4/4/11

5: CH & BA


On Sep 8, 2008 I woke up with the strange idea that there was an exact pattern 4-1 in Jung's life around 4/4/44, then I could check it was true.
In the following days and weeks I discovered other patterns 4-1, some concerning French works, some not. On Sep 30 I was in Marseilles, where I found in a second-hand bookshop Les quatre coins de la nuit, by Craig Holden (2000, French translation of Four corners of night, 1999).
I read it on next days, and found it began on March 31, 1996, which is precised to be Palm Sunday (and I checked it was).
It looks like a free precision, but it awaked my attention. So on this Palm Sunday disappears a girl, Tamara, in an unnamed Midwestern city, and two cops investigate the case, Bank Arbaugh and his friend Mack Steiner, both without any religious belief.
Still looking like a contingent circumstance, it takes Bank just one week to find where is the girl, and in the night from Apr 6 to 7 Bank and Mack have to fight against a gang of dealers to free her. During this night of the Resurrection, Bank sacrifies his life to save Tamara and Mack.
After his death, there are just a few concluding paragraphs:
Well that was quite enough to make of Four Corners of Night my fourth Book of the Week, even if this Holy Week was fortuitous, but I don't think at all it was.
We learn through the book that Bank had a terrible fault to repair, and his sacrifice during this sacred night looks like a redemption.
This novel is very subtle, but I read another Craig Holden's some years earlier, The Last Sanctuary (1996), which was quite clearer. It begins in New Salem, N. Dakota, where we meet the hero, Joseph Curtis, who's got stigmatas from the first War in the Gulf, at times his feet bleed... He has to deal with a sect run by Father Amon. In the end the Father dies, and so seems to do Joe Curtis, but he comes back to life and takes the place of the Father to lead the sect.
Well it's a JC like Jesus Christ, and Curtis is much alike Christ or Cristus...

After Four corners I read three other Holden's, and found all his novels conceal a deep Catholic moral, as well as numerologic patterns in their structure, so The Last Sanctuary has 3 parts with 14 chapters in each one, The Jazz Bird 5 parts with 8 chapters in each one..
Four Corners of Night is in 4 parts, with 38 chapters in all. I thought the author's initials, C-H, had ranks 3-8 in the alphabet.
It's useful now to know one of my main obsessions is numeric patterns in JS Bach's works. I've more than 20 pages in French on my site about it, and at least one in English. One of this page is dedicated to the signature 21-38, seen as letters BA-CH. For example Bach's opus 1 is the Clavier Partitas, beginning with BWV 825, Partita in B (like Bach, in the German system where B is B flat in English system), in which the 2 first pieces are a Prelude and an Allemande counting 21 and 38 bars.
As I do not like the Menuet II in this partita, I wrote another one with in each part 21 notes for left hand and 38 for right one, and recorded it with a very cheap camera for YouTube:
Well I never learnt to play piano... This was just to explain how, after having found a book in 38 chapters by a CH, I wondered if I could find one in 21 chapters by a BA.
On Oct 10, 2008, I went to a public library and looked among the authors names in A the ones that had a forname in B. I'll forget here a few dead ends to come directly to Boris Akunin. Of course I knew his name, but I never felt like opening one of his books, as I don't like historical novels.
Yet there was some 8 Akunin's books on a shelf, and a good chance to find 21 chapters in one of them, so I looked at each book, beginning by the end to find last chapter's number.
No ending chapter 21, but last one of Special Assignments was:
I looked before and found the book was composed of two novellas, The Jack of Spades, and The Decorator, in which action is set in Moscow, during the 1889 Holy Week, in nine chapters giving all a reference to it, beginning with
If it started on Tuesday rather than Palm Sunday, I accepted it as my 5th Book of the Week.
I hardly believed it as when I found the 1996 Holy Week ruling Four Corners of Night I immediately thought a fifth Book of the Week would complete the prominent pattern 4-1 I met in Jung's life around 4/4/44, a Holy Week Tuesday. Yet I had only found 4 such books in 12 years, and the odds seemed against me to find another one soon, so on Oct 9 I put the question on a literary forum I belong to, mentioning the four books I already knew.
This had no result, but on next day 10/10 I found by myself Akunin's, because of Four Corners of Night, 10 days after I found it in Marseilles.
An amazing coincidence is that this frontcover of an English edition (2007) shows a Moscow nightscape with card symbols at the four corners. Actually the original Russian edition was published in 1999, as Four Corners of Night.

