Douglas Mercer
October 12 2024
The idiom “cat’s cradle” is used to describe something that is extremely complex, difficult, or jumbled. The phrase is derived from a classic children’s game called Cat’s Cradle in which two or more children pass a loop of string back and forth between their hand to create various figures. This idiom can be interpreted in many ways depending on the context in which it is used. Some people use it to describe a complicated situation that is difficult to understand or navigate through. Others may use it to refer to something that appears simple at first glance but becomes increasingly complex as one delves deeper into it. The term cat’s cradle eventually became associated with other things beyond the game itself. It began to be used metaphorically to describe situations where someone is caught up in something complicated or confusing. This usage dates back at least several hundred years. Today, the idiom cat’s cradle continues to be widely recognized and used in everyday language. Its historical context serves as a reminder of how games and activities can evolve over time, taking on new meanings and associations along the way.
Similar to a can of worms, or a hornet’s nest or a briar patch or a tar baby or, most aptly: a witch’s brew.
Bokonism is a fantasy religion found in the Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional tale called Cat’s Cradle. In the religion a karass is defined as a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident. A wampeter is the central theme or purpose of a karass. Each karass has two wampeters at any given time, one waxing and one waning.
On November 9 1966 John Lennon met Yoko Ono (of high caste Japanese ancestry) for the first time at the Indica Art Gallery in London, England. Two hours after Lennon left the building Roman Polanski showed up to the Indica Art Gallery and met Ono for the first time. As the art that Ono had made had apples and needles Polanski said: this is the most beautiful apple I have ever seen. This is the essence of a needle. Because 9 was Lennon's lucky number and the meeting between him and his future wife had taken on proportions so mythological Lennon always said the event had occurred on November 9, a date which is replicated in most all subsequent accounts. But it happened on November 7, not November 9.
Lennon was shot five times in front of the Dakota Building in New York City where Polanski's Rosemary's Baby was filmed. During the making of this film the man who portrayed the Crowley figure was very uneasy about the demonic content of the film as if they might be inadvertently summoning dark forces. The movie follows a proto yuppie couple who live at the Dakota, the husband (John Cassavetes) becomes involved with a couple who live in the building who are devoted to Satanism. The husband is an actor and he sells his soul to the devil and a man who got a part he wanted is killed as a result and he gets the part in his stead. He then agrees to let Satan rape his wife in a surreal dream sequence and ultimately she gives birth to Satan’s child. The husband in the Satanic couple is more or less based on Alistair Crowley, an English Aristocrat who dedicated his life to the Dark Arts by means of such things as back masking and speaking and writing backwards.
Backmasking is recording device whereby a message is recorded backwards; when played forward it sounds like normal music but when reversed subliminal messages may be heard (Burke on The Sublime, the limn was a Roman boundary marker).
In the movie Rosemary spells out ALL THEM WITCHES using a scrabble board and arranges them into various phrases such as HOW IS HELL FACT ME. Rosemary buys book on witchcraft which tells her that witches cast malevolent spells and use blood, particularly baby’s blood, in their rituals.
The witching hour is a term that refers to a time of troublesome activity and has become a colloquialism for period of unpredictable or vexing events. Often seen to be an hour of reckoning, when things are revealed and the chickens come home to roost. The time before the revelation will be one of a fugue and, as such, a real cat’s cradle or witches brew and if one is not careful one may even fall into a briar patch.
Is is now the very witching time of night when churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. In these opening lines, Hamlet alludes to the witching hour, which was traditionally thought to be the time of night—often midnight or 3 AM—when witches and other supernatural creatures were at their most powerful. At twelve o'clock a seance round the table in the dark.
Crowley’s philosophy holds the key to our discussion, a philosophy heavily rooted in ancient Egyptian mythology. Crowley understood the significance and sacred symbolism of the beetle. In Egyptian mythology, the scarab or dung beetle was believed to be the incarnation of the beetle-headed god Khepera, who ruled over resurrection and fertility, symbolic of the rising sun, rebirth and creation. Synchronistically, if not consciously, the Beatles would carry the mandate of Khepera and become the sun center of our musical universe (Here Comes The Sun, I’ll Follow the Sun, Here Comes The Sun King, Good Day Sunshine, you and me standing solo in the sun, sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun if the sun don’t come you’ll be standing in an English rain, when the sun shines we slip into the shade, etc).
Crowley was said to be the inspiration for the Sgt Pepper's album as it was released twenty years after his death (it was twenty years ago today). Crowley also make an appearance on the cover of that album. We all know, of course, that Crowley is on the cover of Sgt. Peppers, one of many famous people pictured, and seemingly was placed randomly in the back row. However, if you split the cover diagonally and mirror it, a remarkable thing happens. At the very top of this diamond-shaped image sits Crowley. His head predominates over everyone else.
