon. As he turned me over in his mind he must have remembered his own brilliant school-days, coming sadly to the conclusion that I must go into the Army, if he could get me into the Army, that very sympathetic asylum for booby sons. So that our soldiers may not be altogether too booby, the War Office has decreed a certain amount of ordinary spelling and arithmetic and history to be essential, and to get such as I through examinations there are specialists. Somebody must have exalted Jurles above all men, for my father came home one evening with the news that Jurles had pushed men through who other tutors had said would never be able to pass any examination, and would never get their livings except with the labour of their hands. The record of this thaumaturgist was seventeen hundred and fifty-three, and my father reflected that if there were miracles that even Jurles could not perform, he would at least redeem Alfred Place from the annoyance of seeing me trick-riding on a bicycle up and down the street. And Jurles would also save me from the Egertons, and daughters of a small tradesman living in Hammersmith, whither some other wastrels and myself were wont to go to sup on Sundays. Alma and Kate were on the stage, and photographs of Alma in tights and Kate in short skirts were left about the house, and disgraceful letters turned up in the blotting-book in the drawing-room; he was a man of action rather than words, and putting a season-ticket into my hand he bade me away to Jurles's in the Marylebone Road, to one of the little houses lying back from the main road.
As I passed up the strip of garden under the aspens I often caught sight of Jurles's old withered face blotted against the bow window, and very often met his wife, a tall and not ill-looking woman about thirty; she seemed to be always going up and down the pathway, and at that time almost anything was enough to waken an erotic suggestion, and I began to wonder if she kept trysts with any of the young men sitting on either side of the long mahogany tables bent over their books and slates. It seemed to me that there was warrant for the supposition, for as soon as old Jurles finished a lesson he went to the window and stood there, his bald head presenting an irresistible attraction for flies, a dangerous attraction, for Jurles was quick with his hands. It is probable that Mrs Jurles's trysts were with the butcher, baker and grocer, for besides the half-dozen young men who arrived at ten o'clock every morning, Jurles took in several boarders, and there were never less than ten men sitting down to the midday meal, among them Dick Jurles. We all respected old Jurles, a distant, reserved gentleman and knowledgeable beyond the limits of his craft, but we laughed at Dick for his long red whiskers and moustaches, and his vulgar and familiar manners. We used to charge him in private, on what foundation I know not, probably none, with being a money-lender's tout, and no one cared to take a lesson from him, feeling him to be a fake, one who had acquired just enough education to overlook our sums or to construe a Latin text with us, feeling that if he were to ask a question we might place him in a quandary. The seventeen hundred and fifty-three young men that Messrs Jurles had passed into the Army owed their success to the diligence of his brother and to the solemn Swiss who taught modern languages in the back room. Out of it he came every hour, a red handkerchief hanging out of his tail pocket: I will trable you now, and, my chair tilted, I used to watch him, wondering the while what kind of death each one of his pupils would meet on the battle-field, worried by the thought that my lot might be to die in defence of my country, or be wounded in her defence, which was worse still. It seemed to me that myself was my country, but having no alternative to propose to my father I accepted the Army. All professions were equally repugnant to me; I could not see myself as a doctor or as a barrister, or anything except perhaps a gentleman rider. I did not dare to tell my father that I would not go into the Army; it did not occur to me to say to him: You went to the East for five years, and when you returned home did little else but ride steeplechases. In many little ways I lacked courage and preferred procrastination to truth. I could not be put into the Army unless I passed the examination, and I realised that to miss passing no more was necessary than to read the Sportsman under the table, and spend most of the afternoon at the tobacconists's round the corner—an affable man with a long flowing moustache like Dick Jurles's, and some knowledge of betting, enough to have a book on the big races, laying the odds in shillings with his customers, cabbies from the rank; and while he teased out the half-ounces of shag we discussed the weights, the speed, and the stamina of the horses; we laid the odds and took them, and at the end of the half-year I had won five or six pounds. One day Lord Charlemont mentioned a horse as certain to win the Derby—Pretender, wasn't it? The tobacconist bet in shillings, half-crowns, and dollars, but he would take me round to the public-house and introduce me to the great bookmaker who came there to meet his customers on Thursdays and Fridays. Pretender won, and the Monday after the race the great bookie invited me behind the urinal and took ten five-pound notes out of his pocket, fifty pounds, a sum of money that enabled me to eat, drink, and smoke on terms of equality with Colville and Belfort, two young men who were fast becoming my friends—Belfort, a handsome, high-class, little fellow, bright brows and brown hair, a high-bridged nose, the mouth a little pinched, the chin a little too forward, sharp teeth, a pale complexion, and a high voice. He was going into the cavalry, and lived with his mother and sister at the top of the Albert Road, and as I lived at the bottom of the Exhibition Road it made very little difference whether I took Exhibition Road or Albert Road; there was a short cut at the end round by some cottages with thatched roofs, which have long ago disappeared. We made friends in this walk, and he asked me to dine with him, and we went to the theatre; later he introduced me to his mother and sister, and a very distinct picture these two women have left upon my mind: the mother frail, reserved, and dignified, with fair hair, about to turn grey, parted in the middle and brushed on either side of her thin temples. She must have worn a long gold chain, and she was always in black. The daughter had her brother's high-bridged nose, and her manner was showy—the opposite of her mother's—and I liked to find them sitting on either side of the fireplace after dinner. Now Colville was quite different from Belfort, a south Saxon if ever there was one, his ancestors having been on the land probably since Hengist and Horsa came; a man of medium height, of good trim figure and military bearing, for his thoughts were always on the Army, and his talk was of tunics and of buttons and epaulets, and very proud he was of his great military moustache which he stroked pensively with his little crabbed hand. He was often at Truefitt's getting his hair shampooed and cut closely about his small well-turned head and narrow temples, and from Truefitt's he often walked to his tailor's; he had thirty-six pairs of trousers when I first knew him, and his charm was his cheerful disposition and his somewhat empty but merry laugh.
He was the first man I had ever met who kept a woman, but that was a secret, and Belfort used to wonder how he did it on five hundred a year; he told us that he gave Minnie Granville three, reserving two for himself, and if he ran short he returned to Buckingham and lived free of cost till his next quarter's allowance allowed him to return to the clandestine little home in St John's Wood. We envied him his lady, and on fine afternoons used to leave the confectioner's shop where we had luncheon and go forth to St John's Wood for an hour before returning to Jurles, and the two of us would loiter, admiring the greensward shelving down to the canal's edge, wondering if Minnie Granville were true to Colville; we wished Colville well, but we remembered that if she remained faithful to him she would never become a celebrated light-o'-love, and we should be deprived of the honour of having known her in her early days. We had heard that Mabel Grey lived in Lodge Road, and turned into it wondering which house was hers, and, not daring to inquire, we searched South Bank and North Bank, and, talking of her ponies, we gazed at the pretty balconies, hoping to catch a sight of her or her great rival, Baby Thornhill. Everybody knew these two ladies by sight, for photographs of Baby Thornhill and Mabel Grey were everywhere, in every album; and many other beautiful women were famous. Lizzie Western, the sheep, as she was called—a tall woman with gold hair and a long mild face—and Kate Cook, too, was as famous perhaps as any, Mabel Grey always excepted; Kitty Carew, Margaret Gilray, and Sally Giles her cousin, lived in South Bank, and were often on their balconies tending their birds, giving their canaries and finches seed and water; a favourite bird was a mule goldfinch and canary, a green-brown bird that would take seed from his mistress's pretty tongue. Belfort brought opera-glasses one day, and that day we were happy boys; the pony carriage was at the door. We shall see them get into it if we wait. Belfort wanted to get back to Jurles; and I should not have been able to persuade him to remain if the ponies had not presented a peculiar attraction—fiery chestnut mares, foaming at the bits, and swishing their long tails, a dangerous pair for ladies' hands to drive through crowded streets; and the longer they were kept waiting the more restive they became, rearing over against the little groom, or striking out with their hind legs. And as soon as the ladies stepped into the carriage, before Sally was seated, they bounded forward, overthrowing the groom and what disaster might not have happened if we had not rushed forward to their heads it is impossible to say.
The ponies have not been sufficiently exercised, that is all, Miss Gilray, and I begged Belfort to soothe Miss Giles, who was very much frightened. It would have been splendid to offer to drive the ponies into Regent's Park and bring back Spark and Twinkle chastened, but Belfort said that we must be getting back to Jurles, and we regretfully bade them goodbye. It seemed to us the merest politeness to call next day to inquire, and we were received by the cousins, platonically, of course. But even boys get their chances, and the idea came to Sally Giles to invite Belfort and me to supper, and to come to Jurles's herself with the invitation, stopping the ponies before Jurles's establishment and sending her little groom up the pathway with the note. I was at the window, and how my heart beat at the sight of him! Wearing the livery of his mistress proudly, he stopped Mrs Jurles, who was coming down the pathway at that moment with her white Pomeranian dog, and after a talk with her, old Jurles called me aside and began his lecture: he could no longer consent to waste my father's money, and felt constrained to inform him of the company I kept. But, Mr Jurles, the ponies were kicking, my father would never have spoken to me again if I had not gone to their heads, and Miss Giles was so frightened. Old Jurles seemed to accept my excuse as valid, and, although it was quite out of the question that such ladies should send their grooms with notes to his front door, still the incident might be overlooked were it not that I showed no disposition to learn anything since I came. He reminded me that he had frequently to take the Sportsman out of my hand. I was glad to hear from him that there was no chance of my passing for the Army, but I wished him to withhold this opinion from my father; and after some debate he promised me that I should have another chance. You must mend your ways, he added. But it was only by reading the Sportsman under the table that I could escape from the horrid red tunic with buttons down the front, and the belt, and if I were caught with it again Jurles would write to my father, and every day I expected to see him coming toward me with threatening brow, and to hear him say, I have received a very bad account of you from Jurles. There was some justification for my fears, for he wore a troubled look, and I caught him in whispered talk with my mother frequently; they ceased talking or spoke of indifferent things suddenly, and one night after dinner I heard him say that he was going to Ireland by the Mail. The reason of this sudden departure was not mentioned, and my mother was so often agitated that her fluttered voice caused me no alarm; my father's sudden return from the front door to give me a sovereign did not awaken a suspicion; it seemed, however, to strike my mother's imagination, and a few days later a wire came from her brother summoning us to Moore Hall.
Something dreadful must have happened! she kept repeating to herself, and her talk was full of allusions to a letter she had received from my father. At last she confided to me that he had written to her saying if she did not get a wire from him on a certain day she was to come at once. We got the morning papers coming off the boat, and there was nothing about him in them, but the absence of news was not enough to reassure her, and I felt there was something on her mind of which she did not dare to speak. She does not appear again in my memory till we arrived at Balla. Her brother was waiting outside the gate, and I saw him take her aside and heard him say: Mary, prepare for the worst; George is dead.
We climbed on the car—Joe and my mother on one side, the driver sat on the dicky, and I remember his back showing all the way against a grey sky and my mother wrapped in a brown shawl. Joe Blake is not so distinct to me, only his yellow mackintosh. Every now and again I heard the wail of my mother's voice, and I sobbed too, thinking of my father whom I should never speak to again. At the same time I was conscious, and this was a source of great grief to me, that my life had taken a new and unexpected turn. In the midst of my grief I could not help remembering that my father's death had redeemed me from the Army, from Jurles, and that I should now be able to live as I pleased. That I should think of myself at such a moment shocked me, and I remember how frightened I was at my own selfish wickedness, and a voice that I could not restrain, for it was the voice of the soul, asked me all the way to Moore Hall if I could get my father back would I bring him back and give up painting and return to Jurles? I tried hard to assure myself that I was capable of this sacrifice, but without much success, and I tried to grieve like my mother. But I could not.
We never grieve for anybody, parent or friend, as we should like to grieve, and are always shocked by our absent-mindedness; at one moment weeping for the dead, at another talking of indifferent things or asking casual questions as to how the dead man died. And we only remember certain moments. At will I can see myself and Joseph Applely in my father's bedroom standing together by the great bureau at which he wrote, and in which he kept his letters, and I remember how my eyes wandered from Joseph to the empty bed. He had been removed to the next room, or perhaps he had died in the marriage bed; however this may be, Joseph Applely told me that when he came to call the master, he was lying on his back breathing heavily, and thinking that it would be better not to disturb him he had gone away; closing the door quietly, and when he returned an hour later the master was lying just as he had left him, only he could catch no sound of breathing. So much do I remember precisely, and somewhat less precisely, that Joseph Applely told me he had sent for the doctor. A dim thought hangs about in my memory that the doctor was in the neighbourhood; be this as it may, the reason assigned for death was apoplexy. Two, three, or four days went by and I remember nothing till somebody came into the summer room to tell my mother that if she wished to see him again she must come at once, for they were about to put him into his coffin, and catching me by the hand, she said, We must say a prayer together.
The dead man lay on the very bed in which I was born, his face covered with a handkerchief, and as my mother was about to lift it from his face the person who had brought us thither warned her from the other side of the white dimity curtains not to do so. He is changed, she said.
I don't care, my mother cried, and snatched away the handkerchief, revealing to me the face all changed. And it is this changed face that lives unchanged in my memory, and three moments of the next day: the moment when Lord John Browne bade me goodbye on the way from Carnacun (the body had been brought there for High Mass and was being carried back to Kiltoome, a cold March wind was blowing over the fields, and he feared the journey round the lake); the moment when Father Lavelle called upon the people to hoist him on to the tomb for him to speak his panegyric; and the moment when the mason's mallets were heard closing the vault where the dead man would remain with his ancestors, one would like to say for centuries, but nothing endures in this world, not even our graves. I cannot remember who spoke after Lavelle, and afterwards the multitude began to disperse through the woods and along the shores of the lake, a great many lingering on the old stone bridge to admire the view. Of course I was very principal, and as I passed up the road I felt many eyes fixed upon me, and conjectured that they were all wondering how much of my father's talent I had inherited, and if I would take up the running at the point where he had dropped out of the race. Among the hundreds of unknown there was here and there a known face; our carpenters, sawyers, gardeners, and stablemen—all our servants from Derrinanny and Ballyholly, the villages beyond the domain over the hill along the lake's edge. And of course, I did not escape the inquisitive gaze of the men that used to row me about the islands when Lough Carra was my adventure, and they were probably thinking what I would do for them when I came to live in Moore Hall; and after these men were other faces known to me, but not so well known, the beaters whom I had seen rousing the woodcock out of the covers of Derrinrush, and it seems that when I turned from the Dark Road and walked up the lawn some of the old tenants spoke to me. I have some recollection of being spoken to at the sundial, and I think their questioning eyes reminded me that the house on the hill was mine, and they who spoke to me and those who did not dare to speak were mine to do with as I pleased. Until the 'seventies Ireland was feudal, and we looked upon our tenants as animals that lived in hovels round the bogs, whence they came twice a year with their rents; and I can remember that once when my father was his own agent, a great concourse of strange fellows came to Moore Hall in tall hats and knee-breeches, jabbering to each other in Irish. An old man here and there could speak a little English, and I remember one of them saying: Sure, they're only mountaineymen, yer honour, and have no English; but they have the goicks, he added with unction. And out of the tall hats came rolls of bank-notes, so dirty that my father grumbled, telling the tenant that he must bring cleaner notes; and afraid lest he should be sent off on a long trudge to the bank, the old fellow thrust the notes into my father's hand and began jabbering again. He's asking for his docket, yer honour, the interpreter explained. My father's clerk wrote out a receipt, and the old fellow went away, leaving me laughing at him, and the interpreter repeating: Sure, he's a mountaineyman, yer honour. And if they failed to pay their rents, the cabins they had built with their own hands were thrown down, for there was no pity for a man who failed to pay his rent. And if we thought that bullocks would pay us better we ridded our lands of them; cleaned our lands of tenants, is an expression I once heard, and I remember how they used to go away by train from Claremorris in great batches bawling like animals. There is no denying that we looked upon our tenants as animals, and they looked on us as kings; in all the old stories the landlord is a king. The men took off their hats to us and the women rushed out of their cabins dropping curtsies to us until the 'seventies. Their cry, Long life to yer honour, rings still in my ears; and the seignioral rights flourished in Mayo and Galway in those days, and soon after my father's funeral I saw the last of this custom: a middle-aged woman and her daughter and a small grey ass laden with two creels of young chickens were waiting at my door, the woman curtsying, the girl drawing her shawl about her face shyly. She was not an ugly girl, but I had been to Lodge Road and had seen Jim Browne's pictures.
Everything was beginning for me, and everything was declining for my mother. She would have liked to linger by her husband's grave a little while, but I gave her no peace, urging the fact upon her that sooner or later we should have to go back to London. Why delay, mother? We cannot spend our lives here going to Kiltoome with flowers. An atrocious boy as I relate him, but an engaging manner transforms reality as a mist or a ray of light transforms a landscape, and my mother died believing me to have been the best of sons, though I never sacrificed my convenience to hers. It will be admitted that that is the end we should all strive for. But the means? Ah, the means! An ancient saw this of ends and means which it will be well to leave to others to disentangle.
Awaking from a long reverie, I asked myself where I had left off, like an absent-minded old woman telling a child a story. At the part where every day spent in Moore Hall after my father's death was like a great lump of lead on my shoulders. My mother's grief increased day by day; and if her health were to break down we might be kept at Moore Hall for months. It was important to get her back to London, and I think it must have been in the train that she heard the Army had never appealed to me; I had only consented to accept the Army because I had nothing else to propose to my father; it was painting that interested me, and a studio was sought as soon as I arrived in London. My aspiration did not reach as high as a private studio; the naked was my desire, and a drawing-class would provide me with that. No examination was required at Limerston Street. Barthe, a Frenchman, ran the little show, of which Whistler was the attraction, and as soon as the model rested I picked my way through the easels and stood at the edge of the crowd that had collected round the famous artist. His drawings on brown-paper slips seemed to me to be very empty and casual, altogether lacking in that attitude of mind which interested me so much in Rossetti. His jokes were disagreeable to me; he did not seem to take art seriously, but I must have disguised my feelings very well, for he asked me to come to see him; any Sunday morning, he said, I should find him at 96 Cheyne Walk. The very next Sunday I went there, but there were few pictures in the studio, and I was left to look upon the melancholy portrait of his mother which he had just completed, and gathering nothing from it I turned to another picture, a girl in a white dress dreaming by the chimney-piece, her almost Rossetti-like face reflected in the mirror. Swinburne had translated her languor into verses; these were printed round the frame; and while I read them Whistler discoursed to his friends on the beauty of Oriental art, and his praise sent me to the Japanese screen, but I could discover no correct drawing in it, and begged one of the visitors to tell me how faces represented by two or three lines and a couple of dots could be considered to be well drawn. He gave me a hurried explanation, and returned to Whistler, who laughed boisterously whilst rattling iced drinks from glass to glass; and I think that I despised and hated him when he capped my somewhat foolish enthusiasm for the pre-Raphaelite painters with a comic anecdote.
I left his house irritated, and somewhat ostentatiously neglected him at the class, allying myself openly and defiantly to the next celebrity, for our class boasted of another, Oliver Madox Brown, son of the great Ford Madox Brown, a boy that came from Fitzroy Square, bringing with him such a reputation for genius that he paid no attention whatever to Whistler-a strange boy, stranger even than I: a long fat body buttoned in an old overcoat reaching to his knees, odd enough when upright, but odder still when crouching on the ground in front of his drawing-board, his right hand sketching rapidly, his left throwing black locks of hair from his face, of which little was seen but the great hooked nose. I could not keep him out of my thoughts, for he seemed to me even more unfortunate than myself, less likely to win a woman's love. At last my passion to know him overcame me, and I dared to speak to him. He engaged immediately in conversation just as if he wished to become my friend, and agreed to walk back to South Kensington with me. I remember the care with which I picked my words during this walk, and my object being to win him it seemed to me to be perfectly safe to ask if he were in the life-room in the Academy. My surprise was great when he answered that he had no time to spare for the Academy, all his mornings being employed upon his six-foot canvas, the Deformed Transformed, and wondering how he managed to give visible shape to an idea so essentially literary, I asked if he could explain his composition to me. He said that he would prefer to show me his picture, and I promised to call at Fitzroy Square, but delayed going there from day to day lest too much desire to see him and his picture might wean him from the willingness he had shown for my acquaintance; and it was not till he asked me why I had not been to see him that I summoned sufficient courage to take the tram to Gower Street. Before me on the doorstep was a handsome middle-aged man, somewhat thick-set, with greying hair and beard, who said to me, You have come to see Oliver, haven't you? divining one of Oliver's friends in me.
We met at the class in the Fulham Road, and he asked me to come and see his picture. And you are Oliver's father? I added, the great painter. For I recognised Oliver in the handsome and kindly eyes. Yes, yes, and he turned on the landing to ask me if I would care to come into his studio before going to see Oliver. Does he, then, think so much of Oliver that he puts him before his own pictures? I asked myself whilst he pulled the easels forward and showed me his pictures. If I may make a remark, I said aloud.
Pray do, he said.
Your hands always seem a little heavy, but perhaps that is your style, as long necks are Rossetti's.
He laughed in his beard, and we ascended that great sloping staircase. He paints in the morning, said the adoring father, and writes in the evening when he doesn't go to the class. A volume of poems was mentioned, and I asked if the manuscript had gone to the publisher. Oliver hesitates about sending it. Swinburne and Rossetti are publishing poetry, and all the literature of the pre-Raphaelite movement has hitherto gone into verse. He drawled on, telling me that Oliver had finished a prose romance of about three hundred and fifty pages and was about to begin another, and a volume of short stories was mentioned. I ventured an inquiry, and the great painter quoted from his advice to his son: Oliver, don't waste your time on short stories. You have your six-foot canvas in the morning and your novels and poems in the evening.
I was too overwhelmed to give any answer, and Oliver paid no heed to his fond parent's admonishment. He seemed to take it for granted that he was not like other men, and I understood that having heard himself so often spoken of as a genius he had accepted the fact of his genius as he had come to accept the fact that he could speak and hear and walk. But I, who had been brought up in the belief that I was very stupid, was astonished at my extraordinary good fortune in having met Oliver and won his good opinion. After all, come what may, this wonderful father and still more wonderful son had thought me worth speaking to for a while, and then, remembering that Oliver was writing a novel, I begged him to read me some of it if he weren't too busy. He hesitated and might have been tempted if his father had not reminded him that luncheon would be ready in a few minutes. Father and son were condescending enough to ask me to stay to lunch, but I did not dare to say yes, and descended the stairs regretting my shyness. On the doorstep, while trying to summon up courage to say, On second thoughts I'll come back to lunch, I besought Oliver to bring his manuscript down to the class and read it to us during the rests. He promised to do so, and the following day when Mary Lewis left the pose and wrapped herself in a shawl (a shapely little girl she was, Whistler's model; she used to go over and talk to him during the rests), Oliver began to read, and Mary sat like one entranced, her shawl slipping from her, and I remember her listening at last quite naked. And when the quarter of an hour had gone by we begged Oliver to go on reading, forgetful of Whistler, who sat in a corner looking as cross as an armful of cats. At last, M. Barthe was obliged to intervene, and Mary resumed the pose.
Après tout, je ne veux pas que mon atelier devienne un cours de littérature, he muttered.
But we were thinking of the story, and begged Oliver to take up the reading again at the end of the sitting, and Whistler went away in high dudgeon, for Mary stopped behind to hear how the story ended. And a few months later we crowded together, forgetful of the model, telling how typhoid had robbed England of a great genius; and after Oliver's death my interest in the class declined.

