{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2728", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 2728, "subject": "PEACE: The Elm that binds the dead", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2001-07-17T16:27:45+00:00", "last": "2001-07-17T16:27:45+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com" }, "date": "2001-07-17T16:27:45+00:00", "subject": "(urth) PEACE: The Elm that binds the dead", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Roy,\n\nWe did talk about this before, but it may be too time-consuming to review it.\n\nIIRC, I brought up many of the questions you are raising now. Buried on\ngrounds of estate, etc. Right, the dead don't eat, chop wood, get sick,\nand so on . . . OTOH, there are a lot of traditions from around the world\nabout feeding the dead . . . but it also shows some of the dilemma around\nWeer (perhaps he is \"faking\" these things in order to prove to himself that\nhe isn't dead; or to the contrary, perhaps these things conflict with his\nsense of what being \"dead\" is all about, that is, he didn't imagine that\nthe afterlife would be like this). It also lends itself to the\npost-apocalyptic \"last man on Earth\" sense that Weer seems to have (or\nseems to project, to me at least).\n\nRight, using Either/Or logic, Weer either began his afterlife when the tree\nfell, or not.\n\nAnd yeah, that ref to \"last winter\" might just be an overly specific sense\nof \"before now,\" i.e., he is thinking back to his last days of life in the\n20th century and projecting them onto last winter. Filling in the gap\nbetween life and afterlife.\n\nOTOH, and I think I mentioned this before, there is some stuff in PEACE\nabout binding the dead, holding the dead down, like that flat tombstone\nholding the bell witch down (iirc), and the NECRONOMICON, and,\nwhaddayaknow, the practice of planting trees on graves!\n\nSo maybe the elm tree is, in effect, a weird kind of revenge on Weer for\nhaving killed Bobby Black? That is to say: judging by the effects at hand,\nthe tree seems to have pinned him down, halting his afterlife progress\nuntil such time as the tree falls down. And rather than some memory of\nsickness before death, perhaps a later period is what is being referred to\nas the sickness before the tree fell -- maybe he was in an inarticulate\nstate (no pen, no notebook in the coffin) of discomfort (i.e., a lesser\nhell) for all those realtime years. Then the tree falls like the stone\nrolling away from the tomb, and he rises up to take up pen and notebook,\nbeginning the narrative." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "So, Weer had to know, from the first page of the novel, that he was dead.\nLeaving aside the metaphysical questions of how and why he came to be\nwriting his post-mortem memoir, knowing himself to be dead, why keep up the\ncharade of his frametale physical maladies? He _did_ know his consultations\nwith the doctors weren't real--he said as much to Dr. V. A non-existent 4lb.\naxe weighs no more than a non-existent 2lb. axe, and the axes could not\nexist, not unless the museum-roomed house had in fact been built and was\nstill standing, intact, however many years after his death that the elm tree\nhad been standing, and he had been buried on the grounds of his estate,\nunder that elm. That's pretty farfetched." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Yes, but I think this is like arguing that the conclusion of \"2001: A Space\nOdyssey\" is far-fetched because the aliens couldn't possibly ship all that\nwhite furniture from Earth on such short notice. That is to say, it\nmay be that astronaut Bowman is going through the same sort of\nnormalization that Wolfe is saying that Weer is going through.\n\nBowman goes through a psychedelic light show and then bing, he's in this\nwhite bedroom, where he goes through some kind of accelerated life span and\ndies, to be reborn.\n\nPerhaps Weer goes through a long period of discomfort, and then the tree\nfalls and he finds himself at the memory mansion.\n\nWe definitely went over the \"was it ever really built or not\" angle before.\nIt gets tricky, because Weer will say strong things like there was never a\nPersian room, which makes it sound as if the thing was concrete; comments\nabout the contractor; and that the blue plans were on the table back in the\nCommons apartment.\n\nMaybe the answer is it never really went beyond the blue plans stage.\nThus, the thing is a dream drawn out but never actually realized as a\nphysical \"Winchester House\" type of building (but it appears as a healing\nlabyrinth in his afterlife).\n\n\"Solipsism or Not?\" This is something we come back to time and time again\nin dealing with Wolfe's fiction. At the moment it expresses itself as: is\nWeer locked in his little universe by himself, or not?\n\nI still tend to think that Weer really is talking to these other ghosts,\neither by channeling them somehow, or by moving back in time to talk to\ntheir spirits at fixed points along the time/space continuum (those\nexamples of ghost stories in PEACE showing how time travel is natural for\nghosts). Before I've said that he is like one of those pagan underworld\njudges, interviewing people of his realm -- it's like that, what I'm\ntalking about now.\n\n=mantis=\n\n\nSirius Fiction\nHas Moved To\nhttp://www.siriusfiction.com/" } ] } ] }