Where have you gone, James DiMaggio?

A slightly interesting bit of name gamery going on in the case of the California teenager (Hannah Anderson) found this week in Idaho, recovered unharmed after her abductor James DiMaggio was shot and killed.

The area:  Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.  Indeed.

Weird thing is this obscure area of the country was in the news a few months ago.  A Twin Falls (Twin Peaks) animal shelter counts 34 dogs missing in February and March in the area an hour or so south of where DiMaggio, Joltin' James, took his victim.  All of the dogs vanished without a trace.

The area:  Magic Valley.

On March 12th, the body of a German Shepherd was found covered in a purple sheet, its head smashed to bits with a lump of concrete found at the scene.  The possibility of ritual killing and/or animal sacrifice was entertained.  This was in a place called Devil's Corral....

All Dogs Go to Hell.

Apparently, there's some doubt as to whether the number of missing dogs is in fact higher than the amount of missing dogs in previous years.

Still, we loves us them evocative names and when I saw the report about Anderson, the missing dogs immediately came to mind because well, usually all we hear about Idaho involves potatoes and survivalists.

Still, this is pure Baader-Meinhof.  Reminds me of a paragraph in the article I wrote about in my last post: 

One way to illustrate this [the filter theory of selective attention] to yourself is to experiment with a magical technique described by William S. Burroughs called, “Walking on Color.”  Pick a color and take a walk in an area that is familiar to you, choosing to only allow objects of that color to draw your attention.  You will quickly find yourself noticing things you’ve never paid attention to before.  Those things were always there, but your consciousness was editing them out, because it deemed them unimportant.

A few words by Burroughs himself can be found here.

But wait, what the hell, DiMaggio was killed 18 years to the day that his father, James Sr., committed suicide, not long after he'd held another girl, also 16, hostage.  Twin falls....

In another odd but as of yet inconclusive tidbit: 

The riders who spotted Hannah with DiMaggio earlier in the week said she appeared healthy and safe at the time, leading Sheriff Gore to conclude: 'As far as we know, it didn't appear she was being held against her will.'

The area has also been rife with alleged cattle mutilations. Since the 70's, a biggish wave has hit the state every 5 or 6 years. To the south-east of Magic Valley, 30 cattle were mutilated in 1989-90. In 2007, two bulls had their sexual organs removed. This was a bit farther north, in Clark County. (source)

A string of mutilations and shootings took place in 2010 on the other end of the valley in Gem County.

In any event, there's been no more news about the dogs since March.

BTW, Anderson is a name meaning son of Andrew, a name derived from the Greek for "man". Son of Man?  Baader-Meinhof nourishes my own suffering little girl/Jesus narrative.

This is a bit about how I interpret the "news" and construct poetic narratives out of random facts (alleged).

"You're Lost Little Girl...."

This is a (belated) tale of constructing "synchronicity", a piling-up of information with resonant themes.  In our case, instead of standing back and letting others go hog-wild with conspiracy theories, we freely admit that this is in fact, a construction.  Disparate, unrelated facts, brought together by the mind.  Perception as an organizing process.
 
On Dec. 20, I opened Firefox and my start page appears:  Google.  On this day the "Google doodle" was an interactive story board featuring the tale of Little Red Riding Hood to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Grimm's Fairy Tales.

I went to my Facebook page and on my newsfeed there was a blurb about the photobomb of Vicki Soto; behind her a man makes the "devil's horns" hand sign.  This led to a post (The Devil you say), but not before recalling that I had previously linked a "martyred" young woman to the tale of Riding Hood in a previous post entitled The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf.

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being.

I Googled "origin of the name Soto" and found:  The Soto family originally lived in one of the numerous towns or villages named Soto. The place-name Soto is derived from the Spanish word "soto," which refers to a "thicket" or "grove." This word is itself derived from the Latin word "saltus," which refers to a pasture land containing a forest or wood.  (http://www.houseofnames.com/soto-family-crest)

So now, the link in my head between one "virgin martyr" and another has a kind of "objective" fact.

 

Flash forward nine days to Dec. 29.  At this point, the preceding text is a dusty draft, headed for the bin. However, as I'm organizing some stray folders, I come across the preceding three images.  I apparently scanned these images from a French magazine in April, 2012, probably struck by the fact they used the Little Red Riding Hood story in the sense I discussed in my own post on the tale (The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf, October, 2009); that is to say, the metaphor for sexual predation.

These images resonated so well with the themes in this draft that I resurrected this post.

Continuing with Victoria Soto: She is the only one of the Sandy Hook victims with her own Wikipedia page, the one victim for some reason CNN decided to focus upon (remember The Devil you say, December 29).  Soto is the only name I know from the massacre; I'm certainly not alone.

She has been widely hailed as a hero:  Shots and screaming were heard over the intercom system and Soto hid several children in a closet. When Lanza entered her classroom, Soto told him that the children were in the auditorium. However, several of the children then came out of their hiding places and ran. As they ran, Lanza shot them dead. Soto, fearing for the lives of her other students put herself between her students and the shooter who then fatally shot her.