Serpent Worship predates human history. Until the War-Cycle began, or the Invasions of the Nile, the Serpent was a symbol of wisdom, enlightenment, healing, rejuvenation .... i explained the reasons the serpent has been portrayed as the villain in recent times, and a user happened to post the CIA gate way experience classified page, which is a perfect example of Enlils promise To deprive humanity of knowledge of its potential. The serpent in Genesis is understood to have been an actual creature, not an allegory. In Ancient Hebrew history, for instance, records that our human ancestors were not the only intelligent, free-will beings who inhabited the ancient world. The ancient Hebrew word for "Serpent" is "Nachash" (which according to Strong's Comprehensive and other Biblical concordances contained in itself the meanings: Reptile, Enchantment, Hissing, Whisper, Diligently Observe, Learn by Experience, Incantation, Snake, etc. all of which may be descriptive of the serpent-sauroid race which we have been referring to). The original "Nachash" was not actually a "snake" as most people believe, but actually an extremely intelligent, cunning creature possessed with the ability to speak and reason. It also stood upright as , we say Lebe is 'of great stature '.
Those that evolved from reptiles dream, since The reptilian mind is still operating in them and we humans call that mental state "dreaming." There is no "dreamstate" in reptiles because this mentality is their waking state. The Sacred Secrets Brotherhood, taught through symbolism. "Language" of the reptilian brain is visual imagery. All communications transferred by reptiles are done so by visual symbolic representations, each having specific meaning.(Operation Mockingbird). Amram, Moses father saw the Watchers in his "dream-vision", this is the fiery serpent his son would later describe
R-Complex: .• obsessive-compulsive behavior
• personal day-to-day rituals and superstitious acts • obeisance to precedent, as in legal, religious, cultural, and other matters
• responding to partial representations (coloration, "strangeness," etc.), whether alive or inanimate
The Hopi Indian Legend of Creation tells of three different beginnings. One story says that Hopi have arisen from an underground paradise through an opening called Sipapu. The underground paradise was wondrous with beautiful clear skies and plentiful food sources [ bila-svarga].(identical to Tibetan -Shambala -Place of Peace )Things were great thanks to Anu & Sheti (snake brothers), they would return to the upper world because of the existence of those called Two Hearts, the bad ones.
So Enki/Ninhursag, mixed there genes with humans, allowing them to "eat from the tree of Knowledge" which Enlil disapproved of. HomoSapiens: Man, the Wise. • Naga "serpent & One who is wise.[ Further meanings from the Sanskrit-English Dictionary by Monier Monier-Williams: m. "not moving," a mountain (in Atharva Veda); the number 7 (because of the 7 principal mountains; any tree or plant (in Mahabharata); the sun.] Always associated with the #7, which means enlightenment. In the East Indian pantheon it is connected with the Serpent Spirit and the Dragon Spirit. It has an equivalence to the Burmese Nats, or god-serpents. Egypt, China, India, South/Central America Naga-synonomous with adept/initiates Aramu Muru. ("Serpentine Father or master”). In the Orient, the word “master” often means “teacher”. " Sumer (meaning "land of the guardians"), Babylon (meaning "gate of the gods"), and other civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia.7 Sages
The Nagas are a race of serpent beings. Most often they manifest themselves with half-man, half-serpent bodies, although sometimes they assume the shape of a dragon, or appear in the guise of a cobra. They can take many different forms including snakes, humans with snake tails and normal humans, often beautiful maidens. Said to have A precious gem embedded in their foreheads(3rd eye) endowing them supernatural powers. Nagas are divided into four classes: heavenly, divine, earthly or hidden, depending upon their function in guarding the heavenly palace, bringing rainfall, draining rivers or guarding treasures.
Buddha gave them the Prajnaparamita Sutras, until humanity matured. .Egyptians called the forehead dot Aten, the sun symbol. The Egyptian third eye implies the same concept as the Hindu “forehead dot”. The Aten is the awoken eye of Horus that sees the “sun within” or the “soul within”. And “sun” or “soul” is truly the “divine spark” or “Higher Self” within us. Thus it symbolizes the eye of Horus and the “Sun Within” or “Soul Within” that the awakened third eye sees* Coffin Text 313 Horus states proudly : "I made my Eye a living serpent". The handbag symbolizes divinely inspired knowledge, acquired through the proper use of the pinecone(pineal gland).
That kundalini serpent energy has been scientifically verified, the benefits are well documented. Our ancestors deserve an apology, and we need to follow Teslas advice. Study of nonphysical phenomenon, one couldnt possibly hope to understand how the Ma’ori-Ko-Hau-Rongorongo (‘master of special knowledge’) constructed the moai, the serpent wisdom tells us that all things come from the unseen to the seen & returns from the seen to the unseen. The spinal core with its outlying sympathetic trunks and their ganglia create a structure capable of generating a caduceus wound double helix magnetic field. The vortex ring is an archetypal form for self-organized coherence in zero-point energy. It appears in all levels of nature from galaxies to elementary particles.
There is an occult energy in the heart(mind) that comes from Tonatiuh, the Sun,and if man releases it, returning it consciously to the sun, he becomes immortal.But to liberate this energy, sacrifice is necessary. Man must sacrifice the desires and habits that he adores, sacrifice them in himself, and turn the knife against the enemy that he carries within himself, that keeps his heart a prisoner" Maya Pyramid of Fire Codex
-Enoch(Thoth) was the first among the children of men born of the Earth who had learned writing, science, and wisdom" from the angels. • Aramu Mayu -Serpentine Mother
• Serpents in Sanscrit of Indus (India).
• The earliest Mayans and their first Serpent kings, Caramaya and Naga Maya
• Kukulcan and Quetzalcoatal creating the Itza Maya Culture of South America.
• The Lung Dragons of China, and an interesting fact is that an ancient Chinese term for dragon was Naga.
• Amarus and Con Ticci Viracocha of Peru.
INCA believe that 2012 was the end of a cycle of 5,000yr of darkness. Humanity comes out of this collective amnesia, remember our connection to nature, "The serpentine energies of Pacha-Mama, and her daughters would once again regain their place of honor, and authority in the matrix of social awareness"
The great temple-builders of the famous Ankhor Wat were considered to be the semi-divine Khmers. You see the Buddha protected by Naga during meditation at ankhor Wat, symbolizes the 40 day initiatory ritual.. The avenue leading to the Temple is lined with the seven-headed Naga. -Mexico, we find the "Naga" which becomes "Nagal." The Hopi legends tell of Kachina who lead the migration to their current location. Palatquapi (Palenque) wasnt abandoned, their the Kachina taught the Serpent wisdom, Similar to Göbekli Tepe(buried) it was sacred. The Itza said that :when western archaeologists discovered who was buried in Palenque that the truth would remain hidden". I couldn't even find a photo of his entire body, only articles about a coverup. Notice, when the shining ones remains are found theres only "elongated skulls". Nothing about the tall, robust frame. The underground palace of Naga king is called Patala(Tibet -Dalai Lama resides in the Potala) They have guarded and protected several royal Burmese personages. They also give rubies to those they favor. Orissa India-Ndelebe
-China, the Naga is given the form of the Dragon and has a direct association with the Emperor and is known as the "Son of Heaven"...

• Egypt the same association is termed "King-Initiate." The Chinese are even said to have originated with the Serpent demi-gods and even to speak their language, Naga-Krita. For a place that has no serpents, Tibet, they are still known in a symbolic sense and are called "Lu!" (Naga). Nagarjuna in Tibetan, [becomes] Lu-trub. Nagarjuna for example, is shown with an aura, or halo, of seven serpents which is an indication of a very high degree of Initiation. The symbolism of the seven serpents, usually cobras, are found all over certain systems in the Buddhist ruins of Ankhor, Ceylon.

Babies can see auras clearly. In fact babies eyes are unfocussed and they tend to focus/unfocus around you rather than at you, this is because they are observing the auras. highly vulnerable and auras never lie so it is safer for them to interact with others using auras as a guide
Buddha was an Enlightened Master from the Sakya clan of the Naga Race, and was the first man on earth to preach the great principles of equality, liberty and fraternity. He caused the Nagas to become conscious of their own mind power as opposed to the mantra power.
I mentioned the watchers in the last thread, the text says angels of the Lord, "come down to Earth to instruct the children of men and to bring about justice and equity on Earth." But in the case of the wicked or bad angels, the science they teach turns to wicked ends because of their sins.Watchers fall from grace with God when Enoch travels to heaven in physical form to testify against them. So ,Enoch(Thoth) was Enki’s son & creator of the Mystery school traditions of the Itoure(nile) that we carry on still today. Once again, it's ALWAYS been the serpent who's on your side. The serpent entered into the Egyptian religion under all his characters, of AN EMBLEM OF DIVINITY, A CHARM, AN ORACLE, and A GOD.
He tells God that the Watchers "had begun to go unto the daughters of men, so that they became impure". As punishment for the sins of the evil Watchers against humankind, God destroys humanity, including the hybrid race of beings who are the offspring of humans and Watchers, by causing a great flood. In Genesis the Serpent spoke up for us, Jesus himself was an initiate of the Serpent Wisdom. His 40days in the Wilderness, was our 40day initiation, I previously cited Pythagoras having to go through the same experience before being granted admission to Heliopolis. These rules are written in stone. The Essenes (Outsiders) were nomadic priests, Jesus calls himself the Morning Star(Venus) therefore he's telling us he is a follower of the Mother Goddess Isis.
The Cintamani Jewel was considered one of the sacred treasures of many Eastern civilizations, from Japan to India. Said to have been a gift from Heavenly Naga from Sirius. As i said in the previous post, when our cultures diefy someone it is because they displayed God like actions, the idea of an imaginary man in the sky came about only after The Roman(Enlil) invasions. The Reptilians shown at Horyuji Temple were stylized, that's what the sculptor saw. The jewel first appeared as one of the seven treasures owned by a king who was benevolent, just, and the ideal ruler. It also appears in stories as a water-purifying crystal which could be placed in murky water by traveling monks . This metaphor encouraged faith when overcome by doubts. A third depiction of the jewel is in the tale of Indra's net. It describes a net of immeasurable size with infinite knots. Each knot contains a Mani Jewel with an endless number of facets. Each jewel reflects every other jewel in the same way that individual beings are interconnected and indistinguishable from the whole.
Hindu tradition it is connected with the gods Vishnu and Ganesha or portrayed as a beautiful jewel in the possession of the Nāga king. The Cintamani in these legends are again wish-fulfilling gems that represents the enlightened mind in which all dreams are accomplished.Buddhists believe that the stone came into the custody of the enlightened and was taken to Shambhala, a legendary kingdom said to lie in Asia, north of the Himalayas. They believe a king will emerge from this place to bring forth the Golden Age. the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan, consist of the sword for valor, the mirror for wisdom, and the jewel for benevolence. It is believed that the Emperor was chosen by god and given these three treasures to ensure his success as ruler. The Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for the star, Sirius, closely resembles these three objects, being an obelisk (sword), a half circle (mirror) and a star (jewel). The reappearance of Sirius signified the annual flooding of the Nile and was represented by Sopdet, the goddess of fertility and abundance.
The symbolism of three is common and found in the holy trinity; the three physical stages of life (represented by the Celtic spiral of life that looks similar to the Cintamani); electron, neutron and proton trinity; the body, mind and soul concept; mother, father and child… .
In 2009, elders from the cultures that I often discuss, led by Grand Naga-Maya Council led the end of the cycle 52-moon ritual. Where elders would visit each "navel" on a full moon for meditation, ritual that would occur at these sites before the invaders. This began at Angkor wat & Dec 2012 ended in Mexico. I was obligated to attend the ritual in South America, where a group gathered in an Ohum Temple, in Llanganates mountains. we held the Khipu while in the dreamstate to recall the events that occured in the past. Initiates enter caves with special waterholes,to recieve "new insides" from the 'Hidden' Naga. Remember the same priests would always bring writing that was only for the priesthood and various sciences. The Brazil Tablet depicts a west African Jaliyaa who visited the Andes. The reptilian Statue Morrop, in Peru & the Ono(Venus complex) worship of the San Agustin is attributed to west African Jaliyaa who were called "magicians" & introduced Shamanism. Both Olmec & Moche, Ono worshiped the Venus complex of the Oni tribe.
Aramu Muru, is attributed with establishing many sacred sites that have been rediscovered today throughout the Incan Empire, Manco Kapac and the Kapac Cuna, members of the Solar Brotherhood from Lemuria, built megalithic temple complexes throughout Peru, such as,
Tiahuanaco
• Sacsayhuaman
• Ollantaytambo
• Machu Picchu
Adepts known as the Kumara, were and remain a highly mystical order of the Great Solar Brotherhood. The term Kumara has in our contemporary understandings come to mean "the androgynous serpentine beings." Although it translates more accurately to ‘Father,' those of the Elder Race. It is known in some circles that later, after the decline of the society in Egypt, the Emerald Tablets were taken from their resting place by Great Royal Wife Nefertiti wife of Akhenaten(Moses) who was a Kumara and schooled in the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, to the Halls of Records in the Yucatan.
You can find references to the Kumara the shining ones, in the Hindu Puranas where they are described as being the first teachers of Tantra Yoga on the Earth, and the descendents of Ti and Tiye. As well there are numerous references to 'the shining ones' (Elohim) in the Bible and the Koran. Purana Ancient Text( Only the Roman's made 'Shining Ones ' seem evil..
As the last Incalix Muru in the final days of Kasskara established the Rings of each of the Children of the Sun. With each individual Ring there was then appointed a circle comprising of 13 priests, and 13 priestesses, one head figure became the elected symbolic spiritual leader or Aramu. Aramu Muru for the men and Aramu Mayu for the women
Each Ring that was chosen was then instructed to take their records of ancient wisdom to their respective regions and hide the items at specific locations, deep within the chambers of ancient mountains; until it was the time of the Awakening(2012). These individuals were faithful in their belief, and wise in their understandings of the original teachings.Each had been close to the great and wise Sanat Kumara, the Kumara, the father. (Not as in Father God, rather oldest remembered Relative. The First Kumara the Aten-Adama.)
Naga/Nagash was also the title ‘King’ for the ancient Semitic speaking people of modern Ethiopia who lived in Arwe, and ancient kingdom in Punt.Sir William Jones contends that Sanskrit has its origins in the Nagari Ethiopian script created by the Ethiopian Naga Rulers of India during the era of the Ethiopian Empire of Punt which stretched from Africa’s Blue Nile River into India from circa 900 BC.American Journal Human Genetics "The older subclades of R1b were found East. R1b1a was found among the Levantines and R1b1* in central Africa with a trail leading back to Egypt and the Middle East 12,000-15,000 years ago. The highest diversity of R1b1b1 and R1b1b2 was found in Anatolia and the Caucasus, and the split between these two haplogroups occurred around Anatolia"
Indeed, the name Nagari itself when used to denote Sanskrit betrays the Ethiopian origin of the Sanskrit language. Dravidian classic, the Chilappathikaran made it clear that the first great kingdom of India was Naganadu.These Ethiopians were called Naga. It was the Naga who created Sanskrit.The first writing created by the Puntites was Sabaean. The earliest inscriptions written in this script were found at Haoulti, Ethiopia.WM Jones-Linguistics
This article specifically mentions the Ainu, that i discussed in the thread aboveScienceDaily-Genetics tie Coastal Chinese to Americas

PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1551-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-salve-chapter-15/
PROMPTS: Easily the worst writing I've ever seen, and ironically in it he goes on about how bad someone's writing is... Is this a prank book? Like is he taking the piss, or has the world actually produced people this dumb? George, from the absolute bottom of my heart, I fucking hate you.
I did laugh at that bit where his punching bag was like 'Yo, I have to go to bed.'
And then it was like 'GOOD MORNING PUNCHING BAG! Anyway, as I was saying HEY! LISTEN!'
'Can I just have some breakfast fir-'
'SURE WHATEVER BUT I'M NOT STOPPING TALKING!'
​
Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
XV
When I rushed up to tell him of my discovery he was in breeches and riding-boots, presenting in my drawing-room an incongruous spectacle of sport on a background of impressionist pictures.
You don't mean to tell me that you brought me all the way from Mayo to argue with you about Catholicism and Protestantism, leaving important work?
What work?
Clearing the stone park.
A darker cloud than that I had anticipated appeared in his long, narrow face, and as he seemed very angry I thought it better to listen to his plan for allowing the villagers to cut wood in the stone park. But the temptation to hear him argue that literature and dogma were compatible compelled me to break in.
Do let me tell you; it won't take more than ten minutes for me to state my case. And this is a matter that interests me much more than the stone park. The question must be threshed out.
He protested much, beseeching me to believe that he had neither the learning nor the ability to argue with me.
Father Finlay—
That's what Gill said. But the matter is one that can be decided by anybody of ordinary education; even education isn't necessary, for it must be clear to anybody who will face the question without prejudice that the mind petrifies if a circle be drawn round it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind.
The Colonel was very wroth, and his words were that I lived among Protestants, who were inclined to use me as a stalking-horse.
I came to Ireland, as you know, to help literature, and if I see that dogma and literature are incompatible, I must say so.
At that moment the parlourmaid opened the door and announced dinner.
You'll be late for dinner, Maurice.
If I am, you're to blame, and he rushed upstairs; and as we sat down to dinner he begged me, in French, to drop the subject, Teresa being a Catholic.
I suppose you are afraid she might hear something to cause her to lose her faith, I said as she went out with the soup-tureen.
I think we should respect her principles.
The word inflamed me. Superstitions that were rammed into her.
She returned with the roast chicken, and the question had to be dropped until she returned to the kitchen to fetch an apple dumpling; and we did not really settle down to literature or dogma until coffee was brought in and my cigar was alight.
It's a great pity that you always set yourself in opposition to all received ideas. I was full of hope when you wrote saying you were coming to Ireland. I suppose there's no use asking you not to publish. You will always go your own way.
But if I limit myself to an essay entitled Literature or Dogma—you don't object to that?
No, I don't say I object to it; but I'd rather not have the question raised just now.
I see you don't wish to discuss it.
No, I don't mind discussing it. But I must understand you. Two propositions are involved in your statement—which is the one you wish to put forward? Do you mean that all books, which in your opinion may be classed as literature, contain things that are contrary to Catholic dogma? Or do you mean that no man professing the Catholic faith has written a book which, in your opinion, may be classed as literature since the Reformation?
I put forward both propositions. But my main contention is that the Catholic may not speculate; and the greatest literature has come out of speculation on the value of life. Shakespeare—
There is nothing in Shakespeare contrary to Catholic dogma.
You are very prompt.
Moreover, I deny that England had, at that time, gone over entirely to Protestantism. Italian culture had found its way into England; England had discovered her voice, I might say her language. A Renaissance has nothing in common with Puritanism and there is reason for thinking this. The Brownists? And the Colonel, who is a well-read man, gave me an interesting account of these earliest Puritans.
The larger part of the English people may have been Protestant, he continued, in 1590; but England hadn't entirely gone over to Protestantism. Besides, England's faith has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Nor does anybody know who wrote the plays.
My dear friend, you won't allow me to develop my argument. It matters nothing to me whether you prefer the lord or the mummer. The plays were written, I suppose, by an Englishman; that, at least, will not be denied; and my contention is—No, there is no reason why I should contend, for it is sufficiently obvious that only an Agnostic mind could have woven the fabric of the stories and set the characters one against the other. A sectarian soul would not have been satisfied to exhibit merely the passions.
Will you charge me again with interrupting your argument if I say that I know nothing in Shakespeare that a Catholic might not have written?
Well, I think if I were to take down a volume and read it, I could find a hundred verses. I see your answer trembling on your lips, that you don't require a hundred, but two or three. Very well. A Catholic couldn't have written There is nothing serious in mortality, for he believes the very contrary; nor could a Catholic have written A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
What reason have you to suppose that Shakespeare was speaking in his own person? It seems to me that by assuming he was doing so, you impugn his art as a dramatist, which is to give appropriate speeches to each of his characters; the writer must never transpire in a drama.
I'm afraid your religious zeal spurs you into dangerous statements, and you are in an entanglement from which you will find it difficult to extricate yourself. Shakespeare weaves a plot and sets will against will, desire against desire, but his plays are suffused by his spirit, and it is always the same spirit breathing, whether he be writing about carls or kings, virgins or lights-o'-love. The passage quoted from Macbeth is an excellent example of the all-pervading personality of the poet, who knew when to forget the temporal character of Macbeth, and to put into the mouth of the cattle-spoiler phrases that seem to us more suited to Hamlet. The poet-philosopher, at once gracious and cynical, wise with the wisdom of the ages, and yet akin to the daily necessity of men's foibles and fashions, is as present in the play of Macbeth as in King Lear; and the same fine Agnostic mind we trace throughout the comedies, and the poems, and the sonnets, smiling at all systems of thought, knowing well that there is none that outlasts a generation.
I cannot see why a Catholic might not have written the phrases you quote. One can only judge these things by one's own conscience, and if I had thought of these verses—
You would have written them? I've always suspected you of being an Agnostic Catholic.
The difference between the Agnostic and the Catholic mind seems to me to be this—we all doubt (to doubt is human), only in the ultimate analysis the Catholic accepts and the Agnostic rejects.
We know that the saints suffered from doubt, but the Agnostic doesn't doubt, though he is often without hope of a survival of his personality. A good case might be made out, metaphysically, if it weren't that most of us are without any earthly personality. Why then a heavenly one? You were once a great admirer of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám, and I doubt if you will dare to say to my face that a Catholic could have written the Rubáiyát.
The Colonel was at first inclined to agree with me that there was a great deal that a Catholic could not have written in Fitzgerald's poem; but he soon recovered himself, and began to argue that all that Fitzgerald had done was to contrast ideas, maintaining that the argument was conducted very fairly, and that if the poem were examined it would be difficult to adduce proof from it of the author's Agnosticism.
But we know Fitzgerald was an Agnostic?
You're shifting ground. You started by saying that the poems of Shakespeare and Fitzgerald revealed the Agnosticism of the writers, you now fall back upon contemporary evidence.
I don't think I've shifted my ground at all. If we knew nothing about Fitzgerald's beliefs, there is abundant proof in his writings that he was an Agnostic. You'll have to admit that his opinions on the nothingness of life and the futility of all human effort, whether it strives after pleasure or pain, would read as oddly if introduced into the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as sympathetic remarks about the Immaculate Conception would read in the world of Mr Swinburne or Professor Huxley. The nothingness of our lives and the length of the sleep out of which we come, and the still greater length of the sleep which will very soon fall upon us, is the spring whence all great poetry flows, and this spring is perforce closed to Catholic writers for ever. Do you know the beautiful stanza in Moschus's Lament for Bion?
Ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day they live again and spring in another year; but we, men, we, the great and mighty, or wise, when once we have died, in the hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long and endless and unawakening sleep.
Could these lines have been written by a Catholic?
The Colonel could not see why not.
Because ... but, my dear friend, I won't waste time explaining the obvious. This you'll admit—that no such verses occur in Catholic poems?
As poignant expressions regarding the nothingness of life as any in Moschus, Shakespeare, or Fitzgerald are to be found in the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. Man walketh in a vain shadow and troubleth himself in vain.
The Bible wasn't written by Catholics.
The Colonel had to admit that it wasn't, and after watching and rejoicing in his discomfiture for a while I went on to speak of Shakespeare's contemporaries, declaring them to be robust livers, whose philosophy was to live out their day in love of wine and women, as frequenters of the Mermaid Tavern and of wenches, haters of the Puritan.
You'll not claim Marlowe, I suppose? You'll admit that there was very little Catholic about him except a very Catholic taste for life. You mentioned just now the Brownists; they were overcome, you tell me, for the time being. But Puritanism is an enemy, if it be really one, that I can meet in a friendly spirit. Landor says that Virgil and St Thomas Aquinas could never cordially shake hands; but I dare say I could shake hands with Knox. The Puritan closed the theatres, an act which I won't pretend to sympathise with; but England's dramatic genius had spent itself, and for its intolerance of amusement Puritanism made handsome amends by giving us Milton, and a literature of its own. Of course everything can be argued, and some will argue that Milton's poem was written in spite of Puritan influence; but this I do think, that if ever a religious movement may be said to have brought a literature along with it, Puritanism is that one. As much as any man that ever lived, Milton's whole life was spent in emancipating himself from dogma. In his old age he was a Unitarian.
You've forgotten The Pilgrim's Progress, written out of the very heart of the language, and out of the mind of the nation.
Thank you for reminding me of it. A manly fellow was Bunyan, without clerical unction, and a courage in his heart that nothing could cast down, the glory and symbol of Puritanism for ever and ever.
Puritanism is more inspiring than Protestantism; it is a more original attitude of mind—
The Agnostic mind is the original mind, the mind which we bring into the world.
Milton was a Unitarian, Bunyan a Puritan; where does your Protestantism come in? Who is the great Protestant poet?
I don't limit Protestantism to the Established Church. Protestantism is a stage in human development. But if you want a poet who would shed the last drop of his blood for the Established Church, there is one, Wordsworth, and he is still considered to be a pretty good poet; Coleridge was nearly a divine.
You make a point with Wordsworth, I admit it. He seems, however, to have overstepped the line in his Intimations of Immortality.
But you miss my point somewhat; it is that there is hardly any line of Protestantism to overstep.
I set Newman against—
Against whom? Not against Wordsworth, surely? And if you do, think of the others—shall I enumerate?
It wouldn't be worth while; it is evident that all that is best in England has gone into Agnosticism.
And into Protestantism; confronted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, you can't deny to Protestantism a large share in the shaping of modern poetry. But there isn't a Catholic writer, only a few converts.
Newman.
But, my dear Colonel, we cannot for one moment compare Newman's mind to Wordsworth's or Coleridge's? To do so I may contend is ridiculous, without laying myself open to a charge of being much addicted to either writer. Wordsworth moralised Nature away, and it is impossible, for me, at least, to forgive him his:
A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.
That nothing more is a moral stain that no time shall wash away. One would have thought that flowers, especially wild flowers, might be freed from all moral obligations. I am an Objectivist, reared among the Parnassians, an exile from the Nouvelle Athènes, and neither poet has ever unduly attracted me. Three or four beautiful poems more or less in the world are not as important as a new mind, a new way of feeling and seeing. Mere writing—
A theory invented on the spot so as to rid yourself of Newman.
There you are mistaken. Allow me to follow the train of my thoughts, and you will understand me better. And don't lose your head and run away frightened if I dare to say that Newman could not write at all. But you have dislocated my ideas a little. Allow me to continue in my own way, for what I'm saying to you today will be written tomorrow or after, and talking my mind to you is a great help. I'm using you as an audience. Now, we were speaking about Coleridge, and I was saying that the mere fact that a man has written three or four beautiful poems is not enough; my primary interest in a writer being in the mind that he brings into the world; by a mind I mean a new way of feeling and seeing. I think I've said that before, but no harm is done by repeating it.
If you'll allow me to interrupt you once more, I will suggest that Newman brought a new way of feeling and seeing into the world—a new soul.
I suppose he did; a sort of ragged weed which withered on till it was ninety. It is a mistake to speak of him as a convert to Catholicism; he was a born Catholic if ever a man was born one. Were it not for him the term a born Catholic would be a solecism, for at first sight it doesn't seem very easy to understand how a man can be born a Catholic. A man is born blind, or deaf, or dumb, a hunchback, or an idiot, but it's difficult to see how he can be born a Catholic. Yet it is so; Newman proves it. A born Catholic would seem to mean one predisposed to rely upon the help of priests, sacraments, texts, amulets, medals, indulgences; and Newman, you will not deny, brought into the world an inordinate appetite for texts, decrees, councils, and the like; even when he was a Protestant he was always talking about his Bishop. He was disposed from the beginning to seek authority for his every thought. Obedience in spiritual matters is the watchword of the Catholic, and surely Newman was always replete with it. He was a born Catholic; he justified the phrase. My dear Colonel, I'm aware that I'm delivering a little sermon, but to speak to you like this is a great help to me. He seems to have been the least spiritual of men, bereft of all sense of divinity. He seems to have lived his life in ignorance that religion existed before Christianity, that Buddhism preceded it, and that in China—But we need not wander so far afield. Newman was a sectarian, if ever there was one, astride on a rail between Protestantism and Catholicism, timidly letting down one leg, drawing it back, and then letting down the other leg. In the 'sixties men were frightened lest their ancestors might turn out to be monkeys, and a great many ran after Newman clapping their hands in praise of his broken English.
Broken English! interrupted the Colonel.
Yes, broken mutterings about an Edict in the fourth century, and that the world has been going astray ever since. He seems to have really believed that the destiny of nations depended on the chatter of the Fathers, and he totters after them, like an old man in a dark corridor with a tallow dip in his hand. A simple-minded fellow, who meant well, I think; one can see his pale soul through his eyes, and his pale style is on his face. The best that can be said about it is that it is homely. You never saw The Private Secretary, did you?
The Colonel shook his head.
When Mr Spalding came on the stage, saying, I obey my Bishop, I at once thought of Newman, and, though I have no shred of evidence to support my case, I shall always maintain that that amusing comedy was suggested by The Apologia. It seems to have risen out of it, and I can imagine the writer walking up and down his study, his face radiant, seeing Mr Spalding as a human truth, a human objectification of an interest in texts, decrees, and in Bishops. I never thought of it before, but Newman confesses to Mr Spalding's wee sexuality in The Apologia. I have been reading The Apologia this morning, and for the first time. Here it is:
I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me—there can be no mistake about the fact; viz., that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since—with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all—was more or less connected in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved.
He is himself in this paragraph, and nothing but himself. Even on a subject in which his whole life concerned he can only write dryly.
And we wrangled for some time over the anticipation which had held its ground almost continuously.
I admit that it isn't very good; but how do you explain that he has always been considered a master of English?
All in good time, my dear Colonel. We are now concerned with Newman's mind; it is the mind that produces the style. Listen to this:
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
This passage, I believe, was read with considerable piety and interest by the age which produced it, and I wonder why it has fallen out of favour; for to sentimentalise is to succeed, and it was really very kind of Newman to sentimentalise over the miseries which our lightest sins cause our Creator. An unfortunate case his is indeed, since the Catholic Church holds that venial sins are committed every moment of the day and night. The Creator torments us after we are dead by putting us into hell, but while we are on earth we give him hell. And our difficulties don't end with the statement that we make the Creator's life a hell for him, for we are told that it would be better that all humanity should perish in extremest agony than that, etc. If that be so, why doesn't the Creator bring humanity to an end? The only possible answer to this question is that the Creator and the Catholic Church are not agreed on the point, and it would be pretentious on my part to offer arbitration. They must settle their differences as best they can. I'm afraid, Colonel, you look at me a little contemptuously, as if you thought my criticism frivolous.
Logically, of course, the Colonel answered—logically, of course, Newman is right.
We wasted at least ten minutes discussing how something that seemed utterly absurd could be said to be logical; and to bring the discussion to an end, I reminded the Colonel that Carlyle had said that Newman's mind was not much greater than that of a half-grown rabbit. Perhaps Carlyle libelled the rabbit; he should have said the brain of a half-grown insect, a blackbeetle.
But, said the Colonel, do you believe the blackbeetle to be less intelligent than the rabbit? In my experience—
I'm inclined to agree with you, but we're wandering from the point. I want to draw your attention to some passages, and to ask you if they are as badly written as they seem to be?
When you say that Newman wrote very badly, do you mean that he wrote in a way which does not commend itself to your taste, or that he wrote incorrectly?
His sentences are frequently incorrect, but I don't lay stress on their occasional incorrectness. An ungrammatical sentence is by no mean incompatible with beauty of style; all the great writers have written ungrammatically; I suppose idiom means ungrammatical phrases made acceptable by usage; dialect is generally ungrammatical; but Newman's slips do not help his style in the least. You're watching me, my dear Colonel, with a smile in your eyes, wondering into what further exaggeration my detestation of Catholicism will carry me.
You have abused Newman enough. Let us get to facts. You say that he writes incorrectly.
The passage in which he deplores the suffering that man causes God convinced me that his mind was but a weed, and, though there was no necessity for my doing so, I said: Let us see how he expresses himself. You will admit that a man of weak intellect cannot write a fine style.
Let us get to the grammatical blunders which you say you have discovered in Newman.
I turned to the first pages and read:
He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason.
Don't you think, Colonel, that emphatically opened my mind is a queer sentence for a master of English style to write, and that we should search in Carlyle or Landor a long while before we came upon such draggle-tailed English as we read on page 7?
He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason. After being first noticed by him in 1822, I became very intimate with him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at Alban Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became Tutor of my College, and his hold upon me gradually relaxed. He had done his work towards me or nearly so, when he taught me to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet. Not that I had not a good deal to learn from others still, but I influenced them as well as they me, and co-operated rather than merely concurred with them. As to Dr Whately, his mind was too different from mine for us to remain long on one line.
I know folks that is in the vegetable line, and I think I know one chap who should be tuk up for the murder of the King's English if he warn't dead already.
I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an Article of mine in the London Review, which Blanco White, good-humouredly, only called Platonic. When I was diverging from him in opinion (which he did not like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught me to think, but to think for myself. He left Oxford in 1831; after that, as far as I can recollect, I never saw him but twice, when he visited the University; once in the street in 1834, once in a room in 1838. From the time that he left, I have always felt a real affection for what I must call his memory; for, at least from the year 1834, he made himself dead to me. He had practically indeed given me up from the time that he became Archbishop in 1831; but in 1834 a correspondence took place between us,
A prize fight takes place; a correspondence begins.
which, though conducted, especially on his side, in a friendly spirit, was the expression of differences of opinion which acted as a final close to our intercourse. My reason told me that it was impossible we could have got on together longer, had he stayed in Oxford; yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell without pain. After a few years had passed, I began to believe that his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual advance,
He means than that of intellectual advance.
(I will not say through his fault) had not been satisfactory. I believe that he has inserted sharp things in his later works about me. They have not come in my way, and I have not thought it necessary to seek out what would pain me so much in the reading.
The next page consists mainly of quotations from Dr Whately, who apparently is capable of expressing himself, and we pick up Newman farther on.
The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior.
I really don't see, said the Colonel, that that sentence is—
Don't trouble to defend it. There is worse to come. But how is it that the writer of such sentences is still spoken about as a master of style? Am I the only man living who has read The Apologia? It is almost impossible to read; that I admit.
It would be against my nature to act otherwise than I do; but besides, it would be to forget the lessons which I gained in the experience of my own history in the past.
One doesn't gain lessons. How shall we amend it?—the experience I gained from the lessons of my own history.
The Bishop has but said that a certain Tract is objectionable, no reason being stated.
Without giving his reasons, the Bishop has only said that a certain Tract is objectionable, is how the editor of the halfpenny paper would probably revise Newman's sentence. And who will say that the revised text is not better than the original?
As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, in behalf of who would in the Anglican Church,
Can he mean those who so desired in the Anglican Church? But it would take too long to put this passage right, for it is impossible to know exactly what the greatest master of lucid English meant—
the right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the Saints, and the Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches to part communion upon,
The kind of English that one would rap a boy of twelve over the knuckles for writing!
or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith,
A thousand years of Catholicism is needed to write like this, so perhaps the present Duke of Norfolk is the author of The Apologia.
or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost on the fall, a supernatural habit of grace,
The style is the man, a simpleton cleric, especially anxious about his soul; no, I am mistaken—about a Text.
or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in the Catholic Church.
What does he mean by given? In what sense? Does he mean that the name of Jesus is rendu in all churches in the same way? But, then, what exactly does he mean by given?
The Colonel, who writes a letter to a newspaper as well as anybody I know, took the book from my hand, saying:
It is barely credible ... I can write as well as that myself.
A great deal better, I answered, and we continued to look through The Apologia, astonished at the feebleness of the mind behind the words, and at the words themselves.
Like dead leaves, I said.
What surprises me is the lack of distinction, the Colonel murmured.
If the writing were a little worse it would be better, I answered. Am I going too far, my dear Colonel, if I say that The Apologia reads more like a mock at Catholic literature than anything else; and that it would pass for such if we didn't know that it was written in great seriousness of spirit, and read with the same seriousness? No Protestant divine ever wrote so badly. Perhaps Newman—
Haven't you read anything but The Apologia?
No, and there is no reason why I should.
How would you like to be judged by one book?
I have shown my friends the passages I have been quoting, and they think he wrote better when he was a Protestant.
I see your article on Newman from end to end. That Newman was a great writer until he became a Catholic is a pretty paradox which will suit your style. You will be able to discover passages in his Protestant sermons better written, no doubt, than the passages you select from The Apologia. The Colonel lit his candle, and I could hear him laughing good-humouredly as he went upstairs to bed.
It is dangerous to name a quality, I said to him next morning at breakfast, whereby we may recognise a great writer, for as soon as we have done so somebody names somebody whom we must confess deficient in the quality mentioned. The perils of definition are numerous, but most people will agree with me that all great writers have possessed an extraordinary gift of creating images, and if that be so, Newman cannot be called a writer. We search vainly in the barren, sandy tract of The Apologia for one, finding only dead phrases, very often used so incorrectly that it is difficult to tell what he is driving at; driving at is just the kind of worn-out phrase he would use without a scruple.
You are judging Newman by The Apologia.
I admit I haven't read any other book. But dear Edward once invited me to look into—I have forgotten the title, but I remember the sentence that caught my eye—Heresy stalks the land, and you will agree with me that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the average reporter would be ashamed to write the words ... unless he were in a very great hurry.
Newman wrote The Apologia in a great hurry.
However great your hurry, you couldn't, nor could any of the friends who came here on Saturday night, write as badly, and unless we hold that to be always thin and colourless is a style—
You've a good case against him, but I'm afraid you'll spoil it by overstatement.
My concern is neither to overstate nor to understate, but to follow my own mind, faithfully, tracing its every turn. An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox I felt to be a truth. Our fathers were not so foolish as they appear to us to be in their admiration of Lara, The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour; they breathed into the clay and vivified it, and when weary of romance they wandered into theology, and were lured by a mirage, seeing groves of palm-trees, flowers, and a bubbling rill, where in truth there was nothing but rocks and sand and a puddle. And while Byron and Newman turn to dust Shakespeare is becoming eternal.
There are degrees, then, in immortality?
Of course. The longer the immortality the more perfect it becomes, Time putting a patina upon the bronze and the marble and wood, and I think upon texts; you never will persuade me that the text that we read is the text read in 1623.
The Colonel raised his sad eyes from The Apologia into which they had been plunged.
I'll admit that we never seem to get any further in metaphysics than Bishop Berkeley. I see, he said a few minutes later, that Newman has written a preface for this new and insufficiently revised edition. Have you read it?
No, but I shall be glad to listen if you'll read it to me after breakfast.
As soon as he had finished his eggs and bacon, the Colonel fixed his glasses a little higher on his nose, and it was not long before we began to feel that our tasks were hard, one as hard as the other, and when the last sentence was pronounced, the Colonel, despite his reluctance to decry anything Catholic, was forced to admit a lack of focus in the composition.
He wanders from one subject to another, never finishing.
Excellent criticism! What you say is in agreement with Stevenson, who told an interviewer that if a man can group his ideas he is a good writer, though the words in which he expresses himself be tasteless, and as you say, Newman, before he has finished with his third section, returns to his first; from the fifth he returns to the fourth, and in the sixth section we find some points that should have been included in the second.
The Colonel did not answer; and feeling that I owed something to my guest, I said:
The last time you were here you mentioned that you hoped to be able to get one of the gateways from Newbrook.
The Colonel brightened up at once, and told me that he was only just in time, for the stones were about to be utilised by the peasants for the building of pigsties and cottages. But he had followed them in his gig through the country, and had brought them all to Moore Hall, and was now only waiting for me to decide whether I would like the gateway built in a half-circle or in a straight line. The saw-mill he hoped to get into working order very soon.
It will be of great use for cutting up the timber that we shall get out of the stone park.
Isn't it in working order?
With emphasis and interest the Colonel began to relate the accident the saw-mill had met with on the way from Ballinrobe; as it was entering the farmyard one of the horses had shied, bringing the boiler right up against a stone pillar, starting some of the rivets. A dark cloud came into his face, and I learnt from him that he had very foolishly given heed to the smith at Ballinrobe, a braggart who had sworn he could rivet a boiler with any man in Ireland; but when it came to the point he could do nothing. The Castlebar smith, a very clever man, had not succeeded any better, but there was a smith at Cong—
A real Cuchulain.
The story, I admit, is assuming all the proportions of an epic, the Colonel replied joyously, and I allowed him to tell me the whole of it, listening to it with half my brain, while with the other half I considered the height of the Colonel's skull and its narrowness across the temples.
A refined head, I said to myself, and it seemed to me that I had seen, at some time or other, the same pinched skull in certain portraits of ecclesiastics by Bellini and the School of Bellini: but not the Colonel's vague, inconclusive eyes, I added. Italy has always retained a great deal of her ancient paganism; but Catholicism absorbed Spain and Ireland. It is into Spanish painting that we must look for the Colonel, and we find most of him in Velasquez, a somewhat icy painter who, however, relished and stated with great skill the Colonel's high-pitched nose, the drawing of the small nostrils, the hard, grizzled moustache. He painted the true Catholic in all his portraits of Philip, never failing to catch the faded, empty look that is so essentially a part of the Catholic face. Our ideas mould a likeness quickly if Nature supplies certain proportions, and the Colonel—when he fattens out a little, which he sometimes does, and when his mind is away—reminds me of the dead King. Of course, there are dissimilarities. Kingship creates formalities, and the Spanish Court must have robbed Philip of all sense of humour, or buried it very deeply in his breast, for it is recorded that he was so pleased on one occasion with the splendid fight that a bull put up against the picadors, that he did not deem any swordsman in Spain worthy of the honour of killing him; the bull had earned his death from the highest hand in the land, and arming himself with an arquebuse or caliver, he walked across the arena and shot the bull with his own kingly hand. He must have walked towards the bull with a kingly stride—a sloven stride and a kingly act would be incompatible—he must have walked as if to music; but the Colonel has little or no ear for music, and his walk is, for this reason or another, the very opposite to Philip's. He slouches from side to side, a curious gait, the reader will say, for a soldier of thirty years, but very like himself, and therefore one likes to see it, and to see him preparing for it, hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat in the passage. He never carries a stick or umbrella; he slouches along, his hands dangling ugly out of the ends of the cuffs. To what business he is going I often wonder as I stand at the window watching him, remembering all the while how he had lain back in his armchair after breakfast, reading a book, his subconsciousness suggesting to him many different errands, and at last detaching him from his book or his manuscript, for the Colonel has always meditated a literary career for himself as soon as he was free from the army.
There are people of today, tomorrow, and yesterday; and the Colonel is much more of yesterday than of today. If he does not defend the Inquisition directly, he does so indirectly—all religions have persecuted, for it is the nature of man to persecute, and he is unable to understand that Protestantism and Rationalism together redeemed the world from the disgrace of the Middle Ages. His ideas clank like chains about him, but not to the ordinary ear, for the Colonel is reserved by nature; only a fine ear can hear the clanks. Balzac would never have thought of the Colonel for a modern story, but would have placed him—I have sufficient confidence in Balzac's genius to believe that he would have placed him in a Spanish setting; for the Colonel's mind is so archaic that his clothes distress even me. I am not good at clothes, but I am sure it is because his natural garment, the doublet, is forbidden him that he dresses himself in dim grey hues or in pepper-and-salt. He has never been seen in checks or fancy waistcoats, or in a bright-coloured tie. He goes, however, willingly into breeches; at Moore Hall he is never out of breeches; breeches remind him of his racing and hunting days, besides being convenient. So far can his country gear be explained, but why he sometimes comes up to Dublin in breeches, presenting, as I have said, an incongruous spectacle of sport in my drawing-room on a background of impressionist pictures, I am unable to offer any opinion.

PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1519-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-ave-chapter-102/
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Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
One day Father James said the time would come when I would give up hunting—everything, for the classics, and I rode home, elated, to tell my mother the prophecy. But she burst out laughing, leaving me in no doubt whatever that she looked upon Father James's idea of me as an excellent joke; and the tragedy of it all is that I accepted her casual point of view without consideration, carrying it almost at once into reality, playing truant instead of going to my Latin lesson. Father James, divested of his scholarship, became a mere priest in my eyes. I think that I avoided him, and am sure that I hardly ever saw him again, except at Mass.
A strange old church is Carnacun, built in the form of a cross, with whitewashed walls and some hardened earth for floor; and I should be hard set to discover in my childhood an earlier memory than the panelled roof, designed and paid for by my father, who had won the Chester Cup some years before. The last few hundred pounds of his good fortune were spent in pitch-pine rafters and boards, and he provided a large picture of the Crucifixion, painted by my cousin, Jim Browne, who happened to be staying at Moore Hall at the time, from Tom Kelly the lodge-keeper, the first nude model that ever stood up in Mayo (Mayo has always led the way—Ireland's van-bird for sure). It was taken in great pomp from Moore Hall to Carnacun; and the hanging of it was a great and punctilious affair. A board had to be nailed at the back whereby a rope could be attached to hoist it into the roof, and lo! Mickey Murphy drove a nail through one of the gilt leaves which served as a sort of frame for the picture. My father shouted his orders to the men in the roof that they were to draw up the picture very slowly, and, lest it should sway and get damaged in the swaying, strings were attached to it. My father and mother each held a string, and the third may have been held by Jim Browne, or perhaps I was allowed to hold it.
Some time afterwards a Blessed Virgin and a St Joseph came down from Dublin, and they were painted and gilded by my father, and so beautifully, that they were the admiration of every one for a very long while, and it was Jim Browne's Crucifixion and these anonymous statues that awakened my first aesthetic emotions. I used to look forward to seeing them all the way from Moore Hall to Carnacun—a bleak road as soon as our gate-lodge was passed: on one side a hill that looked as if it had been peeled; on the other some moist fields, divided by small stone walls, liked by me in those days, for they were excellent practice for my pony. Along this road our tenantry used to come from the villages, the women walking on one side (the married women in dark blue cloaks, the girls hiding their faces behind their shawls, carrying their boots in their hands, which they would put on in the chapel yard), the men walking on the other side, the elderly men in traditional swallow-tail coats, knee-breeches, and worsted stockings; the young men in corduroy trousers and frieze coats. As we passed, the women curtsied in their red petticoats; the young men lifted their round bowler-hats; but the old men stood by, their tall hats in their hands. At the bottom of every one was a red handkerchief, and I remember wisps of grey hair floating in the wind. Our tenantry met the tenantry of Clogher and Tower Hill, and they all collected round the gateway of the chapel to admire the carriages of their landlords. We were received like royalty as we turned in through the gates and went up the wooden staircase leading to the gallery, frequented by the privileged people of the parish—by us, and by our servants, the postmaster and postmistress from Ballyglass, and a few graziers. In the last pew were the police, and after the landlords these were the most respected.
As soon as we were settled in our pew the acolytes ventured from the sacristy tinkling their bells, the priest following, carrying the chalice covered with the veil. As the ceremony of the Mass had never caught my fancy, I used to spend my time looking over the pew into the body of the church, wondering at the herd of peasantry, trying to distinguish our own serfs among those from the Tower Hill and Clogher estates. Pat Plunket, a highly respectable tenant (he owned a small orchard), I could always discover; he knelt just under us, and in front of a bench, the only one in the body of the church, and about him collected those few that had begun to rise out of brutal indigence. Their dress and their food were slightly different from the commoner kind. Pat Plunket and Mickey Murphy, the carpenter, not the sawyer, were supposed to drink tea and eat hot cakes. The others breakfasted off Indian-meal porridge. And to Pat Plunket's bench used to come a tall woman, whose grace of body the long blue-black cloak of married life could not hide. I liked to wonder which among the men about her might be her husband. And a partial memory still lingers of a cripple that was allowed to avail himself of Pat Plunket's bench. His crutches were placed against the wall, and used to catch my eye, suggesting thoughts of what his embarrassment would be if they were taken away whilst he prayed. A great unknown horde of peasantry from Ballyglass and beyond it knelt in the left-hand corner, and after the Communion they came up the church with a great clatter of brogues to hear the sermon, leaving behind a hideous dwarf whom I could not take my eyes off, so strange was his waddle as he moved about the edge of the crowd, his huge mouth grinning all the time.
Our pew was the first on the right-hand side, and the pew behind us was the Clogher pew, and it was filled with girls—Helena, Livy, Lizzy, and May—the first girls I ever knew; and these are now under the sod—all except poor Livy, an old woman whom I sometimes meet out with her dog by the canal. In the first few on the left was a red landlord with a frizzled beard and a perfectly handsome wife, and behind him was Joe McDonnel from Carnacun House, a great farmer, and the wonder of the church, so great was his belly. I can see these people dimly, like figures in the background of a picture; but the blind girl is as clear in my memory as if she were present. She used to kneel behind the Virgin's altar and the Communion rails, almost entirely hidden under an old shawl, grown green with age; and the event of every Sunday, at least for me, was to see her draw herself forward when the Communion bell rang, and lift herself to receive the wafer that the priest placed upon her tongue and having received it, she would sink back, overcome, overawed, and I used to wonder at her piety, and think of the long hours she spent sitting by the cabin fire waiting for Sunday to come round again. On what roadside was that cabin? And did she come, led by some relative or friend, or finding her way down the road by herself? Questions that interested me more than anybody else, and it was only at the end of a long inquiry that I learnt that she came from one of the cabins opposite Carnacun House. Every time we passed that cabin I used to look out for her, thinking how I might catch sight of her in the doorway; but I never saw her except in the chapel. Only once did we meet her as we drove to Ballyglass, groping her way, doubtless, to Carnacun. Where else would she be going? And hearing our horses' hoofs she sank closer to the wall, overawed, into the wet among the falling leaves.
As soon as the Communion was over Father James would come forward, and thrusting his hands under the alb (his favourite gesture) he would begin his sermon in Irish (in those days Irish was the language of the country among the peasantry), and we would sit for half an hour, wondering what were the terrible things he was saying, asking ourselves if it were pitchforks or ovens, or both, that he was talking; for the peasantry were groaning aloud, the women not infrequently falling on their knees, beating their breasts; and I remember being perplexed by the possibility that some few tenantry might be saved, for if that happened how should we meet them in heaven? Would they look another way and pass us by without lifting their hats and crying: Long life to yer honour?
My memories of Carnacun Chapel and Father James Browne were interrupted by a sudden lurching forward of the car, which nearly flung me into the road. Whelan apologised for himself and his horse, but I damned him, for I was annoyed at being awakened from my dream. There was no hope of being able to pick it up again, for the chapel bell was pealing down the empty landscape, calling the peasants from their desolute villages. It seemed to me that the Carnacun bell used to cry across the moist fields more cheerfully; there was a menace in the Gort bell as there is in the voice of a man who fears that he may not be obeyed, and this gave me an interest in the Mass I was going to hear. It would teach me something of the changes that had happened during my absence. The first thing I noticed as I approached the chapel was the smallness of the crowd of men about the gateposts; only a few figures, and they surly and suspicious fellows, resolved not to salute the landlord, yet breaking away with difficulty from traditional servility. Our popularity had disappeared with the laws that favoured us, but Whelan's appearance counted for something in the decaying sense of rank among the peasantry, and I mentally reproached Edward for not putting his servant into livery. It interested me to see that the superstitions of Carnacun were still followed: the peasants dipped their fingers in a font and sprinkled themselves, and the only difference that I noticed between the two chapels was one for the worse; the windows at Gort were not broken, and the happy, circling swallows did not build under the rafters. It was easier to discover differences in the two congregations. My eyes sought vainly the long dark cloak of married life, nor did I succeed in finding an old man in knee-breeches and worsted stockings, nor a girl drawing her shawl over her head.
The Irish language is inseparable from these things, I said, and it has gone. The sermon will be in English, or in a language as near English as those hats and feathers are near the fashions that prevail in Paris.
The Gort peasants seemed able to read, for they held prayer-books, and as if to help them in their devotion a harmonium began to utter sounds as discordant as the red and blue glass in the windows, and all the time the Mass continued very much as I remembered it, until the priest lifted his alb over his head and placed it upon the altar (Father James used to preach in the vestment, I said to myself); and very slowly and methodically the Gort priest tried to explain the mystery of Transubstantiation to the peasants, who lent such an indifferent ear to him that it was difficult not to think that Father James's sermons, based on the fear of the devil, were more suitable to Ireland.
A Mass only rememberable for a squealing harmonium, some panes in terrifying blues and reds, and my own great shame. However noble my motive may have been, I had knelt and stood with the congregation; I had even bowed my head, making believe by this parade that I accepted the Mass as a truth. It could not be right to do this, even for the sake of the Irish Literary Theatre, and I left the chapel asking myself by what strange alienation of the brain had Edward come to imagine that a piece of enforced hypocrisy on my part could be to any one's advantage.
It seemed to me that mortal sin had been committed that morning; a sense of guilt clung about me. Edward was consulted. Could it be right for one who did not believe in the Mass to attend Mass? He seemed to acquiesce that it might not be right, but when Sunday came round again my refusal to get on the car so frightened him that I relinquished myself to his scruples, to his terror, to his cries. The reader will judge me weak, but it should be remembered that he is my oldest friend, and it seemed to me that we should never be the same friends again if I refused; added to which he had been telling me all the week that he was getting on finely with his third act, and for the sake of a hypothetical act I climbed up on the car.
Now, Whelan, don't delay putting up the horse. Mind you're in time for Mass, and don't leave the chapel until the last Gospel has been read.
Must we wait for Benediction? I cried ironically.
Edward did not answer, possibly because he does not regard Benediction as part of the liturgy, and is, therefore, more or less indifferent to it. The horse trotted and Whelan clacked his tongue, a horrible noise from which I tried to escape by asking him questions.
Are the people quiet in this part of the country? Quite enough, he answered, and I thought I detected a slightly contemptuous accent in the syllables.
Not much life in the country? I hear the hunting is going to be stopped?
Parnell never told them to stop the hunting.
You're a Parnellite?
He was a great man.
The priests went against him, I said, because he loved another man's wife.
And O'Shea not living with her at the time.
Even if he had been, I answered, Ireland first of all, say I. He was a great man.
He was that.
And the priest at Gort—was he against him?
Wasn't he every bit as bad as the others?
Then you don't care to go to his church?
I'd just as lief stop away.
It's strange, Whelan; it's strange that Mr Martyn should insist on my going to Gort to Mass. Of what use can Mass be to any one if he doesn't wish to hear it?
Whelan chuckled, or seemed to chuckle.
He will express no opinion, I said to myself, and abstractions don't interest him. So, turning to the concrete, I spoke of the priest who was to say Mass, and Whelan agreed that he had gone agin Parnell.
Well, Whelan, it's a great waste of time going to Gort to hear a Mass one doesn't want to hear, and I have business with Mr Yeats.
Maybe you'd like me to turn into Coole, sur?
I was thinking we might do that ... only you won't speak to Mr Martin about it, will you? Because, you see Whelan, every one has his prejudices, and I am a great friend of Mr Martyn, and wouldn't like to disappoint him.
Wouldn't like to contrairy him, sur?
That's it, Whelan. Now, what about your dinner? You don't mind having your dinner in a Protestant house?
It's all one to me, sur.
The dinner is the main point, isn't it, Whelan?
Begad it is sur, and he turned the horse in through the gates.
Just go round, I said, and put the horse up and say nothing to anybody.
Yes, sur.