I was puzzled too to see this story beginning on a Tuesday 4/4, as the switch between Jung and Haemmerli happened on (Holy) Tuesday 4/4/44, but in this Russian book the dates are given in the Julian calendar, where Gregorian Holy Week from 4/14 to 4/21 becomes 4/2 to 4/9 (I checked the Holy Week was this year the same in Gregorian and Julian calendars).
I happened to know that Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, the eve of Easter, as I suspect this fact led Dannay to write his 63-64 novels, The Player on the Other Side, in which a godlike killer was born on April 20, 1924, and And on the Eighth Day..., in which an Essenian community worships Mein Kampf.
The Hitler trail might be considered too here, as The Decorator is about Jack the Ripper, committing another sequence of crimes in Moscow, and this irresponsible fool is killed in cold blood by Akunin's hero during Easter night, a few hours after Hitler's birth.
There is a common question: 'What would you do if you met Hitler when he was an innocent boy, knowing what he would do later?' Killing an innocent boy might avoid millions of dead... This is a classic Sci-Fi theme, and Akunin might have stretched it to an extreme, killing a newborn baby.

The clues to this might be quite subtle, and I will rather tell of another Akunin's, Leviathan (1998), in which most important events happen during the 1878 Holy Week, strangely from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, with two missing days as in The Decorator, but not the same ones.
As the adventure is aboard an ocean liner, the dates are given in the Gregorian calendar, and again strangely the Holy Week period was the same in 1878 and 1889, year of The Decorator. The story doesn't give any allusion to these special days.
Anyhow this cannot be a Book of the Week, as there are many days and chapters of suspicions before the main events.
So on April 14 (Palm Sunday) there is a murder on board.
On April 16 it's the turn of the captain, Joshua Cliff. Note the initials of this only master after God, JC, and Joshua is Hebrew name Jesus.
On April 19 (Good Friday) the owner of a treasure secret changes brutally two times:
- The Chief Officer Charles Reynier is killed by French inspector Gustave Gauche;
- Gustave Gauche is killed by a young woman, Marie Sanfon;
- Then Marie is badly hurt, yet she survives and Erast Fandorin predicts this twice criminal will easily fool the jury; he will not leave that opportunity to Jack the Ripper 11 years later.
I notice the synchronistic fornames of the two victims, Charles Gustave, as Carl Gustav, and the surviving lady is young, Jung...

This leads me to a last exploration in Queen's work. As told before Dannay felt in 1963 free to publish the mystical plots he couldn't write with his cousin Lee. He first wrote The Player on the Other Side, and And on the Eighth Day..., with in both of them the Passion concerned, then from 65 to 71 were published four seemingly more traditional crimebooks, with 'crime of passion' as main theme...
Kurt Sercu and Dale Andrews translated a bit of my comments on these 4 books here, but now comes something new about a last plot Dannay had written and did not publish. Lee died on Apr 3, 1971, and Dannay didn't want to break the legend that Lee and himself were the only 'Ellery Queen'.
Yet the full synopsis written by Dannay was published in 1999 (same year as Four Corners and The Decorator). Dannay imagined five acts for this Tragedy of Errors, and each act ends with a new truth, a new culprit for the murder of actress Morna Richmond on Apr 23, 1967.
In ACT FOUR Ellery gives a long and perfect reasonment to conclude that the only possible culprit should be Theodore Curtis, Morna's lawyer.
That was another error, and ACT FIVE shows the real culprit is Dr Rago, Morna's psy.
I recall that the switch of 4/4/44 is between Dr Theodor Haemmerli and famous psy Carl Jung. In a certain way Theodor sacrified his life to save the old psy (68 years) and give him another 17 years to live.
68-17 is a pattern 4-1, and we have too a pattern 4-1 between the 4 published books and the unpublished one, as well as in the five acts, 4 errors and 1 truth.
Still only from a synchronistic point of view of course, it's fascinating to have acts 4 & 5 of this tragedy deciding between a Theodore and a psy. After seeing Joe Curtis and Joshua Cliff in Holden's and Akunin's, one could wonder in front of Theodore Curtis. It has to be thought that Greek Theodoros means 'gift of God', which is too the meaning of Hebrew names Nathan and Nathaniel. In The Player on the Other Side, the murderer identifies himself with a Nathaniel, born on April 20, 1924, Easter Sunday. Dannay's birth name was Daniel Nathan, and that was Theodore Sturgeon, the famous Sci-Fi author, who transformed the complete script written by Dannay into a novel.

B.Akunin made me curious of Easter dates in the Julian calendar, and the Russian Holy Weak 1967 was from April 10 to 17, in Gregorian calendar from April 23 to 30.
So Morna Richmond was killed on Russian Palm Sunday. This might look meaningless, until thinking Russian Easter was on April 30, 22th anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler, in Berlin invaded by the Russian troops.

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