There were, however, several other acts of this sort which could just as easily be labelled "heroic."  So why focus on Vicki Soto?  First of all, by most accounts she appears to have been a genuinely nice person.  Her actions that day were undoubtedly admirable.  It doesn't hurt that she was also young, full of promise and rather pretty.

I think the scope of this tragedy makes it difficult to focus on any one child....it would seem unfair in some way.  It's hard to remember so many names, there are no details of their short lives to stab our hearts with.  No individual face stands out.  So this young woman became a focus of attention.  The martyred young woman is a powerful archetype; in this case her youth links her to the children in a way an older, greyer teacher might not.  She serves as bridge between the children and the world.  By focusing on Soto, a fair choice is made to symbolize all the victims, all the horror distilled into one individual, bringing it all to a more digestible bit of news.  I don't see this as an engineered meme, but a kind of organic response, a feedback loop between popular emotional response, the recognition of her appeal and then, imitation, repetition, re-circulation.

Victoria Soto, facing down the wolf.  In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf is disguised as Grandma.  I read the name Adam Lanza somewhere interpreted as "Man Lance" (as one other famous Lance is in the news again for doping, or "leg strong").  Adam Lanza also wore a mask.  "Adam (Hebrew: אָדָֿם) comes from the triliteral root אָדַֿם ( 'ADM ), meaning "red", "fair", "handsome". (!!)  And it appears that Lanza comes from Lancia, a name derived from a soldier or lancer.  There is an obvious metaphor here of sexual aggression, a "man lance", but the woman's name suggests victory over the forest, as with Riding Hood.

In some roundabout evocation, this goes back to the very real feeling of a kind of moral victory over Lanza/the Wolf; her humanity in the face of the horror is a kind of victory in death that goes down well in our Christian culture, what with Christ's example followed by numerous Saints among the Catholic martyrs.

(Follow the virgin martyr tag for an extensive selection of posts on the theme).

Loren Coleman has been writing about the symbolism of a "lady in red" (Holmes' Harlots, July 30, 2012).  He links several appearances of the red woman to the Aurora shootings in Colorado, itself one in a series of shootings with patterns pointing to what Coleman calls "Red Dawn" scenarios.  This follows a post of July 22, Blood Red Movie Massacres.  Back on May 3, The Sink Hole's Will Morgan devoted a post to the topic, unrelated to shootings, entitled....Lady in Red.  Morgan links the red lady to the Sacred Whore of Babylon.  Coleman links her to prostitution.  Old acquaintace Tate Bunker, who I haven't actually spoken to in 20 years or so, premiered his first feature film, Little Red at the Milwaukee Film Festival (September 30).  It's a modern re-telling of the tale with the Wolf as a sexual predator named Lou. Meanwhile, I have discussed Little Red Riding Hood as a cautionary tale against prostitution and a metaphor for sexual predation.

Soto is not Little Red Riding Hood, but there are definitely enough "syncs" around which to construct a synchromystic narrative.  The images I've posted are linked to sexual predation on the internet, not mass murder (though I'm sure a lot more could be said about the sexual aspects of murder and/or violence).  Fact is, though, I re-discovered 'em on the day I saw another Little Red link, a Satanic photobomb, and discovered that the photobombee's name meant forest.  By riffing a bit around that, a lot more connections come up.  Which sounds like a way of saying it's all in your head.  The facts are out there, but the nexus is the mind.

So, most of you will be saying, ok, so?  So nothing.  Synchromystics just keep piling this shit on and think they've discovered the entrails of God.  I'm just bored and detailing the tracks of my tears, and that rhymes with bears not beers, as in the the discrete rips at the edges of reality which allow us to think we've discovered something we in fact have built ourselves....and merely forgotten....

The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf

Seems like I bungled my post on the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping.... unable to see the forest for the trees, so focused on synchromystic jibba-jabba that I neglected to note the obvious.

When I spent so much time on the name Dugard--"from the garden"--and thinking only of Jesus' night of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane, how could I have missed the Garden of Eden? Probably because I'm currently involved in a dispute with neighbors which has in fact left me sleepless and anguished. Although it is a matter of beams and nails, my crucifixion doesn't seem to be imminent.

If I could see beyond my own nose I might have noticed that Dugard's story can be seen in the terms of the Eden myth. Sexuality and the loss of innocence. It was the Gid who pointed this out to me so I leave it there, as a challenge to the Gid to lay it all out for us. Let the preacher's kid untangle it!

The second (at least!) point of neglect is the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. I warbled on about St. Thérèse and Anne Frank and forgot to go into this gem of a tale. Worst of all, I'd thought of it and then decided, nah, fuggit. Then this morning I awoke to read a story about Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell, a young woman of 19 who was killed by coyotes while walking in the woods and then after thinking "holy shit that's horrible," I remembered the tale.