This is a collection of oddities, real world inspirations and possible clues that hint to the true purpose of Area Zero and other mysteries in Paldea. My intention was to compile this into one big Theory of Everything, but all of this has been sitting in a Google Doc for a month and a half and I don't see how I can tie it all together with the information we currently have. I figured that I might as well talk about the discoveries I have made because if I had not compiled all of this into a reddit post, it might never have happened. My hope is that it will open up some new discussions about the games, and that someone else may see something that I can not.
​
THE TWO METAL PLATES
Let's start with Area Zero. In the Scarlet/Violet books, the page discussing the strange symbol found in A0 has a few qualities that I have not seen discussed so far. It's titled "Mysterious Plates", plural, and even shows a second plate below the main plate containing the two intersecting triangles. This second plate is strangely never mentioned or shown again anywhere else. It appears to be longer in width and much shorter in height than the one we see in A0, and contains a long string of undecipherable text.
This mysterious second plate is not the only strange thing about this page of the book. The top image is drawn so that the symbol plate has its right side obscured behind rocks, but the bottom image gives you enough of a view to see that it doesn't contain anything to the right of the two zeroes. The map of Paldea and its accompanying text is strangely missing. The drawing is from the side and far away, so the plate is at an angle where it is difficult to make out certain details, but it certainly appears to not be wide enough to contain the mysterious symbol AND the map of Paldea.
That's not all about the metal plate, however. The entire thing, as seen when you yourself go into A0, seems to be based on the concept of a Kilometer Zero location marker. This is something that can be found in many countries across the world, which is why it seemed so strange to me that I have not seen any discussion about this. Regardless, the Kilometer Zero markers are typically placed in locations where multiple roads, railways or other routes of transportation come together in a central location. The marker was popularized by the Roman Empire, which is where the phrase "All roads lead to Rome" originates from. GameFreak makes this connection even clearer by having Hassel say almost that exact same line during one of the Art classes, "All roads lead to Area Zero".
Finally, if you look at the Kilometer Zero marker used in Spain it's clear that GameFreak took inspiration from this specific one for the metal plate of A0. It's located in the center of the country, in Madrid, and has an interesting history. The plaque was removed in 2002 in order for the town square to undergo renovations, and when the plaque was put back the construction crew accidentally put it in the ground upside down, so the north point was facing south and vice versa. This was fixed in 2007, but two years later in 2009 the plaque was removed and a new one was put in. Could this also be the history of the metal plate in A0? While I have yet to think of any implications of this, could it be possible that the A0 plate was found upside down and has been kept that way since Heath's expedition?
​
THE EIGHT TREASURES
GameFreak pulled from numerous parts of Chinese mythology/folklore when putting together Area Zero and the story around Paldea, as the Treasures of Ruin are inspired by the Four Perils and the Kitakami Legends are inspired by Momotaro. Once the DLC was revealed, specifically its logo, I was able to make another similar connection. A not very well known piece of Chinese folklore is that of the Eight Treasures, or the Eight Precious Things, which are eight auspicious symbols that signify good luck and fortune. They had a similar cultural role to the Eight Auspicious Symbols of Buddhism, but beyond that the similarities end.
What the Eight Treasures are exactly varies depending on the source, as the symbols are pulled from the Hundred Treasures of Chinese folklore. The more commonly used Treasures seem to correlate to the eight symbols found on the corners of both the SV logo and the DLC logo. I will point out what I believe to be the Treasure that inspired each symbol, and this is where you can find a more detailed analysis on the Treasure's symbolism.
Starting with the upper left corner of the Scarlet/Violet logo, the Metal Plate inscription is based on the Double Lozenge, representing two hearts joined together to act as one mind. The hexagon in the bottom left is the Jewel, sometimes depicted as a Pearl or Flaming Pearl, containing generative energy and the ability to grant wishes. The four circles in the top right seem to be the Double Coins and the spiral in the bottom right seems to be the Wish Granting Ingot. The symbols in the DLC logo are harder to identify, but I believe the top right is the Mirror Lozenge, the Blueberry academy logo (that looks like an '8') in the bottom left might be inspired by the Coral treasure, and finally the bottom right symbol is the Wish Granting Scepter that is associated with the wish granting ingot. The upper left DLC symbol is too obscure for me to make any direct connections. While I have not drawn any definite conclusions on what these inspirations indicate for the symbols, it certainly seems to indicate the true nature of the Tera jewels and what secret wish-granting powers they may have.
The last thing I'd like to mention about Area Zero is that it seems to be heavily inspired by the Taoist concept of "Grotto Heavens", are worlds believed to exist hidden within the crust of Earth, often times inside the hollow center of a mountain. They are said to receive no actual light from the stars, but rather from "the root of the essence of the sun... its light matches the sun of the outer world". A0, as many have noted, is always lit no matter the time of day.
The mythological locations of Mount Penglai and Mount Kunlun) share some similarities to Area Zero, both of which are believed to be Axis Mundi of the world (a celestial pole, like Yggdrasil from Norse mythology). Mount Penglai is also known as Horai, the name given to the mountain in a short story written by Lafcadio Hearn. It is said to be the home of a cabal of immortals known as the Eight Immortals, although Penglai is found on just one of the mythical islands the Eight Immortals are said to reside on.
Lafcadio Hearn does not share many similarities with what little we know of Heath from the Area Zero Expedition team, but the book Hearn published his many short stories in, including that of Mount Penglai, was titled "Kwaidan". This certainly sounds similar to Koraidon, but I must admit it is a loose connection.
Mount Kunlun, a separate mythical paradise, connects to Paldea through its western/southern river (the direction the river flows from varies) that is known as the "Scarlet RiveWater)". Beyond just the name, in the announcement trailer for Scarlet and Violet there are three globes that can be seen in the room. One is a regular globe of the Earth, one is a regular globe of the Moon, and then the third is a globe depicting the Earth with red colored water instead of blue. If the globes were placed there with thematic intent, I believe the red globe was meant to create the connection between Paldea/A0 and Mount Kunlun. Both Penglai and Kunlun share other similarities to Area Zero through generic paradise tropes that I will not go into here, as the Scarlet RiveRed Globe and Kwaidan/Koraidon felt the most significant and this post is already long enough.
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THE CARDINAL COLORS
As Scarlet and Violet introduced us to the first open world in the series history, it is understandable that the cardinal directions (North, South, West, East) would receive a bit of attention. What stands out in GameFreaks inclusion of them, however, is the colors associated with each direction.
If you look at what colors different cultures associate with the cardinal directions, you will not find a single society in history that had the same associations as Paldea does. In all my research, I could only find two pieces of cultural or fictional media that shared the same Cardinal Colors. In Buddhism, the Mandala Of Avalokiteshvara (Compassion Buddha) and the Mandala of the Medicine Buddha are sometimes depicted with these Cardinal Colors, but these depictions are not easy to find.
For the second instance, the Land Of Oz from the books by L. Frank Baum see the same setup of Blue/Yellow being opposite one another, red representing the south (which itself is rare enough), with some depictions using purple to represent the North and others using green. This would not seem to connect to Pokemon if not for the fact that the games have actually referenced the Wizard of Oz before. In Generation 1, if the player clicks on the TV in their home the text box indicates that Stand By Me is currently playing, the plot of which seems to have inspired the final act of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, The Way Home. In the Gen1 remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, the same reference is made as long as the player chose the male protagonist. Even Sun and Moon included the same Stand By Me reference as well. However, in FLG, a different film is referenced if the player chooses the female protagonist, The Wizard of Oz. Once again I admit this is a flimsy connection, but with one of these two films being an obvious inspiration for the story of Scarlet/Violet, it opens up the possibility that the Wizard of Oz might have also been used as inspiration.
That is all I could find on the inspiration for the choices made for the Cardinal Colors, however certain ways GameFreak utilized the Cardinal Colors of Paldea stood out to me, and I have not seen any discussion on this either. Here are two diagrams demonstrating some ways the Cardinal Colors may have more to do with the Legendary Pokemon of the games than we have realized. Specifically, the shrines encasing the Treasures of Ruin across Paldea are located in the four corners of the region, with their colors being a combination of the Cardinal Colors closest to them. The fire-type Chi-Yu is found in the NorthEast, so its shrine is a combination of blue and green, cyan. This is true of all four of the Treasures of Ruin. If you look at the four new Pokemon introduced in the DLC The Teal Mask, each Pokemon incorporates a Cardinal color in their design, with Ogerpon being the only outlier. Of course, we have barely seen Ogerpon's actual design without the mask, and even then in the image we do have it has a yellow-colored eye which is the only color not utilized by another Pokemon.
Then there is the Mesagoza Type Compass that sits in the center of the city, which has the types arranged in a seemingly random order. I tried to figure out if maybe these Cardinal Colors or the corner colors have something to do with the Type Compass, or the color wheel found in the Art Room, but so far I have had no luck. However the compass is odd in that it has 12 points rather than the 8 points or 16 points typically seen on compass roses, which supposedly is normal of a Japanese Compass Rose but I have yet to find a depiction like this outside of a single DeviantArt image. Beyond the colors, not much else seems relevant to the cardinal directions, although there is one part of A0 that sticks out to me.
While it is difficult to figure out which direction you are looking towards when you enter A0, it is possible to see the Zero Gate above the clouds where you land if you get high up enough along the sides of A0. A link to a screenshot of this is included near the end of the post. Based off of this, it would appear that each river in A0 is coming from a lake located on the cardinal ends of the area. While the North, West, and South rivers all flow down into the bottom of A0, the East river is the one that takes you to the cave with the four circles pointing towards the cardinal directions. This is the only river that does not flow into the crystalline depths below. Given that Part 1 of the DLC seems to take place in the Eastern area connected to Paldea, it makes me wonder if there is any relevance to this river being the only one to not connect with the others.
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THE LUNAR THEORY
There are a number of strange things throughout the story that seem to connect to the moon, specifically its strange orbit that is scarcely commented on anywhere. While most of the observations in this post are just that, observations, I feel strongly that the moon plays a role in the overall plot of Scarlet and Violet, and will be a focal point of the DLC.
When developing a video game, nothing is particularly easy to implement. The easiest thing to do in game development is doing something again. Taking a feature you have already developed, and copy and pasting it to something else in the game. Knowing this, I would like to discuss the strange behavior of the moon as opposed to the typical behavior of the sun.
Imagine you are standing idly in Paldea while facing the Northeast at night, you watch as the sun rises in the East like it does in the real world. You can watch as it crosses the sky over the course of the day, eventually arriving in the West where it disappears over the horizon. Once the sun has set, you look back over at the Northeast direction expecting to see the moon rise over the horizon. The stars start to appear and the sky darkens, and yet you see no moon. If you were to then look back over at the Northwest direction, if you do so quick enough, you can see the Moon suddenly just appear in the West. Not only that, if you watch it over the course of the night you can see it go from West to East, the opposite direction it would normally travel, and then disappear by fading into the sky as the sun starts to rise once again. The sun has a proper orbit, it rises and sets in the correct locations and arcs across the sky. The moon on the other hand does not rise, it does not set, and it moves across the sky in a straight line. Most may chalk this up to a development bug, but I see an intended behavior. Like I said, once you've implemented something once, here being a circle in the sky rising and setting over the horizon, it's not very difficult to copy and paste it to another giant circle. I believe that this has to have been intentional, especially given that it was not fixed in the latest patch.
That's not all though. Of the four symbols on the Scarlet/Violet logo, one of them seems to lack any sort of context behind its relevance. This would be the bottom right spiral found in the Poco Lab. Even the metal plate inscription has some sort of commentary attributed to it, so that players can at least wonder what its relevance may be. The spiral, however, is left mostly unexplained. That is, if you don't pay attention to the other diagrams on the whiteboard. While the specifics of these equations are a little lost on me, it would seem the two circles found on the Poco Lab whiteboard are depicting calculations relating to the horizon of the Earth, possibly the light refraction of a celestial object. The top diagram appears to either calculate the influence of a satellite on the planets gravity, or a calculation of the true altitude of the satellite. That one could be a number of things, but I believe the bottom one to be a calculation of the true position of the moon based on the principle of the moon illusion. While I can't be certain what the spiral symbol represents, I wonder if it is depicting the strange orbit of the moon that is causing it to appear and disappear in the middle of the sky. Could the "moon's" refraction of light rays) be the relevance of ultraviolet and infrared light wavelengths, which many have theorized to have something to do with Scarlet/Violet?
Based on what we know of the Professor, the last time they left Poco Lab was the final time they set foot outside of Area Zero. These diagrams would have been the last thing they wrote on the whiteboard before going to Zero Lab, where a dozen more strange diagrams can be found on the whiteboards there. If you look at what the diagrams are depicting, each one shows a single circle following a path and/or existing within a strange 3D geometric shape. If I am correct that the Poco Lab whiteboard is the Professor discovering that something is off about the moon's orbit, the whiteboards in Zero Lab might be their attempts at finding out what exactly the orbit is. Could this be why they become more of a hermit, locking themselves in the lab and creating more security protocols to keep other people out? Is it possible they discovered some sort of conspiracy and became the target of those upholding the conspiracy?
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THE TURTLE THAT CARRIED THE WORLD
While I have already rambled long enough about the suspicious nature of the moon, there's one final observation I would like to make. If you look at the page in the Scarlet/Violet where Heath drew the Disk Pokemon, which we now know is Terapagos, there's still a number of unexplained aspects of the image. The giant disk Terapagos is resting on, the fact that its fur turns into an ocean with ships atop it, the clouds to the left of Terapagos that are completely disconnected from the Pokemon, and the many planets that can be seen in the background. It has already been pointed out that if you flip the image upside down, the black parts of the image actually appear to be crystals encircling the large disk, but there's something else about the image that has yet to be mentioned. The shading of the large disk is strange, familiar even. This image depicts the view of the Earth from the surface of the moon. It is the same exact shading. Looking at the Disk as a large celestial object from the upside down perspective, suddenly makes its appear as if the artist is looking up into the sky, past the Tera crystals of Area Zero, seeing a large object very far away. After all, it's common knowledge that Terapagos might be inspired by the many myths of a World Turtle that carries the Earth on its back. Looking at the drawing upside down, it almost appears as if that were the case here.
Of course, then there's the whole problem with how Area Zero could possibly be on the moon and/or some other satellite object, and then why Earth has the weird hexagonal shapes covering its visible portion. This could always be attributed to simple Human error with the artist not fully comprehending what they were seeing, but that certainly would not be a satisfying answer. Another theory I hope to discuss more of one day is that the clouds seen inside the Great Crater are teleporting anyone who enters to Area Zero, and vice versa, but I'm still working on how exactly that would fit with what we know about A0 and Terapagos so far.
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LINGBAO DAOISM
One final piece of folklore I'd like to mention is the beliefs of a Daoist school from 400 C.E, known as both the School of the Numinous Treasure and the School of the Sacred Jewel (also known simply as the Lingbao School). While I'm not sure if this actually a source of inspiration for these games, I certainly found some of the aspects and beliefs of this Daoist sect interesting. It's also another piece of spiritual beliefs that have connected to the old Chinese story Journey to the West. This story has had connections to many things I have already talked about, like the Grotto Heavens and Axis Mountains I mentioned earlier. Frankly, anything I found in Chinese mythology that seemed like it might have been inspiration for these games had some sort of connection to that tale, and so as a result it may have been a bigger piece of inspiration that I realized.
Lingbao cosmology is based around the idea of a mountain known as the Jade Capital being the center of the heavens, the Axis Mundi housing the Celestial Worthy (creator god). There are three subsequent deities, the Lord of Celestial Treasure, Lord of Sacred Treasure and the Lord of Divine Treasure. Each deity also resides within its own Grotto Heaven. It was believed by Lingbaoists that time was divided into cosmic cycles, and at the end of each era a deity related to the color associated with that era would descend to Earth provide Humanity a piece of Cosmic teaching. Two types of eras/cycles can occur, one ending with the moon causing a flood that resets the universe, and the other ending in total apocalypse. Before the apocalypse a select few of those who were given the Cosmic teaching, those that actually correctly learned the teaching, would be gathered up by the Queen Mother of the West (A central character of Journey to the West), and taken to a land of bliss not impacted by the apocalypse.
After reading through much of the Journey to the West, I believe that Geeta was inspired by the Queen Mother of the West and plans to take those who follow her to Area Zero when an apocalypse is eventually started, either by her or by natural forces/a Pokemon. This is mostly because I hope that they do something interesting with her character, but partly because it just seems very much like a story GameFreak would tell, especially given the writing of villains in Pokemon games and how recently they have represented big corporate powers.
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I hope that many of these topics fuel the theorizing parts of your brains, as I know that they have for me. Of course this post is formatted the way it is because I have not been able to come up with a cohesive theory that utilizes all of these oddities, as well as the bullet points below, but maybe one day it will click for someone.
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(*MANY) ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS
- If you get on top of the Academy using the Cyclizar Paradox, you can access the outside of the conservatory-like structure. The Academy exit connected to it is the color red, as well as the door used to enter the treehouse-like structure. As far as I can tell, based off of the intro sequence of Violet I found on YouTube, the doors appear to be red no matter the version. Also, the doors to the conservatory have what might be the second metal plate sitting above it with the text blurred, I imagine intentionally so that anyone like me climbs up to them, we don't discover any secrets.
- The hexagonal symbol in the bottom left of the logo may be depicting the six satellite dishes found around Area Zero, rather than the time machine or the Tera jewel/crystal itself.
- Student IDs are only mentioned two times, both mentions are by the AI Professor. First is when the Professor says the player's ID, 805C393. 805 because that's how many years since the Academy was founded, I presume 'C' is the semester (A is spring, B is summer, C is fall), and 393 because we joined the Academy late in the semester. Penny is 803B121, which tracks with that logic as a year and a half before was when she formed Team Star. Strangely, Nemona is 805C001. This means she registered with the school at the beginning of the current semester, and was the first to do so. This does not line up with what Giacomo says about Nemona taking over Student Council president a year and a half before the events of the game. Also - the previous Director mentions that his assistant tried to coverup the Team Star incident by destroying "digital records", no mention of physical records. We assumed this coverup caused the pages to be ripped out of the Student Registry book found in the Academy Library, but this does not track. Was someone trying to hide Nemona's previous ID? This might explain why the Professor felt it was necessary to create the Pokeball Locking security system, as it has to do with ID numbers. Nemona would be able to use Pokeballs with a new ID, up until the final battle where the AI Professor locks ALL ID's other than their own.
- Zero Gate is not the only thing that can be seen above the clouds in Area Zero. On top of the fact that the ledge it rests on looks nothing like the ledge seen in Paldea, the ridges seen above the Area Zero clouds are a completely different shape than the walls of the Great Create of Paldea, appearing more like a mountain range than a crater. Here some screenshots I took.
- Another reason for why I assume the cardinal directions are the way they are in Area Zero, despite the minimap not functioning from within the area, is because of this promotional artwork GameFreak released prior to Scarlet/Violet hitting the shelves. You can see that to the right of the Zero Gate is a waterfall, and the distance between the two appears to be the same as the distance from where you spawn in Area Zero and the closest waterfall to your left. What's most interesting about this image, though, is that the waterfall depicted in the image is not present in the final game. This would have been the only think linking the Crater above the clouds to the grotto below the clouds, and for whatever reason they decided to remove it in the three months between releasing the image and releasing the games.
- The Kitakami Legends each seem to each have a European heraldic charge) depicted on their design. Given that the Koraidon/Miraidon designs on the front of the Scarlet/Violet books are based on how lions and other animals are depicted in heraldry, this seems like a safe assumption. Okidogi has two crescents#/media/File:BlasonJean_Leliwa(selonGelre).svg) underneath its eyes, and the shape on its chest seems to be the shape of the heraldry shield#/media/File:Swiss_Escutcheon.svg) itself. Munkidori has a maltese cross#/media/File:Maltese_cross.svg) on its stomach. Fezandipiti has a cross moline#/media/File:Cross-Moline-Heraldry.svg) at the end of its tail. Ogerpon is yet another outlier here, just like with the cardinal colors, but one could argue the five pointed star on its chest is its charge, which is called a mullet#/media/File:Blason_de_la_ville_de_Deh%C3%A9ries(59)_Nord-France.svg). Also - on the left side of the top floor of the Entrance Hall you can find a strange shape hanging from a light fixture. It appears to be the water-bouget charge.
- Mount Penglai is the home of the Eight Immortals. The Adventure into Area Zero page in the Scarlet/Violet book depicts seven individuals descending into Area Zero, and we can assume that Heath or whoever illustrated the page was not depicted. Was the Expedition team made up of only eight people? With the prevalence of the number '8' in the games and DLC (Blueberry Academy logo), could this have any significance?
- AI Professor mentions that the energy of the Tera Crystals can "alter the organic functions of living things". The future Paradox Pokemon seem to be actual living Pokemon despite being made of machinery. If "Dream Theory" ends up being partially true, then I wonder if the Tera function that 'created' them (summoned, resurrected, there are many possibilities) possibly healed the Professor by turning them into a cyborg. The research journals suggest the assistant mentioned is the AI Professor, but certain discrepancies in them and the AI Professor's dialogue suggests that is not the case.
- In the Scarlet/Violet book the Director depicted to be shaking Heath's hand has a little piece of hair on his forehead that looks like a crescent moon. The two founders of the Academies depicted by the busts on the top floor of the entrance hall have hair that looks like Grapes and Oranges depending on the version, so theres a precedent for hair shapes of Academy figureheads having double meanings. This is the reachiest reach in this entire post, but I thought I'd include it.
- A pet theory I have had since the release of the games is that Geeta runs a secret society in Paldea that is orchestrating events from the shadows. The compass logo of the Elite Four is reminiscent of an all-seeing-eye, which is largely where this notion came from (The 'eye' portion of the logo is also identical to the marking on Lusamine-Nihilego's legs). If this is truly the case, then I imagine its based on the mythical La Garduna secret society of Spain, which historians are unsure ever actually existed. Secret Societies are also a common trope of Academies and Universities. A real world example that the games may be hinting at with the Paldean Pokemon Gimmighoul is a collegiate secret society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called the Order of Gimghoul.
- Every time the Professor summons a Paradox Pokemon from the time machine, the Pokemon falls from the machine in a Master Ball - seemingly just having been caught. In multiple locations within Paldea, including the Player's bedroom and Arven/Penny's dorm rooms, there are scattered boxes with a company logo depicting Tauros. Inside of the Zero Lab, however, the Professor has a large amount of boxes with the Delibird company logo. Most of the settlements in Paldea, like Medali outside of Zero Gate and Levincia where the real estate company is, have warehouses with the Delibird company logo. Is this the company that is providing the Professor with such a large amount of Master Balls? Does this mean that the Delibird company is a subsidiary of Silph Co., or some other Pokeball-manufacturer?
- Penny mentions that Nemona's dad is on the board of the Rotom Phone company. Nemona then mentions how her sister will "take over the family business". Does Nemona's family own a separate corporation from the Rotom Phone company, as 'take over' suggests ownership of the business rather than simply being a part of an executive team. On top of that, we know that the company producing Rotom Phones - or at least the cellphones that the Rotom possesses - is Macro Cosmos, based off of this concept art from Sword and Shield where you can see their logo on the unpossessed phone.
- If you start in the United States and dug a hole straight through the earth, you would end up in China, as the classic saying goes. This is called an "Antipodal Point". The Antipodal point of Madrid, give or take a few dozen miles, is a large isolated mountain in New Zealand with a lake named "Crater Lake" sitting at its peak. If Area Zero's clouds are in fact a portal to multiple locations, and the inscribed symbol was inspired by the Double Lozenge (two hearts joined as one), then could this location in North New Zealand be the other location connected to A0?

