The first time I wrote about this dragon I described it like this: the snarling little face on the tail, the missing hind legs, the human eye set among the plumage. I want to come back to it, because since then the cipher has told us something the picture alone cannot. The book's first sentence does not merely show a dragon: it names it.

Deciphered, that sentence reads: La Magie Sainte, révélée à Moyse, retrouvée dans un monument Egyptien & précieusement conservée en Asie sous la devise d'un dragon ailé — “Holy Magic, revealed to Moses, found in an Egyptian monument, and carefully preserved in Asia under the device of a winged dragon.” The word is devise: a device, an emblem, a badge. The creature on the front is the book's own coat of arms.

Where would a French author of the period get the idea of an Asian magic kept “under the device of a winged dragon”? He would get it in print. In 1735 the Jesuit Du Halde, in the standard French account of China, calls the imperial Chinese dragon la devise de la Chine (“the device of China”) and explains that only the emperor may draw it with five claws; everyone below him is held to four, on pain of punishment. Two years later a French flag-book, La Connoissance des pavillons (1737), pictures the emperor's own banner and blazons the beast on it:

Il est jaune, chargé d'un Dragon de sable, à la queuë de Basilic de même, à cinq Griffes à chaque patte, & la tête tournée en dehors — “It is yellow, charged with a dragon sable, with a basilisk's tail, five claws on each foot, and its head turned outward.”

Now read that caption with our dragon in front of you. It carries five claws on each foot (in the finer of the two copies), its head is turned outward, and the whole thing is offered, in the book's own word, as a devise. The banner even gives its dragon “a basilisk's tail,” and ours ends in that strange second little face. The vocabulary of the emperor's dragon is sitting on the title page of a French grimoire.

And then you look at the flag itself... and the comparison spell breaks. The engraved dragon on the banner is a plain four-legged creature with a single curled tail. It looks little like ours, which has no hind legs at all, bat wings, and a body built to a European heraldic pattern. So the book did not copy the picture. But it copied the words. Its author drew an ordinary European wyvern and dressed it in the Chinese emperor's blazon: the five claws, the turned head, the devise of Asia, lifted off the page and painted onto a creature that was never Chinese to begin with.

That leaves one unexplained feature. Among the coloured feathers sits a human eye, modelled like a portrait miniature. Another animal on the same leaf was given an ordinary round eye, so this was no accident. French heraldry even has a name for the type, a dragon à face humaine (“a dragon with a human face”). The badge is borrowed. The eye looking out of it is the painter's own.

On Thursday a vinyl copy of All Night Session! Vol. 1 by the Hampton Hawes Quartet arrived in the post. I’d happened to find copies of Vol. 3 and Vol. 2 about fifty yards and six months apart at different shops in Chepstow. A few years have elapsed since then, without any sighting of Vol. 1 in the wild, so I resorted to ordering a copy from a Discogs seller to complete my set. The All Night Session itself took place in Los Angeles on November 12th-13th 1956. It was an unconventional recording date for its time: a nocturnal affair with no second takes and with all tracks ultimately appearing on the records in the order in which they were recorded. Nearly two hours of music were captured and pressed on to three LPs, which were first issued in 1958.

Pianist Hampton Hawes led the proceedings, accompanied by Jim Hall on guitar, Red Mitchell on bass and Bruz Freeman on drums. It was clearly a relaxed and freewheeling affair, with all concerned sounding like they had a great time. Hawes was quoted in 1958 as saying:

It’s hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging... I’ve reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah — like people do in church when they’re converted to God. That’s the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session!

The material is a mix of be-bop numbers, ballads, and extended blues-based improvisations summoned out of thin air that night. ‘Hampton’s Pulpit’, for instance, which closes Vol. 1, is one of the best of the album's spontaneous compositions.

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I had no plan to buy any more wax seal stamps, but then I saw (on ebay) a Victorian stamp with a monogram comprising my initials, which seemed too good an opportunity to let pass. Over the weekend I used it in earnest for the first time (Fig. 36). The letters in the monogram are stylized with elaborated serifs in a way I’d seen before in Victorian lettering. The ebay seller suggested that the stamp may date as far back as the 1860s, and associated its style with the Gothic Revival. Unconvinced as to its Gothic-ness, I did a bit of on-line searching & learned that Tuscan was the usual descriptor for typefaces with ornamental bifurcated (or trifurcated) serifs. I think an 1860s origin is still a possibility, but it could equally well be later. See for example a page (Fig. 37) of decidedly florid Tuscan monogram designs from an 1890s sample book in my possession.

