As with most things, I try and keep a record of syncronicity and such, and being as that I co-created them, I think I’ve got a right to the intellectual property of the story of my life, weird and boring as it sometimes is. Here’s a recent example:
About 2 months ago, I started a simple song on guitar after I woke from a dream with this line in my head: “Look now, there’s a tower in the water…” The dream involved a large tower standing 60 feet or so in the air, which I climbed with three friends. We were eventually shooed off by black helicopters. It was oddly vivid, that dark tower standing stark against a gorgeous blue sky laced with clouds, not unlike the illustrations in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands (named, like this blog, for the T.S. Eliot poem) which admittedly was an obsession of mine in high school. Needless to say, I felt a little weird upon waking.
I’ll post the song soon. But the interesting intersection in this meandering road of an essay is this article that I found today, courtesy of the Daily Grail (thank you Twitch) on the mystery of the Irish towers with doorways that open 4 meters above ground:
No surprise therefore that there has been widespread speculation about the round towers, with several writers pushing their date back to pre-Christian times. For historian H. O’Brien, they were even built by the Tuatha de Danann, the People of the goddess Danu, an Irish race of gods, who originally lived on “the islands in the west”, from where they invaded and conquered Ireland.
Tuatha de Danann legends oft mirror the legends of the giants, the Nephilim, the Annunaki, and the Viracochas: all high magicians, godlike in their powers, with the ability to manipulate time and space, all who supposedly left behind great works of architecture. Whether there’s any validity to that is up to you to research and decide for yourself. I personally prefer to breathe and work deeply the mystery. Because it’s just more fun that way.
But if indeed part of a forgotten tradition, or a lost knowledge, nothing beats practical experimentation. Farmer John Quackenboss of Virginia decided to construct a round tower; in 1986, he erected five 6′ high terracotta pipes of 12” diameter filled with basalt gravel, covering an area of 1000 acres. He capped the pipes with a cone of concrete, made with basalt gravel and coated in crushed basalt, bringing the total height to two metres – nowhere near the height of the average round tower. After six weeks, his farm enjoyed increased crop yields, despite drought conditions. He reported that the area covered by the towers had higher rainfall, but less moisture evaporation.
And with that, I leave you with lyrics. Dream well, dream deeply, dream of the Tower which connects all things, may it lead you to other worlds than these.