1. While Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" is probably one of the crooner's best-known songs, it was originally very different. Turns out, we have Robert De Niro to thank for it! Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb were tapped to write music for Martin Scorsese's 1977 film, New York, New York, which stars Liza Minnelli and De Niro. When the duo previewed the songs they had written, De Niro thought the title track, which was connected to his character, was too lighthearted. Although Kander and Ebb said they thought De Niro seemed "pompous" in telling them to rewrite the song, they took the criticism to heart and ended up penning their new version of the song in just 45 minutes.
2. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is my favorite movie of all time, so it's honestly criminal that I've never done a deep dive into some behind-the-scenes moments from the film! John Hughes, known for his teen movies, ended up writing the script in just a few days in order to get a draft finished before the Writers Guild of America went on strike. The script was reportedly so strong that it was barely edited before filming started. The movie is widely considered to be a love letter to Hughes's Chicago hometown and is filled with references to his own upbringing and shots of the city's skyline. In fact, Hughes even gave Ferris the same address as his childhood home, and his bedroom reportedly resembled Hughes's.
3. If I had to learn about this giraffe mating ritual, then it's only fair that you do too, okay? Unlike other animals, giraffes don't have a set mating season. Instead, they have an estrous cycle, which resembles a human menstrual cycle, except this cycle swaps blood for urine. When a male giraffe approaches a female giraffe, he begins to rub against her, which she takes as a signal to begin peeing. The male giraffe then tastes her pee to see if she's fertile, and thus, the mating ritual begins. A typical giraffe pregnancy lasts for 400–460 days. Male giraffes typically have no role in raising their offspring.
4. In 2007, Lisa Nowak became the first NASA astronaut to be arrested when she drove across the United States to confront a woman who was dating a fellow astronaut with whom Nowak had also had a relationship. About a decade after graduating from the US Naval Academy, Nowak was selected to be an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she specialized in robotics. Nowak said she was deeply affected by the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion because her best friend, astronaut Laurel Clark, died. Nowak told NASA that her children convinced her to continue on with her space career despite her unease.
5. Despite what you might believe after watching The Greatest Showman, P.T. Barnum was not a good guy. He had a long history of animal cruelty and was known for mistreating enslaved people and people with disabilities. He even reportedly hated the people who paid money to come see his exhibits. Barnum was allegedly frustrated that people were taking their time during visits to his museum, so he decided to post signs reading "This Way to the Egress" all over the place. He (correctly) believed that most of the visitors wouldn't know that "egress" meant "exit," so when they followed the signs, they ended up unknowingly leaving the entire museum. As a result, many people paid to reenter, bringing home even more money for Barnum.
6. Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" is essentially History 101 in song form. The track name-drops 118 historical events from 1949 to 1989, including everything from pivotal moments in the civil rights movement to details from sports and pop culture history. Joel was inspired to write the song after having a conversation with Sean Lennon, who was then in his 20s, while in the recording studio. One of Lennon's friends allegedly said that it was a terrible time to be a young person. Joel, who was about to turn 40, reportedly said that his own younger years hadn't been that easy either.
7. Coney Island's skyline looked a lot different back in the 1800s. The Brooklyn boardwalk was once home to a 200-foot-tall elephant-shaped hotel! The hotel, known as the Elephantine Colossus, was built in 1885 and contained 31 rooms, a concert hall, and a museum. The elephant's head housed an observatory, and its eyes served as telescopes. The real kicker was that the hotel was built several years before the Statue of Liberty was completed, so the giant elephant was often the first thing immigrants saw when they reached New York. At some point, the hotel was seen as gimmicky and lost most of its clientele. Soon, sex workers began moving in. In 1896, Elephantine Colossus burned down and was never rebuilt.
8. During Ronald Reagan's 1966 California gubernatorial campaign, he began eating jelly beans in an attempt to curb his pipe-smoking habit. His jelly beans of choice were the Goelitz Mini Jelly Beans from the Herman Goelitz Candy Co. Once the company caught wind of Reagan's love for the treat, they began to send the politician a monthly shipment of candy and even gifted the governor with a custom jelly bean jar. After Reagan's two terms as governor ended, the company continued to send him jelly beans. In 1976, Goelitz debuted their latest creation: the Jelly Belly. Within two years, Reagan's entire jelly bean shipment shifted to include only Jelly Belly jelly beans.
9. There are two main groups of whales: baleen whales, which include species like the blue whale and the humpback whale; and toothed whales, consisting of orcas, belugas, and sperm whales. While you probably guessed that toothed whales are named as such because they have teeth, baleen whales have baleen plates in their mouths, which help them filter out krill and other food. Toothed whales also have a "melon" in their foreheads. The melon is a mass of tissue that helps with communication and is crucial for echolocation, which they use to find food and to navigate underwater.
10. In 1997, construction on Disneyland's California Adventure Park was halted after Princess Diana was killed in a limo accident in a Paris tunnel on Aug. 31. California Adventure was supposed to include a ride called Superstar Limo, which involved guests boarding a limo and embarking on a high-speed chase through some of Los Angeles's biggest landmarks in order to get to the Disney offices in time to sign a huge movie contract. Riders also had to evade the paparazzi. Once the ride ended, passengers were encouraged to buy mock tabloids featuring the pictures the "paparazzi" had taken of them. Following Diana's death, Disney knew they could no longer debut the ride. Soon, they began to brainstorm alternative ideas to replace the limo theme.
11. Donald Gorske, who is known as the ultimate Big Mac fan, has reportedly eaten at least one McDonald's Big Mac every day for the past 50 years. As of May 2022, Gorske believes he has consumed about 32,340 Big Macs. He told Guinness World Records that he typically eats two Big Macs a day, although he revealed that at one point, his daily diet included nine burgers! "May 17, 1972, was the day I got my first car," Gorske said. "I drove to McDonald’s, ordered my first three Big Macs, went in the car, and ate them. And I said right there that I’m gonna probably eat these the rest of my life, and I threw the cartons in the backseat and started counting them from day one." Despite his Big Mac diet, Gorske and his wife say that doctors have given him a clean bill of health.
12. Although you probably picture Queen Elizabeth II wearing one of her signature colorful skirt suits, her fashion history is actually quite fascinating! Elizabeth was photographed wearing pants only once during her entire reign. In 1970, she was reportedly interested in updating her look, and asked her tailor for a custom pantsuit to wear during her royal tour in Australia. It's safe to assume that Elizabeth wasn't too fond of the outfit, as she was never again seen wearing pants in public. In order to maintain professionalism and avoid any type of fashion mishap, her dress hems were always cut below the knee.
13. In 1986, Clint Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel, California, in part because he wanted to overturn the town's strict law regarding ice cream sales. Eastwood announced his intention to run for office in 1985 after he reportedly found the City Council very difficult to work with when he wanted to turn property he owned into office space. He also cited a 1929 law in Carmel that banned the sale of ice cream cones as another reason for his campaign. In April 1986, he defeated incumbent Charlotte Townsend. His first order of business? He removed from office all of the people who supported the ice cream ban, thus allowing the sale of ice cream cones in Carmel for the first time in decades.
14. Chances are, you read George Orwell's Animal Farm in school. In the novel, a group of animals team up to rebel against the farmer who owns them, only to end up living in a communist dictatorship led by pigs. Although Orwell said that the book was the first time he had successfully been able to blend politics and art, he had a hard time finding a publisher. Several publishing houses turned down the book because they felt uneasy about its political stance. Secker & Warburg ultimately agreed to publish Animal Farm, and the book became a hit and was even used by the CIA as a propaganda tool during the Cold War.
15. In 1928, Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana on a promise of helping people who had been neglected by the federal government. He soon had his sights set on Washington and won a Senate seat. But before leaving for DC in 1932, he had the lieutenant governor replaced by two successors who promised to follow Long's commands. In the Senate, he created the “Share Our Wealth” program, which many thought was part of his bid for the presidency. In 1935, Long was assassinated by a political rival. Despite his death, his impact in the state lived on. In 1940, a study showed that rural schoolchildren not only had no idea that Long had been killed but also believed he was president.
16. The Real Housewives franchise put Bravo on the map for its depiction of the wild and wacky antics of wealthy women around the country, but it originally looked like a much different show! Scott Dunlop, the original producer of the Real Housewives of Orange County, got the idea for the show in 1986 when he moved from Los Angeles to Coto de Caza, one of the world's largest gated communities, located in Orange County, California. Dunlop began to notice that many of his female neighbors spent their days shopping and playing golf while their husbands went to work.
17. The first meal eaten on the moon included bacon bits, peaches, sugar cookie cubes, and a pineapple-grapefruit beverage. Bacon reportedly had a long history when it came to space travel. It was a staple during the Gemini missions and became a favorite among many astronauts. Despite all of the bacon love, it's since disappeared from space menus. Now the closest thing to bacon is a sausage patty that has to be rehydrated with warm water before being eaten.
18. Oscar Gamble, a baseball player who spent over 20 years in the major leagues, was known not only for his on-field play but also for his Afro, which sparked quite the controversy. In 1973, Gamble arrived at the Cleveland Indians training camp sporting an Afro. Although many Black basketball players had Afros, the hairstyle wasn't too popular among baseball players. Baseball was often seen as more conservative, and during the 1970s, the Afro was associated with the Black Power movement. Gamble's hair quickly became controversial. "People took one look at that hair and thought I was a bad guy," Gamble said in 1979. "There were some sportswriters who wouldn’t talk to me. They thought I was some kind of militant, with my beard and my hair."
19. In December 1990, Iben Browning, who claimed that he was a climatologist, predicted that a major earthquake was going to hit the St. Louis area on Dec. 3. In New Madrid, a Missouri town located on a fault line, people began stockpiling supplies, while others left town completely. Browning reportedly used weather patterns to make his predictions, although his exact methods were never publicized. Although scientists didn't vocally deny Browning's claims, it was believed that they didn't support his prediction, since it's impossible to predict an earthquake. The earthquake never happened. In fact, the area has not faced an earthquake at the magnitude Browning predicted in the three decades since.
20. While kangaroos are known for their hopping abilities (they can jump about 25 feet in one go!), they are unable to go backward because their big feet and long tails prohibit any backward movement. This anatomical hindrance has since been used by their native Australia as a symbol. The kangaroo was reportedly included on the Australian coat of arms to represent the idea that Australia is a nation that is always moving forward.
21. And finally, Elouise Cobell, who was also known as Yellow Bird Woman, fought for Native Americans to have control over their land and finances. Cobell was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, where her family did not have running water or electricity. Her great-great-grandfather notably stood up to the US government in the 19th century. When Cobell was 4 years old, her father built a one-room schoolhouse that she attended until she was in high school. Cobell reportedly took notice of her family's complaints about the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency that many suspected mismanaged the profits from land and trusts owned by Native Americans.

Link to article

(edit: this is a long-ass post, you may want to skip to the big sub-headings)
My recent re-read was, in part, intended to answer a question which would sometimes occur to me while I researched this or that theory, stumbling across passages that leapt out at me as being laden with secondary meaning, yet which stubbornly refused to give up their secrets.
That question was this: ‘How does George keep himself entertained when writing these books?”
And I’ve started to suspect that some of the games he plays with language and symbolism may largely be for his own benefit. A whetstone to keep his mind sharp while he slogs through the writing process, perhaps. We naturally assume that a lot of the complexity in the books is down to the story’s many, many moving parts. And this is clearly part of it. However, I think George has set out, since book one, to make sure he’s having as much fun as possible by including layers of symbolism where they frankly aren’t needed.
Attempting to explain this without sounding insane is the tricky part, but here goes. I’m going to examine a few pages from Davos’ second chapter in Dance, chosen because they contain several good examples of what I call “cryptic dioramas” - a needlessly fancy bullshit phrase I invented which basically means ‘a long passage comprised of images which represent other story elements’. They are chimera paragraphs that lead a double life. By day, they work in a diner. By night, a slightly less reputable diner. Think of those optical illusions which can be a jug and a pair of faces, or that one with the upside-down rabbit but it’s also a horse. Or possibly a duck.
Actually, no. Don’t think of optical illusions. I have a better metaphor. Some of you, I’m sure, will remember doing cryptic picture quizzes such as these:
https://www.quizmasters.biz/DB/Pic/Cryptic_Canvas/Cryptic_Canvas.html.
They used to be really popular. See how two musical lyres represent the Jim Carrey film Liar Liar? Or the letters ‘C C C’ are 300. Or those happy feet are: Happy Feet? Well, bear this image in mind as we move on.
Anyway. These essentially work on two levels, and you can find them throughout the books to a greater and lesser degree. If you’ve read any post on symbolism, you’ll be familiar with the way George weaves symbolic meanings into phrases, quotes and scenes. LmL famously analyses the more mythological aspects, finding references to various legends or prophecies. The Mountain represents the moon, the Viper is Azor Ahai, and so on. But I’ve found that George actually uses them very liberally, and for purposes great and small. As the books progress, he becomes more and more ambitious with their length and detail - in some cases, as with Davos II, writing entire pages of prose that can be read in two widely different ways. What’s more, he seemingly does it just for the hell of it. That, and to raise a smile.
I am no expert in deciphering - far from it. But I do believe I have located a number of passages where George intends deciphering to be done, and I’m getting a feel for the wavelength that he is on whenever he does it. My interpretations are bound to be wrong in places, so by all means offer your own. But that George intends them to be interpreted - of that I am now sure.
One surprising, yet important, thing I must stress is that there is a good deal of 'majestic cheesiness' used in building the symbolism, mixed in with the more abstract stuff. George uses a diverse arsenal of imagery and wordplay, from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s lowbrow here, highbrow there. As I said before, I suspect he is having enormous fun writing these. And that’s really all the justification they need to exist. It’s been great fun re-reading the books in this way, too. So I guess, whether the authorial intention is there or not, I can attest to the fact that the enjoyment I personally got was real (if that counts for anything).
Cryptic Dioaramas in Davos II
So firstly, the obvious surface meaning of the chapter: in short, Davos arrives in White Harbour, discovers that the Freys have got there before him when he sees the ship Lionstar, takes note of the city’s main features, then heads to an unsavoury drinking hole - the Lazy Eel - where he can do a bit of reconnaissance before planning his next move. Not a whole lot of action in this chapter, I think most would agree, but we do learn a lot about the cogs turning in the Northern plot.
The second feature of the chapter is a sequence of cryptic dioramas. Alternative meanings start to come into focus, and we will start to uncover layers that describe events happening (or soon to happen) in other parts of the world, relating to other POV characters, and yes maybe even some foreshadowing.
None of which takes anything away from the surface reading of Davos II, which is still great, atmospheric world-building stuff. George’s philosophy where symbolism is concerned seems to be ‘do no harm to the main story’. References are all subtly folded into the language and background detail, safely tucked away where they will not be a distraction.
1) Setting the scene

White Harbor's scent was sharp and salty, and a little fishy too.

Here we are clued in early to the idea that something unusual, or ‘fishy’, is up with White Harbour. Essentially, the Onion Knight is about to take us on a whistle-stop tour of ASOIAF as it stands in Dance. Scenes of local life, as he walks through White Harbour, are revealed to echo people and places we know and love - all through a twisted lens of wordplay and imagery.
George has divided these scenes geographically, as we will see. I’ll try to whizz through most of the smaller references, then look at the Lazy Eel section in more detail.
2) Around Volantis & Slaver’s Bay (the fish market)
We come now to the heart of George’s premise: White Harbour has become the world writ small.

He made his way along the wharf and through the fish market. The Brave Magister was taking on some mead. The casks stood four high along the pier. Behind one stack he glimpsed three sailors throwing dice. Farther on the fishwives were crying the day's catch, and a boy was beating time on a drum as a shabby old bear danced in a circle for a ring of river runners. Two spearmen had been posted at the Seal Gate, with the badge of House Manderly upon their breasts, but they were too intent on flirting with a dockside whore to pay Davos any mind.

Here we can find cryptic references to:

• Magister Illyrio in Pentos (the former ‘bravo') funding the hiring of …
• … The Golden Company (mead is made from honey) to support Aegon’s campaign. The stacks of casks represent their strength in numbers.
• the 3 sailors throwing dice = Quentyn’s ill-fated trio, their venture essentially one big gamble.
• the fishwives’ catch = the Iron Fleet and their trail of conquests as they reave and plunder their way across the Summer Sea.
• ‘the shabby bear’ = poor old Jorah, roped into service as a slave/arena-fighter (in the ring).
• the boy, ‘beating time’ on his drum = Tyrion, presumably, indicating that despite the odds he is still managing to not only survive but influence events. Could also be a reference to the fact that his ‘time' should be up, but like a cat with nine lives he keeps ‘beating’ fate.
• Finally, the ‘dockside whore’ = Daenerys in Slaver’s Bay, and we can assume that the spearmen represent her troubles with Yunkai and their allies - here, specifically, the sellsword company the Long Lances, some of whom not only flirt with joining her, but actually do (thanks to Daario).

A little unfair on Dany this last one, but it seems that George uses the word ‘whore’ with gleeful abandon - we shouldn’t always read too much into it. It’s just that his story happens to be populated by many ‘whores’, so … he puts them to good symbolic use. A lot. (They should raise their hourly rate.)
There are probably a ton of sceptics furrowing their brow at this so far. And I get it. All I can say is: try to think of these as impressionist paintings in prose form. They’re not blueprints or schematics. You have to squint a little. It’s like when Dany muses about Ser Barristan and his gift of pillows:

The old knight was a good man, but sometimes very literal. It was only a jape, ser, she thought, but she sat on one of the pillows just the same.

George is in full-on ‘jape mode’ here. We need to abandon our inner Barristans as we press on, if we want to make sense of these cryptic scenes.
3) Fishfoot Yard (Westeros)

Inside was a cobbled square with a fountain at its center. A stone merman rose from its waters, twenty feet tall from tail to crown. His curly beard was green and white with lichen, and one of the prongs of his trident had broken off before Davos had been born, yet somehow he still managed to impress. Old Fishfoot was what the locals called him.

Fishfoot himself is a metaphorical Westeros. Take a look at a colour map of Westeros and you’ll see the forest beyond the wall, green and white, standing in for his green and white beard. The broken arm of Dorne is his trident, which long ago had a piece ‘broken off’. The use of the word cobbled is interesting - it can also mean ‘assembled like a patchwork’, as in ‘cobbled together’. And we will soon see just what kind of patchwork puzzle George has constructed.
Here, we catch a glimpse of various story characters and locations throughout Westeros. You might like to have a go at doing the deciphering for yourself first, then read on and see if we match up anywhere, just to confirm that I’m not a raving lunatic. (Merely a lunatic will suffice). Relevant parts highlighted.

The Yard was teeming this afternoon. A woman was washing her smallclothes in Fishfoot's fountain and hanging them off his trident to dry. Beneath the arches of the peddler's colonnade the scribes and money changers had set up for business, along with a hedge wizard, an herb woman, and a very bad juggler. A man was selling apples from a barrow, and a woman was offering herring with chopped onions. Chickens and children were everywhere underfoot. The huge oak-and-iron doors of the Old Mint had always been closed when Davos had been in Fishfoot Yard before, but today they stood open. Inside he glimpsed hundreds of women, children, and old men, huddled on the floor on piles of furs. Some had little cookfires going.

Here are my thought processes on the passage as seen through our wonky, I mean magical, cryptic lens:

• the washerwoman = Lady Stoneheart, hanging people near, or just ‘off’, the Trident (river).
• ‘Arches’ = simple shortening of Archmaesters in Oldtown, where scribes ply their trade. The faceless man with his poisoned coin is our ‘money / changer’.
• the hedge wizard = Sam (a novice maester)
• the herb woman = Gilly (as in Gillyweed)
• the bad (evil) juggler = Euron? Possible reference to the finger dance played in the Iron Islands. He does seem to be juggling many plans at once, too, and as a metaphorical kraken he has enough arms to do so.
• the apple and herring sellers are probably a reference to Littlefinger and Sansa, if only because she is our ‘little bird’ (as herrings are little fish) and what does chopping onions give us? Something that Sansa is famous for: crying. Why Littlefinger is the apple seller is more elusive, but he is paired with Sansa at the Eyrie, so it fits. I need to mull this one over.
• children underfoot = the COTF under Bran’s weirwood tree.
• chickens … clearly they are all Azor Ahai. Ok, this one has me beat.
• The Old Mint is simply a really cute way of describing the Wall - it actually would kind of resemble a colossal breath mint. Cool, white, enormous and in this case really rather ‘old’ indeed. Majestic cheesiness. Again, one of the main aims of these devices is, I believe, to raise a chuckle now and then (or at least a groan).

This last one, for me, is confirmed by the mention of people (wildlings) huddling within on piles of furs, its doors having been newly opened (by Jon Snow). Also, the cook fires may be foreshadowing something that Melisandre has in mind.
Davos’ thoughts also provide some support for our premise:

Any boy stands five feet tall can find a place in his lordship's barracks, long as he can hold a spear." He's raising men, then. That might be good … or bad, depending. The apple was dry and mealy, but Davos made himself take another bite.