So, here goes. Apparently the tale was told in the 14th c. by peasants in both France and Italy and may have roots in Eastern or "Oriental" tales with similar themes. There are many versions; sometimes the girl is eaten and sometimes she escapes; sometimes involuntary cannibalism occurs. Sometimes the wolf is a werewolf or an ogre. Sexual overtones abound.

The first written version was published by Frenchman Charles Perrault in 1697. In his version the girl is eaten and there the story ends. A moral tacked onto the end explains that the story is a warning to "good girls" to resist the sexual advances of men.

Since Perrault, many variations have appeared but most know the version as told by the Brothers Grimm.

The Grimm version is almost certainly a re-telling of Perault's except in the end, where a hunter after the wolf's skin saves the girl and her grandmother. In this version the grandmother and the girl are swallowed whole by the wolf, but emerge unharmed after the hunstman cuts the beast open. This ending sees to have been taken from yet another tale. The Grimms also wrote a sequel in which grandmother and the girl trap and kill another wolf with a cunning ruse: they drown him after luring him with a pot of water which had been used to cook sausages.

Many interpretations have been made of the fairy tale, only a few of which I'll mention here. Obviously, wolf attacks were a serious problem in the Middle Ages, so it may have simply began as a cautionary tale to young kids, much like stories of La Llorona are thought to have begun as a way to scare kids away from dangerous waterways.

Alan Dundes has analyzed the tale and interpreted it as the story of a girl who leaves home and in various actions crosses a threshold; she emerges from the belly of the beast as a woman. In another Freudian analysis, Bruno Bettelheim sees it as a rebirth; the child is reborn coming from the wolf, her emotions liberated.

Yet another interpretation sees the story as a warning against falling into the trap of prostitution; supporters of this theory note that the red cloak was a common symbol of hookers in 17th c. France. Less pernicious perhaps is the idea that the story represents sexual awakening. "In this interpretation, the red cloak symbolizes the blood of the menstrual cycle, braving the "dark forest" of womanhood. Or the cloak could symbolize the hymen....In this case, the wolf threatens the girl's virginity. The anthropomorphic wolf symbolizes a man, who could be a lover, seducer or sexual predator...."

We would argue that the pedophile and the kid-snatcher has replaced the Big Bad Wolf as the ultimate danger of our time, lurking in the forest after the sun goes down, ready to pounce; the former is the metaphor for the latter. Indeed the wolf has always had a connotation of sexual aggressiveness. The leering wolf-whistle as the statuesque blond walks past the construction site, Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf (I'm on the hunt I'm after you....) All of these sexual wolf metaphors may derive from this very tale or others like it; the wolf and sexual danger have become intrinsically linked. Wikipedia offers a brief summary of modern adaptations, such as popular songs, cartoons and fiction in which the sexuality of the tale is explored.

Blatant eroticism has been a trope of the vampire tale since Bram Stoker. Less so perhaps for the werewolf but nonetheless, there is clearly a brute sexuality to the lycanthrope. A normal man goes about his everyday business until the full moon appears. In the maiden-mother-crone cycle of pagan moon-lore, the full moon represents the point when the woman is most fertile, full, bountiful. "Mother" may be the appellation but the implication is fertility and thus sexuality. An in the presence of the full woman our mild-mannered lycanthrope turns into an uncontrollable beast with an immense hunger for flesh. While not universally true, the werewolf in European cultures is usually a man.

According to NASA, however, neither June 10, 1991 (Dugard kidnapping) nor November 22, 1976 (Callaway kidnapping) were full moons; though certainly a beast, we can rule out lycanthropy in Garrido's case!

Wikipedia again makes the point that certain modern interpretations of the tale resemble "animal bridegroom" stories such as The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. This latter is perhaps even more telling than the tale of Riding Hood. In the popular Disney film, the Beast first holds young Belle's father as a prisoner but agrees to free him if Belle agrees to take his place. Although coarse and full of anger, the Beast treats Belle kindly, slowly revealing a more sensitive side. Given her freedom, Belle returns of her own volition to save the Beast from his tormentors. She has fallen in love with the Beast, and her tears transforms him back into a handsome young Prince. Cue the dancing candelabra; they live happily ever after.

One might reasonably construe this as a glorification of the Stockholm syndrome. Given the prevalence of the fairy tale in our culture, it shouldn't be so surprising that Dugard never seemed to try and escape her captor. We speak of her as being imprisoned, but it seems she had some degree of freedom, working in Garrido's printshop, interacting with the public. Her children have been described as fairly well-adjusted and clever. Not exactly feral kids locked in a cage for years. Disney's celebrated version of the film was released on November 13, 1991. A week and a day before the Dugard kidnapping!

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being. The Wolf in Riding Hood you will recall, dresses itself in Grandma's nightdress and bonnet in order to fool Little Red. And what is the Beast but a lycanthrope stuck in his animal state?

Hunter Thompson brought the following quote by Samuel Johnson to many peoples' attention: "He who makes a beast of himself avoids the pain of being a man." I always thought Thompson was explaining, even advocating, his particular kind of behavior. Now I'm not sure that it isn't merely scorn, or an impersonal observation. Men are dogs, they say. And they are right.