Reclaiming the neutral middle ground

[araucaria]

Reclaiming the neutral middle ground
1. The aim of this thread is to examine the varying degrees of unreality surrounding certain events in the world today. Things are increasingly not what they seem. For example, false flags offer at least two levels of reality: level 1, A attacks B; level 2 it is really C attacking D (or D….Z). Hoaxes combine one level of reality with a level of unreality: level 1, A attacks B; level 2, it’s just a drill, or a bunch of actors. Then again you can combine a false flag with a hoax: level 1, it’s just a drill; level 2, A attacks B for real; level 3, it is really C attacking D.

Then you get to the muddled, possibly intentionally almost unresolvable situations we are seeing these days, mostly in the air: civilian aircraft shot down over war zones (MH17), disappearing without trace (MH370), disappearing almost without trace (4U 9525). Typically there are zero survivors. Coping with the brutal reality of these tragedies is the lot of the victims’ loved ones, who were not there to see what happened, and are already at one remove from the event. The rest of us are several removes from the event, and for most the filter of mainstream media places us so far away as to doubt it even happened at all, or if something did happen, exactly what that something might be. This places us in a quandary: either we are inhumanly callous by not grieving over the victims, or we are extremely naïve for grieving over a bunch of actors. So-called conspiracy theorists are suspicious notably because they see that often Hollywood got there first.

My mentioning that the Germanwings episode was somewhat reminiscent of the Pied Piper of Hamelin suggested a historical component to contemporary events and prompted me to backtrack a couple of hundred years to see where this is all coming from. https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post947253
The basic idea is that of Jungian psychology, whereby what comes into physical reality are unconscious shadow-side elements that consciousness has otherwise failed to deal with at the immaterial level. For me a prophet is one standing at this watershed who says, Deal with this unconscious stuff spiritually/symbolically before it becomes your 3D reality. Fulfilled prophecies are those that were not acted upon in due course. However, not all modern prophets are bible-thumpers: some are great writers. I want to look at some great literature that prophesied where we are at right now so that we can maybe get a better idea of what is really going on.

Here is an analogy of the process. On a rising tide, the waves come ashore and die on the beach. On a big spring tide, they will rise higher until they start bouncing off the sea wall. They are reflected back whence they came, creating a sea with waves going in both directions, with some crests compounding each other and causing great turmoil, and others cancelling each other out, producing areas of calm within the storm. Hence you find two very different realities operating side by side, with some people experiencing great stillness amid their storm-tossed neighbours. This scenario of course is being played out in spades on this forum. We ride the storm together, the tide will ebb, the storm will pass. ‘Riding the storm’ involves two aspects: first it is actually what we are doing by being together; second, we think about which course of action is to be preferred, for there are dos and don’ts to be worked out. When things come to a head in conscious reality, they really do become destructive if we sleepwalk through that reality, in other words if we are still not really conscious.

To illustrate the tightrope being walked between the material and the immaterial, here is a quotation from Charles Fort, of whom more later:

The materialists explain all things, except what they deny, or disregard, in terms of the material. The immaterialists, such as the absolute and the subjective idealists, explain all things in terms of the immaterial. My expression is in terms of the continuity of the material and the immaterial – or that one of these extremes is only an accentuation on one side, and the other only an accentuation on the other side, of the hyphenated state of the material-immaterial. (Wild Talents, in The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover Publications, p. 941)

The purpose of my backtracking to the days when certain goings-on were still the stuff of fiction is therefore to examine some (semi-)conscious expressions of the immaterial side with a view to shedding some light on the (semi-)unconscious expressions of the material side we are now facing. For easier reading, I am splitting this material into separate posts. The first half dozen are coming immediately, and I am adding a number of placeholders for some further posts I hope to make very soon. Meanwhile these will serve as a table of contents and open up space for any comments below, as well as for additional material I may post when I get the time.

Since I started writing this, the gray area between fact and fiction has come up from a slightly different angle with regard to Rebekah Roth’s fictional treatment of her 911 truth research from the perspective of a 30-year flight attendant and international purser. See: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post950170
This is the neutral middle ground that needs to be reclaimed in positive and creative ways.

[araucaria]

2. prophetic aspects of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
Symbolically, travelling west (into the setting sun) is the direction of adventure, of history in the making, while journeying east (towards the rising sun) is associated with investigation, memory and inquiry into the past, but also reflection upon the future. Hence, two of the major migrations/invasions have come from the east. In Europe, Angles, Saxons, Visigoths, Huns, Danes and Vikings swept across into western Europe until the native Celtic tribes were pushed up against the Atlantic seaboard from Scotland to the Iberian peninsula. Some would include the Khazarians in this process.

My metaphor of the seawall in the opening post takes on a new meaning here. The sea itself acted as a wall until the day when further migration westward was possible, to the Americas, followed by the gradual colonization of that continent all the way to the Pacific. While this process was in its early stages, the seeds of the French Revolution were sown with the American Revolution, like waves spilling over the top of the seawall, but what happened in Europe itself was like waves rebounding off that wall and travelling in the opposite direction. France being in the west, this is the process that led Napoleon to turn east and aim all the way to Russia in a campaign that ended in total destruction. There seems to be some kind of law almost as hard and fast as the rotation of the planet whereby danger comes from the east. If the aptly-named western movie is where the action is, to attack to the east is reactionary, including in the political sense, and doomed to fail. If to “go west” is a synonym for “to die”, then to “go east” would probably be appropriate in an altogether more destructive way – as happened for example to countless west Europeans Jews (there were also many others of course).