At the Wall (the old mint) someone is raising men. Davos wonders whether this is good or bad, hinting at the double meaning of ‘raising’ men. If they are being raised from the dead, maybe not so good …
So far I haven’t even touched on the ‘surface reading’ of the passage. That’s because it doesn’t really have much bearing on the diorama here. Not to say that George doesn’t also weave things together thematically. He generally does, I think - and one day I’ll have to go back and put together some analyses of these. But in this case, what we’re getting is a ‘symbolic roundup’ of people and events sprinkled throughout the books around/after the time Davos is in White Harbour. It’s a neat little overview, with a light seasoning of foreshadowing.
On with our tour.
4) Past Fishfoot (Heading East again, but with a darker tone)

He made his way around Old Fishfoot, past where a young girl was selling cups of fresh milk from her nanny goat. He was remembering more of the city now that he was here. Down past where Old Fishfoot's trident pointed was an alley where they sold fried cod, crisp and golden brown outside and flaky white within. Over there was a brothel, cleaner than most, where a sailor could enjoy a woman without fear of being robbed or killed. Off the other way, in one of those houses that clung to the walls of the Wolf's Den like barnacles to an old hull, there used to be a brewhouse where they made a black beer so thick and tasty that a cask of it could fetch as much as Arbor gold in Braavos and the Port of Ibben, provided the locals left the brewer any to sell.

As Davos moves past the statue of Fishfoot, so do we move beyond Westeros. Next stop: Braavos.
This next one is weird, but stick with me. The young girl can only be Arya, off in her own separate story, serving the Faceless Men. The nanny goat (of Qohor?) is one avatar of the God of Many Faces - the milk his ‘gift’ of death. Goats/horned animals are frequently symbolic of malicious, god-like entities; the cuteness of the nanny goat juxtaposes nicely with the more sinister reality. Arya has also gone by the name Nan in the past.
“Down past” the trident (with broken prong) = south, then past the broken Arm of Dorne. Take a look at the map and you’ll notice the tip has a distinct trident-like shape. So, heading further east:

• alley where they ‘sell fried cod’ could be Dorne, although the geography doesn’t really match up well so I may be wrong. Summer Isles perhaps?
• the ‘clean’ brothel’ is no doubt Lys, with its pleasure houses.
• the ‘barnacle brewhouse’ - off in the other direction - must be Valyria, clinging to the south coast, the ‘hull’ of Essos, with the ‘black beer’ a reference to their involvement in slavery (black market, dark magic). Or at least it ‘used to’ be involved, before the Doom. The locals (slaves) did eventually rise up against the owners (brewers), eventually founding the city of Braavos and leaving their masters with little to sell. Phew.

It’s probably worth mentioning here that the eastern end of Essos looks (to me at least) like a crouching wolf, facing west. Which makes its codename here (the Wolf’s Den) all the more appropriate. All this geographical pinpointing serves mainly to help us see where we’re headed. South, east, then further east. Wow, we’re really speeding along. In fact, we’re at the limits of the map as Davos enters the dingy gloom of the Lazy Eel. Here be dragons.
5) The Lazy Eel / Asshai

It was wine he wanted, though—sour, dark, and dismal. He strolled across the yard and down a flight of steps, to a winesink called the Lazy Eel, underneath a warehouse full of sheepskins. Back in his smuggling days, the Eel had been renowned for offering the oldest whores and vilest wine in White Harbor, along with meat pies full of lard and gristle that were inedible on their best days and poisonous on their worst. With fare like that, most locals shunned the place, leaving it for sailors who did not know any better. You never saw a city guardsman down in the Lazy Eel, or a customs officer.
Some things never change. Inside the Eel, time stood still. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was stained black with soot, the floor was hard-packed earth, the air smelled of smoke and spoiled meat and stale vomit. The fat tallow candles on the tables gave off more smoke than light, and the wine that Davos ordered looked more brown than red in the gloom. Four whores were seated near the door, drinking. One gave him a hopeful smile as he entered. When Davos shook his head, the woman said something that made her companions laugh. After that none of them paid him any mind.
Aside from the whores and the proprietor, Davos had the Eel to himself. The cellar was large, full of nooks and shadowed alcoves where a man could be alone. He took his wine to one of them and sat with his back to a wall to wait.

Although I toyed with the idea that this might be Old Ghis as its lies near the Worm river, none of the other imagery seemed to fit, so I went with my first instinct which was: a symbolic Asshai, where dragons are said to have originated. Eels / dragons. You could say there’s a similarity of sorts. I mean, George could have called it the Lazy Badger or the Lazy Oyster but he went with something more serpentine.
Here’s a breakdown of the Eel / Asshai symbolism. Situated beneath a sheepskin warehouse could be a colour reference - to the ghost-grass plains near Asshai. Or perhaps that we have moved east beyond the land of the Lhazarene (lamb men). Again, a debatable one.

• Inside the Eel, time stood still.

“ … the ancient port of Asshai stands at the end of a long wedge of land, on the point where the Jade Sea meets the Saffron Straits. Its origins are lost in the mists of time. Even the Asshai'i do not claim to know who built their city; they will say only that a city has stood here since the world began and will stand here until it ends.” - World of Ice and Fire

• The barrel-vaulted ceiling was stained black with soot, the floor was hard-packed earth, the air smelled of smoke and spoiled meat and stale vomit

“ … the city is built entirely of black stone: halls, hovels, temples, palaces, streets, walls, bazaars, all. Some say as well that the stone of Asshai has a greasy, unpleasant feel to it, that it seems to drink the light, dimming tapers and torches and hearth fires alike. The nights are very black in Asshai, all agree, and even the brightest days of summer are somehow grey and gloomy.” - World of Ice and Fire

• … and vilest wines / meat pies full of lard and gristle that were inedible on their best days and poisonous on their worst

“There are no horses in Asshai, no elephants, no mules, no donkeys, no zorses, no camels, no dogs. Such beasts, when brought there by ship, soon die. The malign influence of the Ash and its polluted waters have been implicated, as it is well understood from Harmon's On Miasmas that animals are more sensitive to the foulness exuded by such waters, even without drinking them.” - World of Ice and Fire

In the Eel: “You never saw a city guardsman … or a customs officer.” And in Asshai ..

“ … all find welcome in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, where nothing is forbidden. Here they are free to practice their spells without restraint or censure, conduct their obscene rites, and fornicate with demons if that is their desire.”- World of Ice and Fire

That last part about the demons is interesting. Who is there to fornicate with in the Lazy Eel?

Four whores were seated near the door, drinking. One gave him a hopeful smile as he entered.

Sex workers get such a bad rep in these books. I do hope they get some kind of restitution by the end! So, even though George has stated that we will probably never get to see Asshai in the books, he’s managed to take us there anyway - in his own inimitable way. There are probably many other things to unpack in this scene, but this post was really just designed to draw attention to the patterns in this passage, and hopefully to open symbolism discussion up to readers who may have been sceptical in the past.
That almost concludes our miniaturised tour of the world of ASOIAF. The chapter then moves on in traditional style, as Davos engages with the denizens of the Eel on various topics.
As he leaves the Eel, however, he ponders whether he should seek out any of the other delights White Harbour has to offer. Some optional excursions on our tour, it seems:

There were other places he might get his ears filled: an inn famous for its lamprey pies, the alehouse where the wool factors and the customs men did their drinking, a mummer's hall where bawdy entertainments could be had for a few pennies.

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that so far we have visited, if fleetingly, most of the locations for our POV characters in Dance (plus some extra special guests - Valyria & Asshai). But not all. There are three very notable absences in particular - all in Westeros (there’s a clue).
Here’s a final end-of-post test for you all. So far, we can tick off:

• Volantis
• Slaver’s Bay
• Valyria
• Asshai
• Braavos
• Lys
• The Wall
• Beyond the Wall
• The Eyrie
• Oldtown
• Dorne/Summer Isles (?)
• The Riverlands

What well-known locations, then, do you suppose Davos has smuggled into the text here?

• The inn famous for lamprey pies.
• The alehouse where wool factors and customs men do their drinking.
• The mummer’s hall, where bawdy entertainment can be had (for a few pennies).

I know my guesses. They may not be right, but do we doubt any longer that this is clearly something that George does? The internal logic of this passage, moving along geographically, all seems pretty clear to me. Where I’ve noticed symbolism in previous books, it was nowhere near this comprehensive or on this scale.
To what purpose, though? We haven’t learned who Jon’s mother is, who will wield Lightbringer, the identity of the Valonqar, yada yada yadda. Some little bits of foreshadowing that the reader would get to know by the end of the book anyway. A few breadcrumbs. Well, as I said at the beginning, George is entitled to have his fun. And I’ve personally been having a blast on my re-read (especially AFFC - wow).
But more than that, I think this passage, with its logical structure helping us along, is a teachable moment from our author.
So the question we might prefer to ask is this: If George is prepared to put in this much effort just to create a brain-tickling cryptic roundup - a ‘snapshot’ of the story’s main locations and players as they stand - then how much more effort has he put into the really big stuff?
(edit: originally posted on https://asoiaf.westeros.org)

PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1498-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-ave-chapter-23/
PROMPTS:

1. 2 chapters in, zero retention. Yeats is in this book and someone called Edward, and they have both written plays, and Moore is somehow involved

Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
Only once can I accuse myself of any sudden vanity called out of the depths by the sight of a newspaper placard—once certain words excited in me a shameful sense of triumph at, shall I say, having got the better of somebody?—only once, and it did not endure longer than while walking past St Clement Danes. And I am less ashamed to speak of the joy I experienced five years after the first publication of Esther Waters. The task has to be got through, I said, throwing myself into an armchair, having left my friends at rehearsal. The hospital scenes were not liked, but the story soon picked up again, and when the end came I sat wondering how it could have happened to me to write the book that among all books I should have cared most to write, and to have written it so much better than I ever dreamed it could be written.
The joy of art is a harmless joy, and no man should begrudge me the pleasure that I got from my first reading of Esther Waters. He would not, though he were the most selfish in the world, if he knew the unhappiness and anxieties that my writings always cause me. A harmless joy, the reading of Esther Waters, truly, and it is something to think of that the book itself, though pure of all intention to do good—that is to say, to alleviate material suffering—has perhaps done more good than any novel written in my generation. It is no part of my business nor my desire to speak of the Esther Waters Home—I am more concerned with the evil I know the book to have done than with the good. It did good to others—to me it did evil, and that evil I could see all around me when I raised my eyes from my proofs. At the end of a large, handsome, low-ceilinged flat on the first floor, very different from the garret in King's Bench Walk, hung a grey portrait by Manet; on another wall a mauve morning by Monet, willows emerging from a submerged meadow; on another an April girl sitting in an arbour, her golden hair glittering against green leaves, by Berthe Morisot. The flowered carpet and all the pretty furniture scattered over it represented evil, and the comfortable cook who came to ask me what I would like for dinner. We read in the newspapers of the evil a book may produce—the vain speculation of erotic men and women; but here is a case of a thoroughly healthy book having demoralised its author. How is such evil to be restrained? All virtuous men and women may well ask, and I hope that they may put their heads together and find out a way.
In Paris I had lived very much as I lived in Victoria Street, but it had never occurred to me that I showed any merit by accepting, without murmuring, the laborious life in the Temple that a sudden reverse of fortune had forced upon me;[1] it was no suffering for me to live in a garret, wearing old clothes, and spending from two shillings to half a crown on my dinner, because I felt, and instinctively, that that is the natural life of a man of letters; and I can remember my surprise when my brother told me one day that my agent had said he never knew anybody so economical as George. Some time after Tom Ruttledge himself came panting up my stairs, and during the course of conversation regarding certain large sums of money which I heard of for the first time, he said: Well, you have spent very little money during the last few years. And when I spoke of the folly of other landlords, he added: There are very few who would be content to live in a cock-loft like this. And looking round my room I realised that what he said was true; I was living in a cock-loft, bitterly cold in winter and stifling in summer; the sun beating on the windows fiercely in the afternoon, obliging me to write in my shirt-sleeves. And it so happened that a few days after Tom Ruttledge's visit a lady called by appointment—a lady whom I was so anxious to see that I did not wait to put on my coat before opening the door. My plight and the fatigue of three long flights of stairs caused her to speak her mind somewhat plainly.
A gentleman, she said, wouldn't ask a lady to come to such a place; and he wouldn't forget to put his coat on before opening the door to her. But you have received me dressed still more lightly.
With me it is all or nothing, she said laughing, her ill humour passing away suddenly. All the same, I realised that she was right; the Temple is too rough and too public a place for a lady, and it is an inconvenient place, too, for in the Temple it is only possible to ask a lady to dinner during forty days in the year. Only for forty days are there dinners in the hall; the sutler then will send over an excellent dinner of homely British fare to any one living in the Temple. She used to enjoy these dinners, but they did not happen often enough; and it was the necessity of providing myself with a suitable trysting place that drew me out of the poverty to which I owe so much of my literature, and despite many premonitions compelled me to sign the lease of a handsome flat. The flat sent me forth collecting pretty furniture which she never saw, for she never came to Victoria Street. I should have written better if I had remained in the Temple, within hearing and seeing of the poor folk that run in and out of Temple Lane like mice, picking up a living in the garrets, for, however poor one may be there is always somebody by one who is still poorer. Esther Waters was a bane—the book snatched me, not only out of that personal poverty which is necessary to the artist, but out of the way of all poverty.
My poor laundress[2] used to tell me every day of her troubles, and through her I became acquainted with many other poor people, and they awakened spontaneous sympathy in me, and by doing them kindnesses I was making honey for myself without knowing it. Esther Waters and Tom Ruttledge robbed me of all my literary capital; and I had so little, only a few years of poverty. I've forgotten how long I lived in the Strand lodging described in My Confessions—two years, I think; I was five or six in Dane's Inn, and seven in the Temple—about twelve lean years in all; and twelve lean years are not enough, nor was my poverty hard enough. The last I saw of literature was when my poor laundress came to see me in Victoria Street. Standing in the first position of dancing (she used to dance when she was young), she looked round the drawing-room. Five pounds was my farewell present to her! How mean we seem when we look back into our lives! When her son wrote to ask me to help her in her old age I forgot to do so, and this confession costs me as much as some of Rousseau's cost him.... In bidding her goodbye I bade goodbye to literature. No, she didn't inspire the subject of Esther Waters, but she was the atmosphere I required for the book, and to talk to her at breakfast before beginning to write was an excellent preparation. In Victoria Street there was nobody to help me; my cook was nearly useless (in the library), and the parlourmaid quite useless. She had no stories to tell of the poor who wouldn't be able to live at all if it weren't for the poor. She thought, instead, that I ought to go into society, and at the end of the week opened the door so gleefully to Edward that she seemed to say: At last somebody has called.
I turned round in my chair; Well, how are the rehearsals going on? I noticed that he was unusually red and flurried. He had come to tell me that Yeats had that morning turned up at rehearsal, and was now explaining his method of speaking verse to the actors, while the lady in the green cloak gave illustration of it on a psaltery. At such news as this a man cries Great God! and pales. For sure I paled, and besought Edward not to rack my nerves with a description of the instrument or of the lady's execution upon it. In a fine rage I started out of my seat in the bow-window, crying: Edward, run, and be in time to catch that cab going by. He did this, and on the way to the Strand indignation boiled too fiercely to hear anything until the words quarter-tones struck my ear.
Lord save us! Quarter-tones! Why, he can't tell a high note from a low one! And leaving to Edward the business of paying the cab, I hurried through the passage and into the theatre, seeking till I found Yeats behind some scenery in the act of explanation to the mummers, whilst the lady in the green cloak, seated on the ground, plucked the wires, muttering the line, Cover it up with a lonely tune. And all this going on while mummers were wanted on the stage, and while an experienced actress walked to and fro like a pantheress. It was to her I went cautiously as the male feline approaches the female (in a different intent, however) and persuaded her to come back to her part.
As soon as she had consented I returned to Yeats with much energetic talk on the end of my tongue, but finding him so gentle, there was no need for it; he betook himself to a seat, after promising in rehearsal language to let things rip, and we sat down together to listen to The Countess Cathleen, rehearsed by the lady, who had put her psaltery aside and was going about with a reticule on her arm, rummaging in it from time to time for certain memoranda, which when found seemed only to deepen her difficulty. Her stage-management is all right in her notes, Yeats informed me. But she can't transfer it from paper on to the stage, he added, without appearing in the least to wish that the stage-management of his play should be taken from her. Would you like to see her notes? At that moment the voice of the experienced actress asking the poor lady how she was to get up the stage drew attention from Yeats to the reticule, which was being searched for the notes. And the actress walked up the stage and stood there looking contemptuously at Miss Vernon, who laid herself down on the floor and began speaking through the chinks. Her dramatic intention was so obscure that perforce I had to ask her what it was, and learnt from her that she was evoking hell.
But the audience will think you are trying to catch cockroaches.
Yeats whirled forward in his cloak with the suggestion that she should stand on a chair and wave her hands.
That will never do, Yeats; and the lady interrupted, asking me how hell should be evoked, and later begged to be allowed to hand over the rehearsal of The Countess Cathleen to the experienced actress's husband, who said he would undertake to get the play on the stage if Mr Yeats would promise not to interfere with him.
Yeats promised, but as he had promised me before not to interfere, I felt myself obliged to beg him to take himself off for a fortnight.
The temptation to deliver orations on the speaking of verse is too great to be resisted, Yeats.
One can always manage to do business with a clever man, and with a melancholy caw Yeats went away in his long cloak leaving Mr—to settle how the verses should be spoken; and, feeling that my presence was no longer required, I returned to my novel, certain that Erin would not be robbed of the wassail-bowl we were preparing for her. But there is always a hand to snatch the bowl from Erin's lips, and at the end of the week Yeats came to tell me that Edward had gone to consult a theologian, and was no longer sure that he would be able to allow the performances of The Countess Cathleen.
You see, he's paying for it, and believes himself to be responsible for the heresy which the friar detects in it.
Every other scene described in this book has been traced faithfully from memory; even the dialogues may be considered as practically authentic, but all memory of Yeats bringing news to me of Edward's vacillations seemed to have floated from my mind until Yeats pitted his memory against mine. My belief was that it was in Ireland that Edward had consulted the theologian, but Yeats is certain that it was in London. He gave me a full account of it in Victoria Street, and was careful to put geasa upon me, as himself would word it, which in English means that he was careful to demand a promise from me not to reproach Edward with his backsliding until the company had left Euston. The only interest in the point is that I who remember everything should have forgotten it. There can be no doubt that Yeats's version is the true one; it appears that I was very angry with Edward, and did write him a letter which flurried him and brought him to Yeats with large sweat upon his forehead. Of this I am sure, that if I were angry with Edward, it was not because he feared to bring an heretical play to Dublin—a man has a right to his conscience—if I were angry, it was because he should have neglected to find out what he really thought of The Countess Cathleen before it went into rehearsal. It seemed that, after giving up many of my days to the casting of his play, and to the casting of The Countess Cathleen, it was not fair for him to cry off, and at the last moment. He had seen The Countess Cathleen rehearsed day after day, and to consult a friar about a play was not worthy of a man of letters. But he was not a man of letters, only an amateur, and he would remain one, notwithstanding The Heather Field—Symons had said it. What annoyed me perhaps even more than the sudden interjection of the friar into our business, were Edward's still further vacillations, for after consultation with the friar he was not yet certain as to what he was going to do. Such a state of mind, I must have declared to Yeats, is horrifying and incomprehensible to me. Edward's hesitation must have enraged me against him. It is difficult for me to understand how I could have forgotten the incident.... It seems to me that I do remember it now. But how faint my memory of it is compared with my memory of the departure of the mummers from Euston! Yeats and the lady in green had started some days before—Yeats to work up the Press, and the lady to discover the necessary properties that would be required in Dublin for both plays. Noggins were wanted for The Countess Cathleen, and noggins could not be procured in London. Yeats and the lady in green were our agents in advance, Edward with universal approbation casting himself for the part of baggage-man. He was splendid in it, with a lady's bag on his arm, running up and down the station at Euston, shepherding his flock, shouting that all the luggage was now in the van, and crying: The boy, who is to look after him? I will be back with the tickets in a moment. Away he fled and at the ticket-office he was impassive, monumental muttering fiercely to impatient bystanders that he must count his money, that he had no intention of leaving till he was sure he had been given the right change.
Now, are you not coming with us? he cried to me, and would have pulled me into the train if I had not disengaged myself, saying:
No, no; I will not travel without clothes. Loose me. The very words do I remember, and the telegram two days after: The sceptre of intelligence has passed from London to Dublin. Again and again I read Edward's telegram. If it be true, if art be winging her way westward? And a vision rose up before me of argosies floating up the Liffey, laden with merchandise from all the ports of Phoenicia, and poets singing in all the bowers of Merrion Square; and all in a new language that the poets had learned, the English language having been discovered by them, as it had been discovered by me, to be a declining language, a language that was losing its verbs.
The inflaming telegram arrived in the afternoon, and it was possible to start that evening; but it seemed to me that the returning native should see Ireland arising from the sea, and thinking how beautiful the crests would show against the sunset, I remembered a legend telling how the earliest inhabitants of Ireland had the power of making the island seem small as a pig's back to her enemies, and a country of endless delight to her friends.
And while I sat wondering whether Ireland would accept me as a friend or as an enemy, the train steamed through the Midlands; and my anger against Edward, who preferred his soul to his art, was forgotten; it evaporated gently like the sun haze at the edges of the wood yonder. A quiet, muffled day continued its dreams of spring and summer time; but my thoughts were too deeply set in memories of glens where fairy bells are heard, to heed the simple facts of Nature—the hedgerows breaking into flower, the corn now a foot high in the fields, birds rising out of it, birds flying from wood to wood in the dim sunny air, flying as if they, that had been flying all their lives, still found pleasure in taking the air. I was too deeply set in my adventure to notice the red towns that flashed past, nor did I sentimentalise over the lot of those who lived in those ugly parallel streets—human warrens I should call them. I could think of nothing else but the sweetness of Étaine's legs as she washed them in the woodlands; of Angus coming perhaps to meet her, his doves flying round him; of Grania and Diarmuid sleeping under cromlechs, or meeting the hermit in the forest who had just taken three fish out of the stream, of the horns of Finn heard in the distance, and the baying of his hounds.
The sudden sight of shaw, spinney, and sagging stead would at other times have carried my thoughts back into medieval England, perhaps into some play of Shakespeare's interwoven with kings and barons; now the legends of my own country—the renascent Ireland—absorbed me, and so completely, that I did not notice the passing of Stafford and Crewe. It was not until the train flashed through Chester that I awoke from my reveries sufficiently to admire the line of faint yellow hills, caught sight of suddenly, soon passing out of view. Before my wonderment ceased we were by a wide expanse of water, some vast river or estuary of the sea, with my line of yellow hills far away—cape, promontory, or embaying land, I knew not which, until a fellow-passenger told me that we were travelling along the Dee, and at low tide the boats, now proudly floating, would be lying on the empty sand. A beautiful view it was at high tide, the languid water lapping the rocks within a few feet of the railway; and a beautiful view it doubtless was at low tide—miles and miles of sand, a streak of water flashing half-way between me and the distant shore.
We went by a manufacturing town, and there must have been mines underneath the fields, for the ground sagged, and there were cinder-heaps among the rough grass. Conway Castle was passed; it reminded me of the castles of my own country, and Anglesey reminded me of the Druids. Yeats had told me that the Welsh Druids used to visit their brethren in Ireland to learn the deeper mysteries of their craft. Pictures rose up in my mind of these folk going forth in their galleys, whether plied with oar or borne by sail I knew not; and I would have crossed the sea in a ship rather than in a steamer. It was part of my design to sit under a sail and be the first to catch sight of the Irish hills. But the eye of the landsman wearies of the horizon, and it is possible that I went below and ordered the steward to call me in time; and it is also possible that I rolled myself up in a rug and sat on the deck, though this be not my ordinary way of travelling; but having no idea at the time of writing this book, no notes were taken, and after the lapse of years details cannot be discovered.
But I do remember myself on deck watching the hills now well above the horizon, asking myself again if Ireland were going to appear to me small as a pig's back or a land of extraordinary enchantment? It was the hills themselves that reminded me of the legend—on the left, rough and uncomely as a drove of pigs running down a lane, with one tall hill very like the peasant whom I used to see in childhood, an old man that wore a tall hat, knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and brogues. Like a pig's back Ireland has appeared to me, I said; but soon after on my right a lovely hill came into view, shapen like a piece of sculpture and I said: Perhaps I am going to see Ireland as an enchanted isle after all.
While I was debating which oracle I should accept, the steamer churned along the side of the quay, where I expected, if not a deputation, at least some friends to meet me; but no one was there, though a telegram had been sent to Yeats and Edward informing them of my journey. And as there was nobody on the platform at Westland Row to receive me, I concluded that they were waiting at the Shelbourne Hotel. But I entered that hotel as any stranger from America might, unknown, unwelcomed, and it was with a sinking heart that I asked vainly if Edward had left a note for me, an invitation to dine with him at his club. He had forgotten. He never thinks of the gracious thing to do, not because he is unkind, but because he is a little uncouth. He will be glad to see me, I said, when we meet. All the same, it seemed to me uncouth to leave me to eat a solitary table-d'hôte dinner when I had come over in his honour. And chewing the casual food that the German waiters handed me, I meditated the taunts that I would address to him about the friar whose advice he had sought in London, and whose advice he had not followed. He runs after his soul like a dog after his tail, and lets it go when he catches it, I muttered as I went down the street, to angry to admire Merrion Square, beautiful under the illumination of the sunset, making my way with quick, irritable steps towards the Antient Concert Rooms, whither the hall-porter had directed me, and finding them by a stone-cutter's yard. Angels and crosses! A truly suitable place for a play by Edward Martyn, I said. The long passage leading to the rooms seemed to be bringing me into a tomb. Nothing very renascent about this, I said, pushing my way through the spring doors into a lofty hall with a balcony and benches down the middle, and there were seats along the walls placed so that those who sat on them would have to turn their heads to see the stage, a stage that had been constructed hurriedly by advancing some rudely painted wings and improvising a drop-curtain.
There is something melancholy in the spectacle of human beings enjoying themselves, but the melancholy of this dim hall I had never seen before, except in some of Sickert's pictures: the loneliness of an audience, and its remoteness as it sits watching a small illuminated space where mummers are moving to and fro reciting their parts.
And it is here that Edward thinks that heresy will flourish and put mischief into men's hearts, I thought, and searched for him among the groups, finding him not; but Yeats was there, listening reverentially to the sound of his verses. He went away as soon as the curtain fell, returning just before the beginning of the next act, his cloak and his locks adding, I thought, to the melancholy of the entertainment. His intentness interested me so much that I did not venture to interrupt it. His play seemed to be going quite well, but in the middle of the last act some people came on the stage whom I did not recognise as part of the cast, and immediately the hall was filled with a strange wailing, intermingled with screams; and now, being really frightened, I scrambled over the benches, and laying my hand upon Yeats's shoulder begged him to tell me what was happening. He answered, The caoine—the caoine. A true caoine and its singers had been brought from Galway. From Galway! I exclaimed. You miserable man! and you promised me that the play should be performed as it was rehearsed. Instead of attending to your business you have been wandering about from cabin to cabin, seeking these women.
Immediately afterwards the gallery began to howl, and that night the Antient Concert Rooms reminded me of a cats' and a dogs' home suddenly merged into one. You see what you have brought upon yourself, miserable man! I cried in Yeats's ear. It is not, he said, the caoine they are howling at, but the play itself. But the play seemed to be going very well, I interjected, failing to understand him. I want to hear the Countess's last speech—I'll tell you after.
A man must love his play very much, I thought, to be able to listen to it in such distressing circumstances. He did not seem to hear the cat-calls, and when the last lines had been spoken he asked if I had seen The Cross or the Guillotine. Wasn't it put into your hand as you came into the theatre? And while walking to the hotel with me he told me that the author of this pamphlet was an old enemy of his. All the heresies in The Countess Cathleen were quoted in the pamphlet, and the writer appealed to Catholic feeling to put a stop to the blasphemy. Last night, Yeats said, we had to have the police in, and Edward, I am afraid, will lose heart; he will fear the scandal and may stop the play. He spoke not angrily of Edward as I should have done, but kindly and sympathetically, telling me that I must not forget that Edward is a Catholic, and to bring a play over that shocks people's feelings is a serious matter for him. The play, of course, shocks nobody's feelings, but it gives people an opportunity to think their feelings have been shocked, and it gives other people an opportunity of making a noise; and Yeats told me how popular noise was in Ireland, and controversy, too, when accompanied with the breaking of chairs. But I was too sad for laughter, and begged him to tell me more about the friar whom Edward had consulted in London, and whose theology had not been accepted, perhaps because Gill had advised Edward that the friar's opinion was only a single opinion, no better and no worse than any other man's. It appeared that Gill had held out a hope to Edward that opinions regarding The Countess Cathleen, quite different from the friar's, might be discovered, and I more or less understood that Gill's voice is low and musical, that he had sung Hush-a-by baby on the tree top; but a public scandal might awaken the baby again. And send it crying to one of the dignitaries of the Church, and so it may well be that we have seen the last of The Countess Cathleen.
Yeats seemed to take the matter very lightly for one whom I had seen deeply interested in the play, and I begged him to explain everything—himself, Edward, the friar, and above all, Ireland.
In Ireland we don't mean all we say, that is your difficulty, and he began to tell of the many enemies his politics had made for him, and in a sort of dream I listened, hearing for the hundredth time stories about money that had been collected, purloined, information given to the police, and the swearing of certain men to punish the traitors with death. I was told how these rumoured assassinations had reached the ears of Miss Gonne, and how she and Yeats had determined to save the miscreants; and many fabulous stories of meetings in West Kensington, which in his imagination had become as picturesque as the meetings of Roman and Venetian conspirators in the sixteenth century. A few years before Miss Gonne had proclaimed '98 to a shattering accompaniment of glass in Dame Street, Yeats walking by her, beholding divinity. We have all enjoyed that dream. If our lady be small we see her with a hand-mirror in her boudoir, and if she be tall as an Amazon, well, then we see her riding across the sky hurling a javelin. And the stars! We have all believed that they could tell us everything if they only would; and we have all gone to some one to cast our horoscopes. So why jeer at Yeats for his humanities? We have all been interested in the Rosicrucians—Shelley our van-bird. Yeats knew all their strange oaths, and looked upon himself as an adept. Even the disastrous pamphlet could not make him utterly forget Jacob Boehm, and we spoke of this wise man, going up Merrion Street—a dry subject, but no subject is dry when Yeats is the talker. Go on, Yeats, I said—go on, I like to listen to you; you believe these things because Miss Gonne believes herself to be Joan of Arc, and it is right that a man should identify himself with the woman he admires. Go on, Yeats—go on talking; I like to hear you.
After some further appreciation of Jacob Boehm we returned to the pamphlet.
It is all very sad, Yeats, I said, but I cannot talk any more tonight. Tomorrow—tomorrow you can come to see me, and we will talk about Edward and The Cross or the Guillotine.

