The Birds and The Bees Pt2: Don't Worry Bee Happy

I had wanted to write this follow-up sooner, but I had to take a much-needed detour first. I found myself in Virginia for a recital put on by Melissa's dance school that explicitly incorporated the death/rebirth symbolism of the Easter/Spring period. Then we came back to NYC on a bus out of Newport News, VA. The address of the bus station? 317 of course.

We ended Part One of this series by touching on the Vonnegut book "The Sirens of Titan," which centers around the town of Newport, Rhode Island. Written in 1959, the book has a BlueBeam event, a man who is scattered across time and space gaining all sorts of knowledge and power who then builds a city on Mars. I'd be surprised if Alan Moore didn't lift 85% of the plot from this book for his "Watchmen," but maybe not all that surprised. At it's core, this sci-fi theme seems to be an attempt at explaining the ego-death experience. That is a universal challenge and where most of the symbols we look at lead us.

We have been looking at the repeated death/rebirth symbols for the last few months. But, we cannot have rebirth, let alone first-life, without "the birds and the bees." The public sex ritual of Tiger Woods and all he represents never disappoints to give us symbolic fodder and we can always count on the Nazi-antics of Drudge to spell it out for us:

Note the name Boehner (Boner), combining the political with the sex Wood, who now cannot perform (castrated like Osiris?) and leading us to the White House. All in 2010, the year of the Tiger, the year we make contact.

And, in case you missed this update to Pt1: Jesus wants to go to Venus,

it seems Jesus, the solar-powered SUN of God, really does want to go to Venus.

Now we have bees connected to space travel again. For actual space bees, let's take a peek at the Futurama episode "The Sting."

It opens with the robot Bender playing golf like our Tiger Woods on, what else, the 17th hole.

Bender then dons a bee costume for the trip to the space hive, where our cast enters a hexagon gateway.

Note the double B telling you to "Be the B" and the sexual overtones of the advertisement next to the episode. "Be the Boss, control your Staff!"

Here we see Fry killed by the sting of another Killer Bee, starting off our death/rebirth ritual.

Outside his funeral, this DNA-bearing spaceship-truck flies past, hinting at rebirth.

Later, Leela eats hallucinogenic honey and imagines that Fry is reborn out of the combo of DNA and Honey. We had already looked at the historical connections between honey and hallucinogens in the post Circumpunct Breakfast: Masonically Delicious! - see Terence McKenna and others for more on this.

She then imagines that the Jesus-resonating, reborn Fry takes her to his favorite planet, Venus.

In Leela's next hallucination, the cast of the show does a song and dance number singing "Don't worry, BEE happy," a variation on Bobby McFerrin's "Don't worry, Be Happy." While singing and dancing, they all die after being stung by bees - sorta like that Lady Gaga video. Nice disco-ball hexagons too.

Follow me on a tangent to look at the original Bobby McFerrin song, especially since his initials reunite the B & M that we have noticed again and again with the honey meme.

Notice the video set is two illuminated pillars beside an entrance to a smoke tunnel. It also has a holy trinity dancing in front of it, made up of Bobby McFerrin, Robin Williams (resonating Jake Kotze's favorite bird), and Bill Irwin (who we'll look at in a minute).

The video also gives us this shot of a financial meltdown (something we've seen a lot of in the the markets lately). I include this because in "Sirens of Titan" there is a stock market crash that the US President decides to stimulate his way out of with a new era of space travel. If you're living in the US in the year 2010, this may sound like a familiar scenario. Interesting.

Also noteworthy in "Sirens of Titan," is a spaceship called "The Whale." As I I had been looking at the fact that bees are perfect symbols for death/rebirth - bees have stingers and die after using them, they are potentially deadly themselves (see Killer Bees), but also are responsible for much life on this planet by pollinating the world's plantlife - I began seeing Bees and Whales as symbolically interchangeable, since there are Sperm Whales and Killer Whales. We also have "the belly of the whale" as a dark night of the soul or ego-death experience. So, when the spaceship called "The Whale" popped up in this book, I took notice.