Germany being central, the case of Nazism is more complex. Hitler too was defeated when he attacked the Soviet Union. He had greater success in the west, and if he met with military defeat in that quarter, it also led, some claim, to postwar Nazism spreading and thriving in that direction, mostly in the Americas.

Coming now to Moby Dick (completed in 1851), this novel applies a somewhat similar analysis to the above to the USA at a time when it mostly still lay in the future. The Californian gold rush was contemporary in time, but spatially in the future. Melville’s is the tale of an almost suicidally depressed narrator who contradicts the westbound majority making their way across land, by heading off in the opposite direction by sea on a whaling ship out of Nantucket – he is already on the rebound.

I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

Getting away from Wall St would be an anachronism, so the following is not a bad approximation:

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward.

http://www.hermes-press.com/wshist1.htm
http://new-york-city.yodelout.com/ma...-on-manhattan/

The highly symbolic directional aspect is crucial, which is why the final showdown with the monster white whale takes place as far east as you can go (the international date line), and plumb “on the Line”, in the equatorial fishing grounds of Kiribati. One of the men actually describes this last as a feature of Ahab himself: “squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albermarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He's always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye!” This is exactly where Ahab lost a leg to Moby Dick, which is the cause of his quest for revenge. So what is this tale of destruction all about?

Whaling was the ancestor of the oil industry. In the days before the internal combustion engine, oil was mostly used to bring light to the world – not in the sense of enlightenment, I hasten to add; we are talking about big business:

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 7,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?

Whaling snuggling up to royal power?

Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish." (…)
It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hairoil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here is this—what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but the sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

The symbolism of this novel is of course infinitely richer than the simple point I am trying to make here, namely that going east for oil was ever a highly lucrative business, but one that involved killing, and one that would ultimately backfire. The wagon trails and iron horses had barely reached the west coast, and Henry Ford wasn’t yet born, but the story of America’s love affair with oil was already written. For a man suicidally depressed with present affairs on land, the coffins and the funerals, the longer-term outlook at sea is much bleaker still. The only survivor from the final vortex is the man with the coffin, himself dead beyond the fact of surviving to tell the tale.

Epilogue

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"
Job.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?—
Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

[araucaria]

3. ufological aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom”
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/26/
Poe’s short story, written before 1841, ten years before Moby Dick, also has a vortex but takes a different direction: north to a whirlpool at the 68th latitude off Norway – as it happens, very close to a somewhat major ley line node. The rotational energy of vortexes relates of course to UFO technology as described by someone like Joseph Farrell. There is also a “consciousness connection” mentioned by David Wilcock on page 372 of The Source Field, where with reference to the Russian science of “vacuum domains”, he quotes Dr Alexei Dimitriev as making “a direct connection between the appearance of these vortexes and the overall level of human consciousness in a given area”.

There you have two items of knowledge that are rather unexpected for an early 19th century Bostonian orphan brought up in Richmond Virginia to have. What actually seems to be going on here is in itself a whirlpool of sorts where fact becomes fiction and vice versa. Here is Poe’s biographer:

It was extremely ironic that the author of the article on “Whirlpool” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica gave Poe credit for information that Poe had lifted from an earlier edition of the same Encyclopedia, and then quoted as facts the parts of the story that Poe himself had invented. In this case, as when [The Narrative of Arthur Gordon] Pym was assumed to be an account of a scientific journey in the English newspapers and Julius Rodman was absorbed into a Senate Report, Poe’s fantastic fictions were accepted as factual truth. (Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe, His Life & Legacy, London, John Murray Publishers, 1992, p.125)

He also appears to be clued in to the UFO phenomenon inasmuch as he distinguishes between two types of object: circular and cylindrical. But I want to focus on the consciousness aspect here. The tale is told by a sailor who lost a brother in the maelstrom, and another younger brother in the approach to the vortex. What saves him as opposed to his brother, who gives in to sheer panic and confiscates his own position on the boat, is his ability to transcend his fear and apply clear thinking to what is happening to him. He understands that cylinders survive longer than other shapes and small cylinders longer than large ones, which requires him to abandon the seeming relative safety of the ship for a loose barrel. Hence the part of the man with heightened awareness pulls through, while the part (his “brother”) that remains unconscious is destroyed (while a third part, the other “brother”, is unable even to get that far). So what we appear to be dealing with symbolically are three different responses to a UFO encounter/abduction scenario. Here is the final part of the story.

"It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström. By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way - so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of splinters - but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed - that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been drawn in more early, or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that, as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent - the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape , the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere - the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly. Since my escape, I have had several conversations on this subject with an old school-master of the district ; and it was from him that I learned the use of the words 'cylinder' and 'sphere.' He explained to me - although I have forgotten the explanation - how what I observed was, in fact, the natural consequence of the forms of the floating fragments - and showed me how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offered more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater difficulty than an equally bulky body, of any form whatever.

"There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station.

"I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother's attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design - but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay ; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment's hesitation.

"The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale - as you see that I did escape - and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say - I will bring my story quickly to conclusion. It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after my quitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-ström had been. It was the hour of the slack - but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the hurricane. I was borne violently into the channel of the Ström, and in a few minutes was hurried down the coast into the 'grounds' of the fishermen. A boat picked me up - exhausted from fatigue - and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and daily companions - but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story - they did not believe it. I now tell it to you - and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden."

