Ceiling Wax???

[RonJonSurfer]

In the lyrical pursuit game on of the questions id about the Stones "19th Nervous Breakdown". The lyric is "Your Father is still perfecting ways of.......the answer says "Of making ceiling wax". I'm sure it is supposed to be "Sealing Wax". The point being Father was wasting his time perfecting something that was already perfected and going out of style. I checked on Lyrics on Demand and they say ceiling wax too. I know that's wrong, i just can't prove. They talk about sealing wax in "Puff the Magic Dragon" too. Can somebody help me prove this unimportant yet troublesome point?

[Aunt_Acid]

Ceiling wax is a type of sealant that they used to use before insulation was popular. They called it that because you put it on the cracks in your ceiling to keep the cold air and rain out.

[Uncle Joe]

1. There is no such thing as "ceiling" wax. Someone (maybe many folks) substituted this for the correct term, which is:

2. Sealing wax. Generally used to seal envelopes closed in the old days. Many English noblemen had their own seal (crest) which they used as a stamp for the wax. This very same sealing wax was probably used to seal Chris's cracked ceilings .

[Aunt_Acid]

I hate you.

[Uncle Joe]

You're just saying that because you love me.

[RonJonSurfer]

I feel vindicated...I guess.

[windy1]

unc is right and you are too ron. He was perfecting something that had gone. wasting time on meaningless nothing.

[edna]

I love this place! I love these people!

[Uncle Joe]

That feeling is mutual, Ms. Lipschutz.

[RonJonSurfer]

I checked the record books and this is now the longest conversation ever on sealing wax, er concealing whacks, um, right, ceiling wax. :sleepy:

[The Answer]

 

On 1/5/2005 at 1:26 PM, RonJonSurfer said:

In the lyrical pursuit game on of the questions id about the Stones "19th Nervous Breakdown". The lyric is "Your Father is still perfecting ways of.......the answer says "Of making ceiling wax"...I checked on Lyrics on Demand and they say ceiling wax too. I know that's wrong, i just can't prove.

So sorry, my sir, there is absolutely no doubt that the correct answer is ceiling wax.

This is because this poem, like everything in Wonderland, is a cipher. 

The song describes a "simulacrum," like in Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus. This is the Platonic, geometric symbol underlying rhetoric. One maps imagery over this symbol. To describe this symbol, Cicero once said, "The Epicurians thought the most beautiful image was that of a pyramid, a cylinder, and a cone. The Stoics thought, why not a circle, because it contains all that and more besides."

An common example of mapping symbols on these points is Heaven (the summit of the pyramid), Hell (the cone), and the Earth (that which connects). This symbol of the providential eye and unfinished capstone is on the back of the dollar, and was popular with Masons around the founding to represent the three mixed branches of government held in balance. Deleuze came up with things like the monkeys, vampires and the sun. 


In this song, we know we're in for some nonsense. The first simulacrum is the sun, the line of the sea, and the ocean. This is the most basic simulacrum called a "proem" or creation myth, and we see it at the start of Genesis. However, in this case, night is day, and the whole symbol is turned upside down. 

Then the next set is the sea, the sand, and the sky, which has no clouds and no birds. 

Then come the Walrus and the Carpenter, which in the movie Dogma by Kevin Smith, Loki interprets as Jesus and Buddah. The Walrus then says a full simulacrum
Kings represent the pyramid, just as they do in a republic, and cabbages represent the inverted summit, because cabbages are of the earth and the common folk. 
He says the sea is hot like the sun, which is inverted, an that pigs have wings, when we know they are animals that root in the dirt. 
Therefore, shoes touch the earth, ships sail on the sea, and ceiling wax goes in the ceiling. 

Sealing wax would make "no sense" in this poem because it goes on a letter, and has no symbolic value here at all.