In his novel Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon (“I can connect everything with everything") makes two references to the Dakota Building: 1) in terms of being haunted “the Deseret always made the Dakota look like the Holiday Inn” and Maxine leaves the subway and “gets off at the Dakota, and threads in and out of a busload of Japanese visitors snapping photos of John Lennon’s assassination site.” The arch villain of the novel is Gabriel Ice (Ice-Nine in Cat’s cradle). The computer program most alluded to in the novel is Deep Archer (departure, the transportation is here).
In the novel Time And Again (1970) there is a warehouse in Manhattan that has movie sets and actors, the idea being that if you can reconstruct a scene in your mind’s eye and self-hypnotize you will be able to time travel to the past. In the novel The Dakota is said to be a “staging area” for this autosuggestion and breaking of the normal rules of space and time.
The Dakota building was built in 1884, it was built in the high German Renaissance style, a gabled and turreted structure like a castle keep, a sand-colored gem. It was initially described as being so far uptown that it might as well be in the Dakotas, hence the name. Uniquely it has four feet of sand between the walls of the apartments so dead silence can be enjoyed in its confines, dead silent being the most silent a thing can be. In the 1980s an architectural firm called Glass and Glass did a remodel; it was once a Co-Op but no longer; they say that it used to house the bohemian, the odd, the offbeat, the artistic, and the unconventional and the famous of the arts (Pynchon's ironic the whole sick crew in V) but of late has become home to the titans of the world of finance. As always I offer this only by way of explanation.
In the song The Two Of Us (McCartney, 1969) it is said that you and I are lifting latches and burning matches and writing letters on the wall. In an impromptu and rhapsodic speech prior to the song Lennon says the word pygmy (pig) and Charles and inscrutably references a time when someone named Doris will get her oats (comeuppance). The phrase Deaf Aids refers to things which help those who are hard of hearing (see The Fat Lady Sings, White Biocentrism, July 17 2024).
Before they went in mastermind Charles Manson instructed the killers to write something witchy on the wall and in the event they did not disappoint.
John Lennon was murdered in front of the Dakota building on December 8 1980, one day after the commemorative day of Pearl Harbor. Both the murderer and the murdered were married to females of Japanese descent. Pearl Harbor comes down to us as the prototype of a sneak attack and the Japanese have a worldwide reputation for inscrutability. A kabuki dance being one of masks and dissimulation, of a sort of going through the motions with a ulterior motive in mind. That is it a ritual dance or play or waltz meant to adhere to certain preordained points in a heavily stylized manner. The term kabuki originates from a verb that was used to describe young samurai patrons, meaning being weird or offbeat.
Weird: ancient word for destiny (norns). Wyrd is a concept in Anglo Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to the Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of supernatural or uncanny or simply unexpected. The cognate term to wyrd in Old Norse is uror (furor), with a similar meaning, but also personified as a deity: Uror (anglicized as Urd), one of the norns of Norse Mythology. The Uror is also the name of the location or ground where the Norns meet, Urorabunn. Weird: word.
It’s coming down fast.
According to Farrow actor Sidney Blackmer (who played coven leader Roman Castevet) once said he was disturbed by all of the dark motifs of the movie and apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so. William Castle later became convinced the film was cursed. Shortly after production he suffered gallstones to such a severe extent that he required surgery. As he recovered from that illness, Rosemary’s Baby composer Krzysztof Komeda suffered an accidental fall that led to a coma and, eventually, his death. Then, in the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate—Polanski’s wife—was infamously murdered by the Manson Family. For Castle, it all added up. He had a cameo, playing the grey-haired man standing outside the phone booth where Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, is attempting to get in touch with the obstetrician.
The whole sick crew or actors on the staging ground: a sybaritic Jew who eight years after his wife was murdered raped a thirteen year old female, a vapid talentless blond whore who slept her way to the top, a mindless jet setting heiress at loose ends, a jet setting Polish man given to outbursts of uncontrollable violence, a hairstylist to the stars who, as such, was a parasite to the parasites (see The Moist Star, White Biocentrism, June 30 2024). John Lennon did so much cocaine he blew out his septum, he once did so much acid all the color was washed out of his vision, as the apostle of free love he ushered in universal devastation to the world, he was a billionaire who imagined no possessions, for several weeks he wanted to go to Spain to find the holy grail of the spear of Christ, he believed evil spirits were in his doorways at the Dakota, he believed for months that he was dead, he predicted that the way things were going he would be crucified, he beat both his wives, he killed a man in Hamburg, and his last photo was with him naked curled up in a fetal ball laying atop his wife. That is he was subject to infinite regression (mother!) and it is quite true to say that he ended up sucking his thumb and wondering by the bank of his own lagoon.