[araucaria]

4. a vortex of synchronicities in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

If you thought Poe was sailing in the wake of Melville’s Pequod at least as far as the southern Atlantic, then you’d be wrong: Poe’s book came first, in 1838. The novel falls neatly into two parts. In the first episode, Pym and his friend Augustus Bernard are stowaways on board the Grampus where a mutiny and a shipwreck occur, before the final climax when the two young friends find themselves and another older man, Peters, reduced to cannibalism, feeding on the cabin boy Richard Parker until they are picked up by the Jane Guy. This subject came up recently on a thread about weird coincidences, to which I contributed:

Posted by araucaria (here)

Posted by EWO (here)
#7

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The novel includes the tale of four men stranded at sea after their ship sank. Desperate, the men kill and eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker.

Forty-six years later, a ship called Mignonette suffered the same fate. The four starving survivors killed and ate the cabin boy whose real name was -you guessed it- Richard Parker.

All these 13 stories come from a book I have in front of me right now: Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer and Brian King. In it, the Richard Parker story goes into overdrive; ending with this:

In the summer of 1993, my parents took in three Spanish language students. My father told them about Richard Parker one evening over supper. The television was on in the background. All conversation stopped when a local programme started talking about the remarkable story. Dad went on to break the silence by saying how weird coincidences always occur whenever Richard’s tale is mentioned. He told them about Edgar Allan Poe.
Two of the girls went white. “Look what I bought today”, said one. She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of the Poe story. “So have I”, said the other girl. Both had gone shopping that day and independently bought the very same book containing the Richard Parker story.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post946527

I suppose the real coincidence for was my own familiarity with this particular subject: I have studied the book and own three copies of it. I abridged this postscript to this mother of all coincidences, but I may as well add the missing text here:

It seems that coincidences beget coincidences.
Craig Hamilton Parker’s grandfather was a cousin of the young cabin boy Richard Parker. Craig has recorded a whole string of further coincidences connected with his ancestor’s tragic story.
‘My cousin Nigel Parker was the first to notice the link between the Poe story and actual events. He wrote an account and sent it to Arthur Koestler who published it in the Sunday Times on 5 May 1974.
‘Koestler, author of The Roots of Coincidence, relates how sometime after the news story, he casually mentioned it to John Beloff at the university of Edinburgh, who had, that day, written about it in his journal.
‘Nigel’s father, Keith, thought that Richard’s story would make an interesting theme for a radio play and began to plan a synopsis. At that time, to supplement his writer’s income, he reviewed books for Macmillan publishers. The first book to arrive through the post was The Sinking of the Mignonette. A few weeks later he was asked to review another play, among a collection of short plays, called The Raft. It was a comedy for children with nothing sinister about it at all, apart from the cover illustration. Three men seemed to threaten a young boy, which is completely out of keeping with the play’s tone. The Raft was written by someone called Richard Parker.

So again, we have the question of Poe’s source. Sure, we have tales of shipwreck cannibalism with reference to the Méduse, the subject of Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, or Owen Chase’s Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, also a source for Melville but only for the sinking of the whaler by a sperm whale. (Interestingly, Melville points out the irony of the men resorting to cannibalism because they had failed to head for Tahiti, mistakenly fearing cannibals there when they would have found missionaries).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_%28whaleship%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism

Poe had sources for cannibalism, but the story of a cabin boy called Richard Parker was still very much in the future. The point is that while the name on its own might readily be dismissed as mere coincidence (whatever that means), the fact that the process itself seems to have gone viral (to use an anachronism) suggests that something other than the inevitability of statistically unlikely events is at play. It is almost as if the usual rationale for ritual cannibalism, “to absorb the dead person's qualities” (wiki above), was actually at work – as if through some kind of metaphysical cannibalism Poe had absorbed Parker in some timeless other-worldly realm. As in the Maelstrom, we have quasi-brothers: one who dies immediately (Parker, on July 17), another only later (Augustus on August 1), and the narrator, who only just survives. Only this time, the connection between life and death becomes clearer: the survivor depends on/feeds off the dead man. And whereas in the whirlpool, the one who remained cool, calm and collected lived, here he dies – Parker is the one who initiates the proceedings, while Pym, the most horrified and reluctant, is the chief and more than willing beneficiary.

I was recalled to my senses by the voice of Parker, who urged me to relieve them at once from the terrible anxiety they were enduring. Even then I could not bring myself to arrange the splinters upon the spot, but thought over every species of finesse by which I could trick some one of my fellow-sufferers to draw the short straw, as it had been agreed that whoever drew the shortest of four splinters from my hand was to die for the preservation of the rest. Before any one condemn me for this apparent heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own.

At length delay was no longer possible, and, with a heart almost bursting from my bosom, I advanced to the region of the forecastle, where my companions were awaiting me. I held out my hand with the splinters, and Peters immediately drew. He was free—his, at least, was not the shortest; and there was now another chance against my escape. I summoned up all my strength, and passed the lots to Augustus. He also drew immediately, and he also was free; and now, whether I should live or die, the chances were no more than precisely even. At this moment all the fierceness of the tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt toward my poor fellow-creature, Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred. But the feeling did not last; and, at length, with a convulsive shudder and closed eyes, I held out the two remaining splinters toward him. It was fully five minutes before he could summon resolution to draw, during which period of heartrending suspense I never once opened my eyes. Presently one of the two lots was quickly drawn from my hand. The decision was then over, yet I knew not whether it was for me or against me. No one spoke, and still I dared not satisfy myself by looking at the splinter I held. Peters at length took me by the hand, and I forced myself to look up, when I immediately saw by the countenance of Parker that I was safe, and that he it was who had been doomed to suffer. Gasping for breath, I fell senseless to the deck.

I recovered from my swoon in time to behold the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about. He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead.