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On Wednesday I finished reading Makenna Goodman’s novel Helen of Nowhere. I could say it’s my favourite of the current batch of Booker Prize longlist nominees, but that would only mean I liked it better than M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything: I’ve not read any of the others. It’s a striking and unusual tale, somewhat in the shape of a play, with a list of personae up-front and then six ‘scenes’ largely comprising dialogue and/or internal monologue. I had to work to stay interested in the university office politics which set up the scenario of a disgraced academic seeking an off-grid life in the country. The stranger turn taken in the book’s second half intrigued me rather more. It didn’t quite score as a direct hit, but I enjoyed it overall: a favourable impression consolidated by an ending that struck me as both satisfying & amusing.

Most of my days are spent thinking about, investigating, researching, and journaling the various aspects of my ongoing atopic (anomalous) experiences and the underlying circumstances. I once thought the experiences themselves were the hardest part. They're not — though that's not to say they're getting any easier either.

No, not hardly.

And I’m now finding the silence that follows a vision or encounter to often be more difficult than the experience itself.

How do you tell the people around you about something you can barely find words for, let alone fully explain, when it keeps happening?

I really don’t know.

For nearly nine months now, I’ve been struggling with that very question. I’m not seeking attention, but I do need a way to release the pressure that builds from being unable to speak about my experiences.

How do you say, “I’ve seen some very strange things,” without slipping into rationalizing, defending, and defining something that you haven’t found the definitions to describe accurately?

How do you say, “Oh, I’m just an average guy with an average life, until I randomly and uncontrollably slip into a liminality that defies conventional wisdom and explanation.” That’s one hell of an icebreaker line for a networking party, but I won’t be using it anytime soon.

Even among people who better understand it or have had similar experiences, I find it hard to fully share. And that’s because, even among the experienced, there can be predispositions and misunderstandings. Everyone expects my experiences to align with their own. Some want my encounters to fit their own cosmologies. Others want my encounters to match their own. Even my own enthusiasm often works against me; I get ahead of myself and impose too much on those kind enough to listen and share in kind.

There’s no guidebook or roadmap for this juggling of realities, which is really a single reality, but I’ll deal with that another day. Today I’m just trying to remain functional at work while turning the deeper questions over and over in my mind: What is her true nature? What will it mean? What will be the implications? That last question gives me chills and fills me with trepidation.

But I don’t know what I don’t know.

I’m just writing my own guidebook as I go.

Not ideal—though it could be far, far worse.

#Intermundia

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Fellow exiles are welcome.

Lately, I haven’t posted on schedule. Due to walking up earlier in the mornings to drop my son off to school, spending time with the younger one, and working on my recent projects I won’t post as often as I once did. I apologize for not keeping in touch with you. And I’ll try to post whenever I can.

#writing #break #schedule

Outside, the whole day, rain has been falling from a monochromatic gray smudge which is both a fog rising from the ground and the clouds overhead.

And there are brown dirt roads with puddled pot holes. Brown slugs are crawling up on the furniture, litter bins and whatever is left lying on the ground

And I only did sleep for three hours, my mind thoughts spinning out of control throughout the night

But then, a big rainbow and a big yellow sun

Green almost yellow illuminated grass

And my friend came visiting with his girlfriend and a small baby child they’d made.

And he was tall just like me with gray streaked beard just like me, long hair in a ponytail and round glasses, just like me

But he’d made these big earrings, you know, and he’s got some tattoos too, and today he was wearing a Slayer t shirt. It’s never been my taste, slayer.

So objectively he was a little bit cooler with this wild style, some would say

And then, as it turns out, we were both running Manjaro Linux

And then they left

There are some people you’ve not talked much for years but it’s still the same when you meet, you know? He’s like that

I think

Thank you for your time

JOURNAL 1er septembre 2026

Je fais une pause. On a eu hier plusieurs inscriptions nouvelles au kendo d'élèves anciens de to sensei qui le suivent, c'est bien ça. Pas mal de nouvelles inscriptions aussi pour notre côté, il faut que je restructure tous les groupes et notamment les débutants. C’est très chouette quand même.

Et puis aujourd'hui j'ai eu la surprise de voir arriver mon Américain, cette fois s'exprimant dans un japonais très correct malgré son foutu accent de Boston. Il a commencé à me remercier de l'avoir forcé à travailler la langue, il est comme ça en règle avec les nouvelles exigences des cinglés de takaichi. Il a bien assimilé les formules de politesse à employer avec un sensei. 😆 Bref il me demande si je suis toujours ok pour le prendre comme élève. Je tiens toujours mes promesses, je l'ai donc inscrit dans un groupe débutant. Pour les cours particuliers on verra après, je peux pas le prendre à son niveau. Voilà donc inscrit Mr Elijah qui se fait appeler Tom en japonais, c’est vrai c’est plus simple 😅. On verra

#dojo