This theory was validated when, in the Radio8Ball show that synced so strongly in Part One, Twig Palace sings her song "Little Finger." She sings a line that reminds us of Lucky's four magic charms and Elton John's Levon, "Let's blow up big balloons and send them soaring into outer space." The next verse has the people reincarnated as Bumble Bees. In the verse after that she sings, "If our honey lives don't suit us, let's be killer whales instead."

After making this connection, I saw an ad on the subway for a show called Whale Wars. If you have any doubt that the double "W" is an upside-down double "M," note that the station "AniMal Planet" has a highlighted "M" in the logo. The tagline on the advert and the synopsis on the animal planet website both read: "Whale Wars: It's not about whales. It's about 42 crazy die-hards with a mission."

So there's our ever-present 42 and this DVD case reminds us again that it's all about death and rebirth:

Oh, and my symbol junkies will love the logo of the "conservation society" those 42 people operate. Check it out:

Since Whales are Bees, and we're going with the "birds and the bees" theme, I next thought of the Tom Waits song, "Fish and Bird." Here are some of the lyrics:

Of a world that was so far away
And a song that we'd never heard
A song of a little bird
That fell in love with a whale

He said, 'You cannot live in the ocean'
And she said to him
'You never can live in the sky'
But the ocean is filled with tears
And the sea turns into a mirror
There's a whale in the moon when it's clear
And a bird on the tide

So, after all this, I saw a birdcage in the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" video, and said to myself, "Okay, there's our bird, where's the fish?" Well, I wasn't disappointed. As if summoned, a fishbowl falls out of the sky and Bill Irwin catches it, then places it next to the bird, where it belongs.

Wiki tells us that our third member of the Holy Trinity, Bill Irwin, has had a fascinating career. With roles in The Regard of Flight, Fool Moon, Waiting for Godot (alongside Steve Martin and Robin Williams), The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, My Blue Heaven, Lady in the Water, Across the Universe, Northern Exposure as "The Flying Man," 3rd Rock from the Sun, and Bye Bye Birdie. He is most known for his clown work, since graduating Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1974.

Yep, that Ringling Brothers. The one we were just looking at in "Bread and Circuses." You know, the one with the OZ Stargate on their site.

Remember, we had just looked at Ringling again, alongside Elton John (the guy who has an album called Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) in Part One of this series.

If you want more on the Circus and Space travel connection, see The Secret Sun here and here.

Oh hey, don't let me forget this headline. It's graduation season and high profile douche, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, spoke at a commencement ceremony telling kids, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." So now you know everything is going to be fine.

While I've still got you on a tangent or twelve, let's look at the other ad that popped up on the Futurama site. It's for something called Earth Eternal, with a logo that is obviously two E's back to back, but which creates something else all together.

It may be a nod to our 2010, year of the Tiger. In many artistic representations of the year of the tiger, the tiger is drawn with a "Wang" on his forehead, over its third-eye. It is the Chinese character for "King" and often appears on real-life tigers as shown in this picture from the zooschool site.

While in Virginia with a bunch of dancers, we watched this incredible tap routine from The Nicholas Brothers.

Wiki tells us that Fayard Nicholas "was a member of the Baha'i Faith since 1967." The Baga'i "ringstone" symbol should now look familiar to us, as it is the spitting image of the Wang and the back-to-back E.

I'm reminded that Bees communicate through dance as I watch these guys dance on a set with a now-familiar stargate design.

I know what you're asking yourself. Why does it always come back to 2001/2010 and Stargates and all that? Well, let's finish that Futurama episode, shall we?

Leela decides to find Fry's coffin, assuming it to be empty, to prove that he's still alive. When she gets to it, the classic music starts, and the coffin is shown to be a black monolith from the 2001/2010 films.

She opens it and finds a surprise...

The coffin contains non-other than a stargate:

Hitting us over the head with death-as-stargate symbolism.

But, if you think that's the end of it, you're going to be as surprised as I was.

To be continued...