The term ‘vortex of synchronicities’ would be an exaggeration if I could not offer a Richard Parker moment of my own to confirm the current ongoing real-life connection. On the day I posted to the coincidence thread, my wife opened a jar of lentils that she’d bought for supper, also containing three thick sausages, which had an unpleasant texture and taste, and gave me a headache and stomachache overnight. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I dreamt that we sat down to a plate of human fingers; I had three that I wouldn’t touch.

As I write this, I come across news of a lone sailor who capsized and survived for 66 days on raw fish and rainwater, suggesting it is not always necessary to have someone to eat. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-10153817.html

And if you want a “three brothers” synchronicity, it is right here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post949063

Both this triple aspect and the Richard Parker multiplier effect recall something I have described elsewhere, Remo Roth’s ‘twin process’. See for example https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post905123
This overall process includes a mechanism called ‘multiplicatio’:

‘seen as subtle matter radiating out of the intermediate world (…) and penetrating and transmutating the whole surroundings and even the whole universe’ (I:146). Applied to ideas, Pauli interprets it as ‘the synchronistic spreading of similar ideas at the same time in human history’ (I:158).

But what exactly is being propagated in this manner? Is it by chance that the subject matter is that great taboo, cannibalism, and if not, what is going on? Man-eating man may be so sickeningly verboten because it smacks too much of an underlying phenomenon that is increasingly rising into human consciousness: anthropophagy, as practised by some other man-eating creature – specifically, we are nowadays led to believe, what are known as reptilians. This puts a whole new light on the “shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” that appears at the end of the second part of this story…

[araucaria]

5. a near-death experience in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Poe’s hero has clearly had a very close brush with death, to the point of bringing something back from the other side; we can only speculate idly on how Poe himself reached this point of bringing something back from the other side. Did he perhaps have a similar experience on losing his mother at the tender age of three; or was it the result of chronic liver disease, which I gather induces altered states of consciousness (the author, who had a genetic propensity to alcoholism, became an occasional binge drinker after being given bread dipped in gin by his old nurse)? Let’s stick with the usual explanation: Poe was a poet (whatever that means). Be that as it may, I like to see the rest of the story as a report of a near-death experience, or for all intents and purposes a death experience – which is why the tone is so different from the objectively descriptive style of the first part. This is why in the end Poe has to kill off his character for good: even more than Moby Dick, this journey to the South Pole is one from which there is no return. Here is a summary from Poe’s biographer:

On January 19 (Poe’s birthday) Pym and Dirk Peters reach Tsalal, on the coast of Antarctica, which is inhabited by treacherous black savages with long woolly hair. As the voyagers pass from the real into the dream world, the tone of the novel – which starts like Defoe and ends like Coleridge – changes from the factual to the fantastic. While they are exploring the interior, Pym becomes trapped in a chasm and descends by rope the side of a precipitous cliff. As his imagination becomes wildly excited by the depths below him, he vainly tries to suppress his dangerous thoughts: “The more earnestly I struggled not to think, the more intensely vivid became my conceptions, and the more horribly distinct. At length arrived that crisis of fancy, so fearful in all similar cases, the crisis in which we began to anticipate the feelings with which we shall fall – to picture to ourselves the sickness, and dizziness, and the last struggle, and the half swoon, and the final bitterness of the rushing and headlong descent. [section cut: And now I found these fancies creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact. I felt my knees strike violently together, while my fingers were gradually but certainly relaxing their grasp. There was a ringing in my ears, and I said, "This is my knell of death!" And now I was consumed with the irrepressible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and, with a wild, indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of a relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind—in the next] my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable.” In this psychologically perceptive passage, Poe anticipates Hemingway’s insight about the danger of the imagination in moments of extreme crisis: “Cowardice . . . is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier [or a sailor] can acquire.”
The end of Pym, though inconclusive, is extremely effective. In 1818 Captain John Symmes had set forth the unusual theory that the earth is “hollow, habitable, and widely open about the poles”; and the idea of “holes at the poles” was taken seriously until the late nineteenth century. Like the unfortunate narrator of “M.S. Found in a Bottle” Pym and Peters fall into one of these “holes” – and Pym somehow survives to tell the story. As they paddle south through the sullen darkness and through the warm, milky waters, “we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the húe of the skín of the fígure / was of the pérfect whíteness of the snów.” The hypnotic cadence of the final sentence is achieved through four anapestic, prepositional phrases, divided into two ten-syllable lines, each with three strong accents. The majesty of this poetic sentence brilliantly recalls the menacing white beasts and the destructive prophecies of the end of the world in Revelation 1:14: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.” [Meyers, p.99-100]

I am taking some material from Jacques Cabau’s introduction to the pocket edition of Baudelaire’s translation, in an attempt to make more overall sense of several unconnected comments he makes. Incidentally, the poet Charles Baudelaire was the initiator and translator of Poe’s work, which is admired much more highly in France than elsewhere. His “Raven” was illustrated by Edouard Manet, and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé made prose translations of some of the poems as well as writing a sonnet of his own for Poe’s memorial, which he describes as a kind of monolith (“calm block”) that has dropped out of the heavens from some obscure stellar disaster (the word ‘disaster’ itself originally meaning the unfavourable aspect of a star).

First, in the terms of my geographical compass as shown notably in Moby Dick,this journey south to the newly discovered Antarctic, exploring beyond the 84th parallel, is going to reflect the north-south aspect of the United States. In actual fact it also reflects Poe’s own progress: born in Boston, he was, as Cabau indicates, a southerner, and a racist one at that. The “treacherous black savages” alluded to in the above summary are violently allergic to anything white – even their teeth are black. This includes miscellaneous belongings of the crew of the Jane Guy and of course the pure whiteness lying to the south which is fatal to a captive savage.

