It is true that I was looking at the original text of the Mithrasliturgie right before bed, but I don't know that that accounts entirely for the spectacular dream of two women practicing mediumship circa 1923 in a way that looked pretentiously credulous and neoclassically phony until the younger one suddenly hit all five vowels of the Greek alphabet on a deep, hard-echoing note held longer than a human voice could sustain and the wax-polished wood of the table under their linked hands fell to sand and boiled up into faces and forms and landscapes all vibrating like Chladni figures or Faraday waves. Each was a different participant's answer, but I don't remember how any of them went together—something like a cluster of singing children, the tall cone of a mountain collapsing like a pot on a wheel. Everyone was watching their own resonant frequency of the world. There was an eight- or ten-year difference between the women and the older always presented the younger to their clients as her sisterly protégé, but at the height of the séance she held in her arms a shivering sand-red double of the younger woman reaching naked for her, almost bending her mouth to its own before it fell away suddenly into undisturbed candlelight, not even dust. I didn't know if they ever spoke to one another about these revelations of the living, not the dead: I hoped. After that I don't even know how to classify dreaming about sharing a hotel room at a convention with a mid-career Denholm Elliott. He was a completely reasonable roommate for the weekend. Have some links.
1. I don't think I'd read any of Christopher Brennan's The Wanderer (1901), but this excerpt reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin and M. John Harrison, which I wasn't expecting.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme: "Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer." That's a factual description, not a clever band name.
3. I love the idea of students creating their own incantation bowls. I know some things I would trap at the bottom of those spirals.
4. I had no idea Biden liked the poetry of Seamus Heaney. I admit it does incline me kindly toward him as a person.
5. I just didn't want anyone to think I wasn't mourning for Arecibo.
1. I don't think I'd read any of Christopher Brennan's The Wanderer (1901), but this excerpt reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin and M. John Harrison, which I wasn't expecting.
2. Courtesy of
ashlyme: "Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer." That's a factual description, not a clever band name.3. I love the idea of students creating their own incantation bowls. I know some things I would trap at the bottom of those spirals.
4. I had no idea Biden liked the poetry of Seamus Heaney. I admit it does incline me kindly toward him as a person.
5. I just didn't want anyone to think I wasn't mourning for Arecibo.
