East, West, and much ado about nothing

In earlier posts, I had made a big deal about which way Beings and symbols were facings:  East vs. West.  Going all the way back to the boy in Run, Boy, Run, and continuing on to figures like Ben Stiller on the movie art for Walter Mitty, I became convinced that there was meaning in their symbols, but that they were facing the wrong way.

This was partly based on this West vs. East travel story, and interpreting Left = West and Right = East.  But it was also partly driven by the thought that there were some words that I believed were being spoken to Faramir-Eonwe that seemed to be telling him to go East, but "knowing" that West was the way to go, or ultimately the path that one would take in finding and following the road home.  Those were the primary drivers for this assumption.

Because things got pretty strange for me in the final weeks and months in the spring of 2020, and there is at least one known instance of me writing something that came from something fairly strange (what I call the Finwe Letter... don't ask, trust me), it was possible that at least some of these later words and dialogues were coming from questionable sources, or at least some of them reflected that.  It is with this reasoning that I developed the theory that these references to travelling East must have been a trick, like I assumed this Finwe Letter was.  Meaning, whereas before I was hearing or listening in on Friends or Good Beings, I would have been hearing some of these words from other Beings (i.e., Saruman) in trying to convince Faramir to go a different direction and thus get lost.

It is an interesting take, but I now think I was completely wrong!  Like, really badly so.

The first cracks in that story actually started occurring for me when Orion-Menelmacar worked his way into our story.  If you take a look at Orion in the sky, you will notice something about his pose:

Yeah, he is facing to the right, and he travels to the right.  Yet, Orion travels to the West through the sky.  This completely shatters that first, simple (and completely wrong) assumption I made that Right = East.  No, it doesn't, and Orion shows us this.  We view him from the North looking to the South (at least where I live), and so him travelling to the right in the sky means he is going West.  It is just a matter of perspective.

Thus, bringing back Ben Stiller and his Sky Walk imagery, it is entirely consistent with Orion's own travels for Stiller to be walking to the West (straight on past the Empire State Building, by the way).

So, that aspect of my interpreting some of these symbols as being partly corrupted falls apart, at least based on that bad assumption.  That means some of the other things I looked into too deeply also fall apart (such as the influence of Tim in that specific imagery, which just isn't so).

And what about that - the influence of Saruman in that whole "Tempting Farmir to travel to the East" scenario?  Yeah, I think that falls about pretty badly as well.  France, and the notion of important things being located there, pretty much put a nail in the coffin for how I was both interpreting these symbols as well as translating and interpreting my words from the Spring of 2020 relative to who was speaking and what their intent was.

In at least two instances, a speaker is telling another that they will come back to the East.  Because my understanding is that West is the way that this Sky Walking path will lead, I couldn't reconcile East with this view.  I assumed this must be Saruman, or some other Being with bad or incorrect intentions, telling Faramir (the person being spoken to) he should follow them to the East, and then Faramir would be lost.  I even invoked Lehi's dream journey as an example of when this had happened - when a Being (the mane in the White Robe) led Lehi out into a dark abyss and left him.  This would have been a similar scenario, or at least that is how I imagined it.

However, this doesn't work for me anymore, and I was wrong in assuming this, all because I couldn't reconcile the East reference with the West destination (as I understand it).

France holds the key, however, and WanderingGondola, who comments on this blog occasionally, had a jump on the right way to reconcile East vs. West in this story.  At that time, France had not yet fully entered into this story in the way it has now.  I had identified it as the place where Tom's House is, and where the Stone Couriers had gone to, but hadn't yet marked it as a potential travel destination for other Beings in the future, for whatever reason.   In a comment on the post "Wagon's East!"... or was that supposed to be West?, WanderingGondola said:

Following your assumption this is about "Faramir", did you previously suggest he's currently on Earth in some capacity? If so, perhaps "East" is merely relative to his geographical location at whatever time this stuff is happening.

 Yes, this is the answer, I think.  She nailed it, at least with respect to the first leg of any trip, and France solidified this in my mind.

The things that will ultimately enable a Sky Walk to the West are found in the East relative to Faramir.  So it is first East, and then West.  This way, that way. as the song went.  If we assume that he is on this Earth, then the invitation to come East is an invitation to come to Tom's House in France, which will be a trip to the East from Faramir's geographic location.