But what does it mean to describe a great writer as a vile racist? I suggest that racism is, like cannibalism, another taboo that has its roots in something else: the superior attitude that comes from being a very different and in some ways more evolved species – we come back to the reptilian. If Poe has been somehow channeling a reptilian entity, it will have been not only with respect to its feeding habits but also its predatory attitude generally; and one would expect some of this to have rubbed off. It would seem to have rubbed off on many American people during this period. But note how the writer takes his ship across the same north Atlantic taken by the slave traders, only in the opposite direction. Hence this white-hating black inversion is not meaningless; it suggests that if we are distinguishing between the human and the non-human, then the human is identified, not with the white, but with the black. Which is not to deny an inevitable contamination of the one with the other. Thus the names of the savages’ king and island share an interesting feature: “The commencement of the words Tsalemon and Tsalal was given with a prolonged hissing sound, which we found it impossible to imitate, even after repeated endeavors”.
This places a whole new meaning on the final chapters. Cabau also discusses John Symmes’ hollow earth theory. “Pym” is a combination of “Poe” and “Symmes”, and I would add, “Poe” is also literally a “Pole with a hole”. Hence Cabau’s analysis ends up with the customary Freudian twist of death being back to mother and her birth canal, not forgetting the whiff of another taboo, this time incest. With respect to the giant figure, he corrects Baudelaire’s “mistranslation” of “figure” as “homme" (man). Certainly, the masculine is not in the original, but I would tentatively suggest that the poet knew something that the university professor would never suspect… namely that somewhere in the cosmic order he touches on, death can be a negative brutally masculine affair after all. Pym and Peters both get back home, Pym dies in an accident before getting the end of his manuscript to the printers. Presumably the fictional publisher who wrote the final note after the manuscript breaks off, when finishing with the enigmatic "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." is quoting from memory from the missing pages. But what does it mean? Vengeance for what?

[araucaria]

6. a disappeared whistle-blower in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

We have a choice between an obvious interpretation based on what is written and which is clearly going to be wrong, and an unavoidably venturous interpretation based on what is missing – but the latter may not be too far from correct if it somehow factors in what we have in black and white. That is something that conventional interpretations like Cabau’s fail to do, simply because, as I said, they are contradicted by both men surviving the ordeal.

Let’s go back to the treachery of the blacks, when “the day of universal dissolution was at hand” – they provoke a massive landslide that kills the entire landing party save Pym and Peters. There follows a huge battle to take control of the schooner, ending in catastrophe. While plainly there is a huge motive for revenge in what follows, equally plainly there is no cause for revenge inasmuch as instant karma has already taken care of them bigtime in the 19th century equivalent of a self-inflicted nuclear explosion.

They had already made a complete wreck of the vessel, and were now preparing to set her on fire. In a little while we saw the smoke ascending in huge volumes from her main hatchway, and, shortly afterward, a dense mass of flame burst up from the forecastle. The rigging, masts and what remained of the sails caught immediately, and the fire spread rapidly along the decks. Still a great many of the savages retained their stations about her, hammering with large stones, axes, and cannon balls at the bolts and other iron and copper work. On the beach, and in canoes and rafts, there were not less, altogether, in the immediate vicinity of the schooner, than ten thousand natives, besides the shoals of them who, laden with booty, were making their way inland and over to the neighbouring islands. We now anticipated a catastrophe, and were not disappointed. First of all there came a smart shock (which we felt as distinctly where we were as if we had been slightly galvanized), but unattended with any visible signs of an explosion. The savages were evidently startled, and paused for an instant from their labours and yellings. They were upon the point of recommencing, when suddenly a mass of smoke puffed up from the decks, resembling a black and heavy thundercloud—then, as if from its bowels, arose a tall stream of vivid fire to the height, apparently, of a quarter of a mile—then there came a sudden circular expansion of the flame—then the whole atmosphere was magically crowded, in a single instant, with a wild chaos of wood, and metal, and human limbs-and, lastly, came the concussion in its fullest fury, which hurled us impetuously from our feet, while the hills echoed and re-echoed the tumult, and a dense shower of the minutest fragments of the ruins tumbled headlong in every direction around us.

The havoc among the savages far exceeded our utmost expectation, and they had now, indeed, reaped the full and perfect fruits of their treachery. Perhaps a thousand perished by the explosion, while at least an equal number were desperately mangled. The whole surface of the bay was literally strewn with the struggling and drowning wretches, and on shore matters were even worse. They seemed utterly appalled by the suddenness and completeness of their discomfiture, and made no efforts at assisting one another.

There are some degrees of latitude to fill in the couple of missing chapters – we are literally five or six degrees shy of the pole. One giant figure is like one Loch Ness monster: a demographic conundrum; the logical next step would be to find a colony of giants. Secondly, so far we have had only a very timid foray into Symmes’ hollow earth; the logical next step would be for Pym’s no. 3 story to find a colony deeper in that hole, with some interior lighting arrangement evidencing the change of environment, such as an inner sun; and the final chapter would describe their unlikely escape from an obvious enemy unwilling to have his presence made known.

We are told that back in the US Pym dies in an accident before getting the end of his manuscript to the printers. It sounds like that was no accident, but rather the silencing of a whistleblower by some disgruntled giants. It would make even more sense if they were not just oversize humans like Bigfoot, but something else altogether, such as reptilians. This is not as farfetched as it sounds: in one of his detective stories (a genre invented by Poe), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the killer was not a human at all but an orang-utan. But before we look further into this, we need to backtrack a little.