Squats are the mind-killer.
Squats are the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my squats.
I will permit them to pass over me and through me.
And when they have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see their path.
Where the squats have gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
​
(with apologies to the Dune guy)

What is Super Squats?

At first I thought Super Squats was silly and impossible. Then I did it. In conclusion, I love it.
Super Squats is a book by Randall Strossen, frequently recommended by u/MythicalStrength. It instructs readers to do "breathing squats" in sets of 20, and to add 5 to 10 pounds each workout. Milk up to a gallon a day is included in the dietary recommendations. Does this sound ridiculous? That's what I thought too.

Correcting a few misconceptions

Here are a few things I didn't understand about Super Squats from just hearing about it. These are a few things that became clear as I read the book:
You don't need to start with your 10RM. Strossen recommends starting with "your normal ten rep poundage," as in a working set, not necessarily a 10 rep max. (You'll get there, though.) One of the authors he's working from, Peary Rader, has written: "Incidentally, you don’t jump into this full force all at once. Start with light poundages that seem easy, and then add 5 or 10 lbs. each workout."
Super Squats is a book, not a program. It is a collection of recommendations, drawn mainly from older articles written throughout the 20th century. 20-rep squats are emphasized, but there are also discussions of changing your squat rep scheme to 2x15 or 3x10 or 5x5. It also mentions that you may want to squat once or twice a week instead of three times. It's a book in praise of squats as a lifelong practice. It's not a simple six-week program.
It involves more than just squatting. Strossen describes squats as a full body exercise, and it's true that in the course of holding a bar on your back long enough to complete a set of breathing squats, you're keeping your back tight and you're bracing your core, so your traps/erectors/abs/obliques and various other core and upper-back muscles are getting at least a little bit of work. But do not forget that all the programs described in the book call for direct upper body work. Even the "abbreviated program" calls for bench press and bent over rows.
The "gain 30 pounds of muscle in 6 weeks" promise is not necessarily meant to be believed. In fact, it seems to come from a rumor that J. C. Hise "gained twenty-nine pounds in a month [from squatting]--progress so remarkable that no one believed him." The book also includes a footnote that nobody knows how tall Hise actually was. I'm pretty sure we're seeing the tail end of a game of telephone with nothing resembling fact checking at any stage. Take it all with a grain of salt.
By the way, if you want a closer look at the strength-article-industrial-complex of the time, I'd recommend reading John Fair's Muscletown USA. And if you want to see Peary Rader get milkshake ducked you can read Fair's other book Mr. America. But we digress.

Modifications I made because I'm an old lady

The book seems to be aimed at skinny teenage dudes. As a middle aged woman I suspected that I would not be able to keep up the 5lb increases, especially if I started with a challenging weight.
Besides my size and age, I figured it was probably bad news that I was already experienced at squatting. I have been squatting 1-3 times per week for about the past 4 years. While I was confident that Super Squats would help me bust my squat plateau, I didn't have any low-hanging noobie gains to collect.
In hindsight I probably didn't need to worry, but we'll get to that. I started light, with 50kg (about 50% 1RM) on the first day.
I also did not drink the gallon of milk per day. Take a look at the sample menu in the book: the recommended "at least two quarts" is meant to supplement your breakfast eggs and lunch sandwiches while you wait for your mom to make you dinner. As a grownup who can cook, I simply ate normal food but more of it.

The sorta-speedrun

I only had three and a half weeks to dedicate to Super Squats. This was the amount of time from my meet on December 6 until regular programming started again with the new year. So I had to work fast. Six weeks of Super Squats would be 18 workouts. I did my best to squeeze it all in.
I squatted 3.5 times per week. The rest day after each workout was non negotiable. However, I didn't see any point in resting Saturday and Sunday, so I just squatted every other day, for a total of 12 workouts. (There was one day I was traveling without access to barbells and had to take a double rest day.)
I took double jumps sometimes. The book suggests increasing the weight by 5 pounds each time. (Actually "five or ten" but being smol and old five sounded good to me.) My plates are in kilos so I went with 2.5kg jumps most of the time. But on a few occasions I took 5kg jumps. So in total, I did 15 workouts' worth of weight jumps in 12 workouts.

The routine I followed

I went full goblin mode for these few weeks. Aside from a few snatch sessions and an odd lift meet, I stayed in my garage and did simple things at high volume. I tweaked the accessory routine so I didn't need to track increases in weight, just added more reps as I went. Squats were the only thing where weight changed regularly.
I did the most full-featured routine from the book (there are several to choose from), plus occasional other lifts. Below is the structure I used for most of the workouts. For the visual learners, here is a video showing everything at once.
Press, 8x2-3 The book calls for behind-the-neck presses, which are fine, but I care more about improving my regular strict press. I did a rep scheme inspired by Hepburn method here: 8 doubles at a light-ish weight, and each workout you change the last double to a triple until you're doing 8x3. Then you're supposed to increase the weight and start over. Instead of starting with 80% I did more like 75%. I did these EMOM.
Push and pull superset. At first I did bench press and pendlay rows, as a superset, with the same weight. (In the training hall after my meet, this was actually floor press and pendlay rows with the same barbell.) I would also add bench shrugs to the end of the last bench set, and lat shrugs to the end of the last row set. After a while I switched to doing dips and chinups for variety and because they were easier to set up. This was usually something like 3x5-8.
SQUATS and pullovers as described in the book. Pullovers were with a 20 lb dumbbell. I squatted the same way I do in weightlifting, high bar and ass-to-grass. I did take the book's advice to go beltless, which was new territory to me.
Deadlifts, normal rather than stiff legged, again just my preference. I used a belt for these. Sometimes I even remembered to take off my squat shoes. Hepburn but EMOM again, 8x2-3 but with 65% because I did these immediately after roasting my legs with squats.
I did not do pullovers or chest pulls after the deadlifts.
Calves, crunches, and curls. This is a different order than in the book, but it's what I like. At first I was doing the calf raises with squat weight, but later I decided it was more convenient to use the squat plates on the deadlift bar and then do the calf raises single-legged without added weight. I set down a 2x4 in the squat rack, so that I could put a hand on the squat bar for balance. 3x15.
For curls, I did them poundstone style. Poundstone means you hold an empty Olympic barbell and you don't put it down until you have done 100 curls. My noodle arms were not ready for this, so I used an empty EZ bar and did 50 curls. Toward the end I increased the target to 75 curls.

Results

Before:

• Squat 1RM (belted, high bar, ATG) 106 kg
• Weight about 64 kg
• Bf% 23% by Navy method
• 8RM (belted) 80 kg
• First squat set of Super Squats: 50 kg in 1:39

During:

• average 3100 calories per day (400 surplus)
• On most "rest" days I did 45-60 minutes moderate to hard cycling (from the Peloton "Build Your Power Zones" program)
• Also on most "rest" days I did 15 minutes of arm work with dumbbells (again a Peloton program: "Arms with Tunde.")
• kept a spreadsheet where I logged the difficulty (color coded) and length (in minutes) of each squat set.
• I felt shockingly good the whole time. I mean, the squat sets were hell, but everything before and after them, and the way I felt when I lay in bed at night, was just really nice. Focusing on volume rather than pushing the weight on heavy singles was refreshing for my body.

After:

• Weight 66.1 kg
• Bf% 26% by Navy method
• Gained an inch on hips and waist, and half an inch on each thigh
• Best set of Super Squats: 85 kg in 4:02
• 1RM: 110 (tested, with belt, 2 days after my last Super Squats workout).

How 20 reps is magic

If you've ever used an e1RM calculator, you know that there's a semi predictable mathematical relationship between how much you can lift for a set of 3 or 5 reps, versus how much you can lift for a max single. Well, that all goes out the window here.
Mythical is right when he says that it's not a set of 20 squats, it's a set of 20 BREATHING squats, and these are not the same. When you take three or five or ten breaths between reps, the ATP in your quads regenerates a little. Metabolites get cleared out. Oxygen gets delivered. Glucose gets rearranged and ready to fuel you again. It's not the full recovery you would get from resting 5 minutes, but it's enough to buy your legs the energy for one more rep. (See also: cluster sets.)
I see this not as a set of 20, but as 20 singles. Can you do a single with your 10RM weight? Of course. Can you do 20 of them in quick succession? That's harder, but not out of the question.
There are strong parallels between this type of training and Kettlebell sport, by the way. In kb sport, sets are timed, usually 10 minutes, and you can't put the bells down until you are done. I watched a kettlebell sport competition at the Arnold last year. By minute 2, the competitors looked like they were dead inside... and yet they kept going. Sometimes a person would give up and their counter would stop. At 9 minutes, everybody would be shouting for the people still standing to get in their last few reps. If you've ever thought Super Squats deserves to be its own sport, this is the closest thing out there.
When I trained for kettlebell sport I would get to a place where I couldn't do another rep and I couldn't hold the bells any longer and every fiber of my being ached for rest. I could just put the bells down and this would all be over, a little voice would whisper. I got through my Super Squats sets the same way I got through my kettlebell sets: by asking myself "Can I do one more rep?"
If you want, you could approach Super Squats the way kb sport athletes approach their training. Strengthen your rack position with heavy walkouts, quarter squats, and/or Hise shrugs. Get serious about cardio and conditioning. (I am VERY thankful that I've been cycling a lot lately.) Consider doing timed sets instead of only counting reps, and work up to longer and faster sets.
Or, you know, do sets of 20 for six weeks and move on. I think the work I've done these last few weeks has set me up really well for whatever training the new year will bring. Just a phenomenal off-season volume block.

Conclusions

Once I realized this is more about high frequency density sets (60 separate reps per week, not three "sets") I understood. This is why you can keep increasing weight. This is why squats feel better and better even though they get heavier. You just get so much practice at them. And while the rest of the recommended program is kind of an afterthought, it covers the bases. I'd recommend doing the exercises in a format that you like (Hepburn was fun for me) rather than skipping them or choosing the abbreviated routine.
I'll disagree with a few things in the book. First of all, there's no reason to believe pullovers or breathing with a bar on your back will change your bone structure. That's just silly. I also disagree with the idea that you should be resting as much as possible between workouts. Cardio is great, and helps your body to be able to do more reps with more weight.
It's true about the food, though. I ate generously, aided by Christmas goodies. My TDEE according to MacroFactor is usually 2400 during bulks and can drop as low as 2100 during cuts. During my Super Squats stint, it got up to 2700. You gotta eat.
Would I run it again? I made a meme to illustrate my thoughts on that matter.
If you are feeling inspired, note that gainit is doing a program party beginning Jan 9.