That is instant karma came and shot them right in the face. For I believe it was no less a person than Paul McCartney who said, with a demented laugh, that forces are come. This is what happens when children play with fire. It all seems like fun and games until you’re hanging from the rafters by an umbilical cord and letters have been written on the wall in your warm red blood; or you are bleeding out on a Manhattan operating table.
How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?
What comes around goes around; or, to put it another way, if you play with fire you get burned. The grand decider cures us of the pleurisy of the peoples. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges.
Sidney Blackmer (dark sea) was an American actor who was in such films as Kismet, It’s A Wise Child, House Of Secrets, A Covenant With Death, Rosemary’s Baby, and Revenge Is My Destiny. Allegedly he was given the creeps and was quite uneasy at the contents of Polanski’s film saying at one point that “nothing good will come from this hail Satan business." Which is something, one supposes, that really might have gone without saying.
***
Notes
Destiny: density
Neil Armstrong landed on the moon on July 20 1969. Upon returning to earth he and his fellow astronauts remained in quarantine for three weeks (see The Moist Star, White Biocentrism, June 30 2024).
Donald Crowhurst was lost on the Sargasso Sea in late June/early July 1969. His recovered log books revealed that he thought he had become second generation cosmic being (see Deep Water, White Biocentrism, August 4 2024).
David Bowie's song A Space Oddity was released on July 11 1969 in order to capitalize on the mania surrounding the upcoming moon landing. There’s a star man waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
All good children go to heaven.
A penny on the water, twopence on the sea,
Threepence on the railway, and out goes she.
This is an English Nursery Rhyme and the first two lines are repeated ten times on the song You Never Give Me Your Money to the sound of tolling bells. The phrase was painted on a door at the Spahn Ranch in 1969.
I can summon spirits from vasty deep
So can I or any man
But will they come when you call them?
During the investigation of the Tate Murders the LAPD set up a war room in which for six weeks two pieces of paper were located eighty feet apart which were never looked at in tandem. Once they were the identity of the murderer became self-evident, that is the papers then spoke for themselves. During this period of ignorance several people were murdered by the various members of the Mason family.
Juxtaposition definition: an act or instance of placing two opposing elements close together or side by side.
Busy, busy, busy: words Bokononists whisper when they think about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
In the novel Cat’s Cradle: Borasisi and Pabu, the Sun God and the Lunar Goddess; the binary trans-Neptunian object 66652 Borasisi and its moon, 66652 Borasisi I Pabu, now bear their names. The Two Of Us, The Portrait of Mr. WH, W is two Us, hues, all hues in its controlling, Willie Hughes, Ted Hughes, Cthulhu, in Bleeding Edge the name Chuchu appears rather randomly, see The Pool Of Life, White Biocentrism, August 14 2024).
The Planet Neptune was discovered by logical inference.
We started Let It Be in January 1969 at Twickenham Studios, under the working title Get Back. Let It Be is the twelfth and final studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 8 May 1970.
The woman who was killed at the LaBianca residence was named Rosemary; the maid who discovered the bodies at the Tate residence was named Chapman.
PUERILE FANTASY
Quentin Tarantino has a reputation of as an iconoclast, a rebel and a maverick but safe to say that anyone who takes down Hitler, slavery, and Charles Manson is on quite solid terms with the establishment. In Once Upon A Time in Hollywood he sweeps the evil demons of Hollywood under the rug by giving a big sloppy wet kiss to the Tate Family. Before he made the movie he made a pilgrimage to them and got their blessing and was even allowed to have the actress who played Tate use some of Sharon’s personal perfume and jewelry. In the movie Tate is portrayed as an uncomplicated, sweet and innocent beauty who is in childlike awe of her good fortune. By shooting the actor who played Manson in long shots or side shots the director is supposed to have marginalized him from the narrative and thus symbolically removed his talismanic power.
In fact of course Tate used to have her lackeys solicit young White street girls from Hollywood Boulevard and have them brought back to her home on Cielo Drive. There the girls were forced to perform sex acts and were sadistically whipped and filmed and the quasi-snuff films of the girls were passed around to the Hollywood Smart Set for their sick pleasures. As for the rest of them, her husband, a sybaritic Jew, is a known rapist, Victor Frytowski was a wife beater and a sadist, and he and Jay Sebring were in the middle of a ten-day mescaline high when the murderers showed up, and Abigail Folger was a lightheaded heiress living off the fat or the land. In this way Tarantino did the bidding of his masters and whitewashes the truth and turns the darkly satanic into a day glo wonderland and fairy tale. Because as no less a person than Sammy Davis Jr. said everyone in Hollywood was into the dark arts, even if it was just for sexual kicks