In the preface signed A.G. Pym, we see several layers of truth masquerading as fiction and fiction masquerading as truth, the novel itself being the not quite seamlessly joined handiwork of a fictional character writing non-fiction and a real author writing fiction.

Among those gentlemen in Virginia who expressed the greatest interest in my statement, more particularly in regard to that portion of it which related to the Antarctic Ocean, was Mr. Poe, lately editor of the "Southern Literary Messenger," a monthly magazine, published by Mr. Thomas W. White, in the city of Richmond. He strongly advised me, among others, to prepare at once a full account of what I had seen and undergone, and trust to the shrewdness and common-sense of the public-insisting, with great plausibility, that however roughly, as regards mere authorship, my book should be got up, its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth.

Notwithstanding this representation, I did not make up my mind to do as he suggested. He afterward proposed (finding that I would not stir in the matter) that I should allow him to draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it in the "Southern Messenger" under the garb of fiction. To this, perceiving no objection, I consented, stipulating only that my real name should be retained. Two numbers of the pretended fiction appeared, consequently, in the "Messenger" for January and February (1837), and, in order that it might certainly be regarded as fiction, the name of Mr. Poe was affixed to the articles in the table of contents of the magazine.

The manner in which this ruse was received has induced me at length to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question; for I found that, in spite of the air of fable which had been so ingeniously thrown around that portion of my statement which appeared in the "Messenger" (without altering or distorting a single fact), the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable, and several letters were sent to Mr. P.'s address, distinctly expressing a conviction to the contrary. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity, and that I had consequently little to fear on the score of popular incredulity.

When we peel all this back to what is “really real”, it amounts to some hybrid kind of “factional” content similar to what in modern parlance is known as disinformation, of the sort containing a great deal of truth with ambiguous intent, leaving it to the reader to discern between what lies are protecting what truths and what truths are masking what lies. To continue the modern analogy, we seem to be dealing with an anonymous whistle-blower (Pym itself possibly being a pseudonym like “Henry Deacon”) talking to an alternative researcher, but in actual fact this would be cover for their being one and the same person – the non-existent Pym as the pseudonym of the real-life Poe. Hence, since no one really made the trip towards the South Pole, the hazy, somehow unreal “creative process” used by the novelist might actually involve a very real, albeit non-mainstream altered consciousness technique such as remote viewing. Alcohol abuse is known to attract negative entities including through demonic possession, so in such circumstances uncontrolled remote viewing would likely lead to an unpleasant experience.

When we come to the end of the story, and Pym is dead, we find a discrepancy: Poe, who was initially his ghostwriter, now refuses to complete the tale on the grounds that the end is unbelievable. This works from the fictional standpoint; however, from the reality standpoint, it amounts to dismissing his own inner experiences as beyond belief. This in itself may sound hard to swallow, coming from the author of numerous “Extraordinary tales”, including such stories as “The Premature Burial”, recounting the experience of being buried alive, or “The Black Cat”, recounting the experience of a murderer being undone by a cat he has buried alive. All I can suggest is that some contemporaries have been touting as real some totally incredible personal stories that might meet this demanding benchmark quite admirably…

In particular, Poe is used to telling stories of revenge without saying for what (e.g. in “The Purloined Letter”, the original “hidden in plain sight”). Here he doesn’t even say how – apart from the suggestion of an inscription: "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." The revenge is the book itself, seen as a… disclosure statement. As Poe writes in “Manuscript Found in a Bottle”:

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.

[araucaria]

7. a free energy device in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days

See below. https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1117057

[araucaria]

8. a hostile alien threat in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

[araucaria]

9. a life review in Jorge-Luis Borges’s El Otro

[araucaria]

10. “accidents” in French airspace in the 1920s in Charles Fort’s Wild Talents

[araucaria]

11. mass abductions in the contemporary world


comments welcome below

[araucaria]

A free energy device in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days

I am taking this book as read. It is available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103

The premise in this story is that the minimum theoretical time for a journey in several stages is long enough to complete that journey in practice: "A well-used minimum suffices for everything." Basically you have an extremely tight time-based agenda (ship and train connections known in advance) which can only be kept to by applying a sequence-driven agenda (a definite place and time of arrival with a list of not entirely mandatory intermediate stopping points). It makes for an interesting story. But... it is only a story, meaning that what is theoretically possible becomes possible on paper (i.e. in a novel, or “mathematically” as Fogg calls it): what can happen in real life never gets a look-in. There is this deliberate in-your-face trickery symbolized by the typically American way of crossing a railway bridge: the bridge is too weak to carry a train travelling at normal speed, so you drive the train at a hundred miles an hour and it more or less flies over!

And they passed over! It was like a flash. No one saw the bridge. The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station. But scarcely had the train passed the river, when the bridge, completely ruined, fell with a crash into the rapids of Medicine Bow. (Ch.28)

What happens is that the story dwells at length on all the times when the journey takes longer than expected, and passes over very quickly the occasions when time is gained. Thus Phileas Fogg does not gloat over saving a whole two days by bribing the crew of a steamer to clip that much time off a long voyage. Public transport becomes private transport when unlimited money is thrown at a problem. The eighty-day round-the-globe-trip is done to win a twenty-thousand pound wager, but since this in a wealthy Englishman we are talking about, it is not about the money, meaning that he can afford to only just break even. He is not out of pocket, except for a brief moment at the end when his journey is over and he has not yet collected his winnings. Cash is not a problem; it keeps flowing, just like time, and just like motion through space. In the case of the servant Passepartout, the journey is basically a zero-sum operation, since he has forgotten to turn off the gas, and the gas bill he will have to pay is almost equal to his wages. Once again, anything is possible on paper: there is just enough paper money to meet every contingency, and one thing that doesn’t happen is for Fogg to get robbed. On the contrary, he matches the description of a bank robber and is followed round the world by a policeman until back home he is proven innocent. A novelist does not need to rob a bank to make his hero just as rich as he likes, but Verne at least hints at the magical source of Fogg’s income.