That trip East is not the same thing as the Sky Walk back to the West, to be clear, but it does solve the riddle about why an invitation to travel that way is mentioned

This makes sense to to me.  At the time I was trying to reconcile East and West, the whole concept of a Study or Room of Records to which Beings might go and find certain things like Stones, Plates, and whatever else, and that this was found at the same location of Tom's House in France, hadn't even entered into my mind.  France has the Key, and so is to France one must go in order to find that Key. This was the missing puzzle piece, and without it, I had to assume that at least some of these strange words were corrupted in the latter part of that Spring.  But, not so.

Not only does that make sense, but it is also reassuring that I don't have to try and delineate those 2019 and 2020 words and try to parse through which came from friendly vs. unfriendly sources, and the narrative becomes clearer.

For instance, in one of the instances that Faramir is told about going East, we hear about 2 Beings who will usher him.  Here is the text:

March 22, 2020

Jewel zimel link

Back and east to come it profit your house

Them dual iskwendi to know

Suggest usher toward home a story to tell

A visceral glow

A stone binding two ways center-heart

tell me where the good men go

 I've brought this up before in previous posts, one where we examined the interesting instance of Usher cruising around a Black Hole on roller skates, and also in the original "Wagon's East" post linked above where I first surmised that perhaps Saruman was the one offering to take Faramir to the East and ditch him out in the middle of the void, or something.

This is about as far off as I could have been!

The clue here that I didn't key off of is that the third line, the one that goes "Them dual iskwendi to know".  Now, I could be very wrong on this new interpretation as well - entirely possible, so keep that in mind - but I now see here a reference to our Stone Couriers.  There were two of them, I've guessed, and we of course have the word "dual", meaning two.

What threw me for a loop initially is that I interpreted "Iskwendi" as meaning Elvish assemblies, or groups of Beings, and that there were two of them.  This may still be the correct interpretation, or we've seen plenty of double meanings, so I'm not ruling it out (I've been off enough to hedge!), but I see a simpler story.

The speaker here is telling Faramir that he will will come back and East.  This is both a return (to come back) and a direction (to the East).  So, wherever it is, is a place that he has been before, and lies to his East.  Tom's House fits with the first criteria, since recall that I have both Eowyn and Faramir at least in one instance being at Tom's House prior to their separation.  This story actually seems to be referenced in the later lines of a "Stone binding two ways center-heart" (the heart-language mentioned earlier), as well as in the song that is alluded to in that last line (Heaven Knows, by Five for Fighting).

Since we are already assuming France for Tom's House, then the East is more dependent on wherever Faramir is, so this isn't necessarily a criteria for that House, but more of indicative of where he would be found if this interpretation is true.  And in this way, it would be a similar path as the Stone Couriers took.  They started off in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and took an Eastward journey to finally arrive at Tom's House in France.

And this then gets to the identity of meaning of these "dual iskwendi".  I think this translates as "Two Elfs", pretty cleanly, actually.  Kwendi does mean Elvish people, but 1s is a pronoun for an individual person, so basically "Person of the Elves".  And the speaker says that these two Beings will 'know', meaning they will know how to get to Tom's House.  This interpretation makes complete sense with the next line "suggest to usher toward home a story to tell".

Because the Stone Couriers will know the location ("to know", as in something still in the future as of 2020 since the Couriers will not deliver the Stone until 2021), the speaker suggests to Faramir that these two Beings also be the ones to escort him there.  The word "usher", again, was likely chosen for specific reasons I outlined before.  That all still holds.

OK, so this all makes much more sense to me, and I feel better about it.  Rather than Saruman hopping in and trying to trick Faramir into going East, and all of the various stories I created around this being the case, this actually never happened.  So scratch previous writings that emphasize this or try to make sense of it.  

What we actually have here is the speaker (who is Good) telling Faramir about something that will happen in the future.  He will go to France (in the East), and it is probably wise to allow the Stone Couriers to usher him there since they know the way.  It is framed as a suggestion, but my guess is it is a really good suggestion.  At Tom's House are stories that will need to be told, some of them found on Stones, and others found on Plates, and it seems that following events there a Sky Walk heading to the West is made possible.

So, that is my story, and I'm sticking to it... for now.