The reverse magic is at play as regards time. Passepartout has a watch that is always slow as he travels, until it is exactly right (albeit 12 hours out) halfway round the world (“I was sure that the sun would some day regulate itself by my watch!" he says) and exactly right again back in London (now actually 24 hours out). This is one reason for his lateness that is an occasional hindrance on their journey; but another is that for all the exactness, time has already started misbehaving before anyone leaves the Greenwich meridian, in Chapter 1:

"What time is it?"
"Twenty-two minutes after eleven," returned Passepartout, drawing an enormous silver watch from the depths of his pocket.
"You are too slow," said Mr. Fogg.
"Pardon me, monsieur, it is impossible—"
"You are four minutes too slow. No matter; it's enough to mention the error. Now from this moment, twenty-nine minutes after eleven, a.m., this Wednesday, 2nd October, you are in my service."

First you have the “impossible” four-minute discrepancy. This amounts to one degree of latitude. Passepartout, who has just arrived from Paris, which is two degrees east of London, seems to have set his watch to the time in the mid-English Channel. So we have what I shall call a Franco-British fudge factor. But then we have more fudge, since the discrepancy turns out to be seven minutes (11.22 v. 11.29), not four: a French authorial fudge factor of three minutes. The author is making fun of this precise Englishman with such a seemingly inappropriate name by indicating that he is not telling the whole story. The only way to make any sense of this conversation is to suppose that three minutes have been spent talking about something else. In other words, while real time is too slow, narrative time is much faster, and indeed can show you edited highlights of a round-the-world trip in a few hours. The days get shorter by travelling; they also get shorter by timing the end of the trip with December 21st, the winter solstice; they get shorter still by curling up with a good yarn and suspending disbelief.

Another way of looking at this is to see that Verne has done exactly like that American train: he has backed up two degrees from Paris to London and hit the ground running. They set off immediately and are already in Suez before the reader has got his specs on: what happened up to that point, including the lightning passage across Paris, is briefly summarized after the event. Hence the fictional scam started ahead of time, which is the normal course of events when an author writes a book and later finds a reader for it.

What is missed with this immediate departure for Paris is the existence of an alternative route. They could have got a train to Liverpool and done their world tour in the opposite direction, for, ruling out such contingencies as dominant westerly winds for the Atlantic crossing, it remains true that a 79-day journey in one direction can theoretically be done in the same time in the other, and with respect to London time Fogg would still have won his wager. But it would make for a very different story. We have some indication of what that story would be: a tale of Mr Hyde, when what we have is almost exclusively that of a nice Dr Jekyll.

The detective Fix follows Fogg round the world thinking he is a bank robber: normally speaking, he would expect a criminal to head straight for the US, out of his jurisdiction. Fogg must be rusing, by heading for the US the other way, much like Christopher Columbus claimed to be heading west for India. When they leave New York for England, it must be because he is hoping to return home discreetly after all the fuss has died down. Clearly the Fix sideshow could not have happened had Fogg sailed west. Actually no nastiness at all is allowed when travelling east. When Fogg has a brush with an American politician, he wants to come back another day to fight a duel. His opponent wants to stop the train and fight on the spot. This is not possible, so they decided to duel on the train as it rolls eastwards. They are interrupted by Indians and end up fighting on the same side. Killing a few Indians is not nasty: the real nastiness seems to be inextricably associated with travelling west, hence the dispute with the white American, and a story for another day. The nice story for today is how Fogg loses time travelling south to save Passepartout from said Indians. He also loses time on the other side of the world saving a young lady from suttee, an Indian tradition whereby the widow is burned alive on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. She slows him down all the way home, but he gets a loving wife for his kindness. Meanwhile, the robber tale is shunted off northwards to early Stevensonian Edinburgh, where Fogg’s ‘Mr Hyde’ doppelganger is finally arrested after an 80-day manhunt.

Hence, this is a fairy story where no nastiness is supposed to happen, a fact established early on with the description of the honest dealings at the Bank of England where the shocking daylight robbery took place: normally a customer could wander around for half an hour inspecting a gold ingot and the staff would think nothing of it! “The Bank of England reposes a touching confidence in the honesty of the public” (Chapter 3): times have changed....

How this works with respect to time is to do with the illusion, i.e. our faulty perception of time. You can create the illusion of 80 days with 79 days of time by shortening the days through travelling, or by competing in a ‘race against time’. No need to approach the speed of light all the way to Einsteinian time travel paradoxes. Time itself acts exactly like a catalyst: it speeds up the reaction while being itself unchanged. What has remained unchanged is Fogg’s normal routine of eating meals, reading newspapers and playing cards. This is how he spends all his time back at home and nearly all his time during his world tour, spurning any sightseeing. Only the author is able to present him as hyper-active through “a well-used minimum” of what Passepartout describes in Chapter 2 as “a real machine; well, I don't mind serving a machine." This machine has no existence except on the pages of the book. It bears no relationship to a real person beyond the illusion we are prepared to entertain; cf. Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: "I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes."

We have clear evidence that foggy Fogg is merely a machine or puppet brought out at suitable moments (a “real machine; well, I don't mind serving a machine" says Passepartout, Ch. 2). Sure, he makes a mistake, but he is still a machine. Much is made of the mistake but nothing is made of the downtime.
[quote] How was it that a man so exact and fastidious could have made this error of a day? How came he to think that he had arrived in London on Saturday, the twenty-first day of December, when it was really Friday, the twentieth, the seventy-ninth day only from his departure?
The cause of the error is very simple.
Phileas Fogg had, without suspecting it, gained one day on his journey, and this merely because he had travelled constantly eastward; he would, on the contrary, have lost a day had he gone in the opposite direction, that is, westward.
In journeying eastward he had gone towards the sun, and the days therefore diminished for him as many times four minutes as he crossed degrees in this direction. There are three hundred and sixty degrees on the circumference of the earth; and these three hundred and sixty degrees, multiplied by four minutes, gives precisely twenty-four hours—that is, the day unconsciously gained. In other words, while Phileas Fogg, going eastward, saw the sun pass the meridian eighty times, his friends in London only saw it pass the meridian seventy-nine times. This is why they awaited him at the Reform Club on Saturday, and not Sunday, as Mr. Fogg thought.
And Passepartout's famous family watch, which had always kept London time, would have betrayed this fact, if it had marked the days as well as the hours and the minutes! [quote]

The downtime we are left to ignore is the final day spent in London from being five minutes late to being bang on time. While recounting this race against the clock, the author has got ahead of himself and now has time to kill. Fogg’s time, he says, “would be absorbed all day in putting his affairs to rights” (Chapter 35) – with not a moment to do something he did in Chapter 1:

Phileas Fogg was seated squarely in his armchair, his feet close together like those of a grenadier on parade, his hands resting on his knees, his body straight, his head erect; he was steadily watching a complicated clock which indicated the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the days, the months, and the years.

Had he done so – and how could any real human fail to do so? – he would have realized that he actually had time on his hands. He would not have lost 24 hours on account of Passepartout’s watch with its 12-hour face and no calendar (“Passepartout obstinately refused to alter his watch, which he kept at London time. It was an innocent delusion which could harm no one.” Ch.11). However, a story ain’t over till it’s over, hence the need for eccentric English punctuality: not a minute too late nor a minute too soon. But a story is not real life and instead of telling us how Fogg could spend a day gazing at his clock without figuring something out, the novel adds an event another two days afterwards, to explain how the journey might actually have been two days shorter.

It need not be said that the marriage took place forty-eight hours after, and that Passepartout, glowing and dazzling, gave the bride away. Had he not saved her, and was he not entitled to this honour?
The next day, as soon as it was light, Passepartout rapped vigorously at his master's door. Mr. Fogg opened it, and asked, "What's the matter, Passepartout?"
"What is it, sir? Why, I've just this instant found out—"
"What?"
"That we might have made the tour of the world in only seventy-eight days."
"No doubt," returned Mr. Fogg, "by not crossing India. But if I had not crossed India, I should not have saved Aouda; she would not have been my wife, and—"
Mr. Fogg quietly shut the door.
Phileas Fogg had won his wager, and had made his journey around the world in eighty days. To do this he had employed every means of conveyance—steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, trading-vessels, sledges, elephants. The eccentric gentleman had throughout displayed all his marvellous qualities of coolness and exactitude. But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?
Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!
Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world? (Ch.36)

We are back to where we started: "a well-used minimum suffices for everything", QED. What happens is that this just-in-time delivery machine finally and briefly becomes human and, maybe suffering from decompression, presumably dozes off in front of his clock. So the tale that could have lasted 48 hours less is made to spill 48 hours over the crossing line for this wedding. What is going on here? Something Thomas Mann calls “the spirit of story-telling”: in his novel The Holy Sinner the town’s church bells start pealing spontaneously; no campanologists pulling on the ropes: they ring simply because the author wants it that way and wants his reader to know. Get me to the church on time

[Curt]

Wow. There is a tremendous amount of content in this thread. But since it's shaping up to be a busy day here, I've only been able to skim.

And skimming isn't proving to be adequate...at least not how I do it.

But I just wanted to say thank you... in advance of my sitting down to read the entire thread more carefully.

...Am I right to read the entire thread in light of this quote from Charles Fort which you've included in the opening post?:

The materialists explain all things, except what they deny, or disregard, in terms of the material. The immaterialists, such as the absolute and the subjective idealists, explain all things in terms of the immaterial. My expression is in terms of the continuity of the material and the immaterial – or that one of these extremes is only an accentuation on one side, and the other only an accentuation on the other side, of the hyphenated state of the material-immaterial. (Wild Talents, in The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover Publications, p. 941)

[araucaria]

Many thanks Curt. Yes, that Charles Fort quote is one very good way of describing the place of balance we need to find. Unfortunately you cannot read the whole thread yet, until I fill in a few more empty posts: today’s effort (which was thanked 18 months ago!) is only half the picture regarding Jules Verne, so I need to get down to the other half. Forum posting itself is a focus on the immaterial that is hindered – or balanced – by the material considerations of everyday living; but I hope to add more to this thread in the not too distant future.

[Michelle Marie]

Is this about time travel, free energy, or breaking out of the old paradigm consciousness techniques? (Or ..., or all of the above?)

I was just speaking to someone about crossing a bridge (metaphorical) in my life, and then that friend left and I opened up the private message that lead me to this. Now I'm going to use this in my intentional creative laboratory to cross my own bridge! I love the idea of flying over it!

Whatever your original intent was regarding these posts, I'd like to thank you for this inspired solution.

I love synchronicity. Thanks!
Michelle Marie