Meschia and Meschiane

I thought I'd just throw this out here at you guys. I believe I owe this information to Mantis, so thanks! We all agree that the play Eschatology and Genesis closely echoes what really goes on, with the first man and first woman getting dropped off to recolonize the planet or whatever, and the threat of flood and all that good stuff. The names Meschiane and Meschia are persian ... they spring to new life out of a golden tree instantaneously after that demon wench Jahi fools Mainyu into poisoning Gaya. Once again we have life simlutaneously springing into being from foliage after the poisoned Urth is reborn. (Opposing the story of Hyacinth from mythology, the closing quote of the book: flower springs from dead man). People seem to be primarily arguing about the indentity of Blue as Urth - and I use the trees to justify it. Is it the trees that are one step too far for most people, or do most people agree that the trees can eat people and spit out copies sans Blue=Urth? Is it the actual hybridization between plant and human that is too hard to accept, or is it the idea of sentient trees? Whatever else I may have done, I have made a huge case for the carnivorous sentience of these trees, and I have tied them to the vanished people regardless of whether eating humans creates new neighbors. Does anyone want to argue that vital first step? Trees = or approximate primitive neighbors; vines = or approximate primitive inhumu. Blattid said I should drop Blue=Urth. I'm not, but let's pretend for a second that I did. Where does my argument then go too far? As far as I can see, it's all tied together inextricably - just say Horn is in Babbie? My only mechanistic proof (I mean, how it was done) for that transfer is the presence of the huge tree at the end of On blue's Waters where Horn/Silk has a vision of being Babbie. This of course explains a lot about the narrative changes and Babbie's later behavior, as well as the changes in the narrator at this point. I just don't see how I could back off from one position and keep anything at all of my theory. All the way back to "Seawrack is a spy"? (Nicely confirmed by GW, I might add.) Marc Aramini

At 06:12 2002-03-28, Marc wrote: ...

The ideas about trees are extremely interesting, even without believing that Blue is Urth. And the reason it seems unlikely that Blue is Urth is that you can see the one from the other, or at least see the Old Sun from Blue. SBear.

Modulo some meaning of the word "closely," I think we can all agree with this proposition, yes.

That's where my credulity falls down and goes boom. I simply fail to see any connection from the trees to the "return to Urth" scenario. It is, as Cornelius Ryan might put it, a hypothesis too far.

That some trees on Green are carnivorous seems beyond argument. That some trees on Blue are carnivorous seems at least plausible. Spitting out copies, I'm not so sure about, nor could I, if you held a gun to my head, believe any argument given thus far that the trees spawn the Neighbors.

Neither of these bothers me particularly. (BTW, there's an interesting quote in the Green Man passage of "Claw" that might be relevant here. I don't have my copy to hand, but it's something to the effect that "even if trees were to follow the one path in a million that leads to sentience, they would not have the form or mind of men.")

The only part of this I question is the sentience of the trees. Carnivorous, certainly; related to the Neighbors, absolutely.

Again, I question this. I don't say "drop it" the way I do the "Blue = Urth" hypothesis, because I think it has merit and is worth pursuing. I simply don't think it's sufficiently established yet. But there aren't the kind of strong arguments against it that there are for the "Blue = Urth" hypothesis, so its explanatory power is a prima facie argument for its plausibility, if not its probability. Can I say this too many times? My point about the "Blue = Urth" hypothesis is that, in the presence of so much evidence against, you need a textual smoking gun to make the hypothesis even plausible. That doesn't apply to the whole "trees = neighbors, vines = inhumi" business, where the only real counterargument is Fava's story -- do I have her name right? -- about being a young inhuma swimming around in a Greenish river. What she describes doesn't sound like a vine.

That isn't proof; but it is a mechanism. (I'm also agnostic about your "Horn is in Babbie" theory.) I'm not clear on what this hypothesis seeks to explain or why it's necessary. It certainly seems to me that the Narr still "contains" Horn right up to the end (indeed, I'm not at all convinced by the arguments some make that the Narr is "only" Silk after his confession-crisis). No, wait: I do recognize one thing it could explain: Marble's prophecy. It does not, however, explain the Narrator's comment on the prophecy, particularly since that comment is made before the vision of self-as-Babbie; I believe that comment implies that Marble's prophecy has come true in the Narrator's mind by that point.

What changes, specifically, are you referring to? How does the Narrator and the narrative in the second book differ from that Narrator in the first, and how is this explained by Horn being transferred to Babbie? Similarly, what changes in Babbies behavior does it explain and how? (And why would the tree do this? - you have a mechanism, but it is a totally unmotivated mechanism as far as I can see.)

How does any of it require Blue to be Urth? I simply do not get this.

I missed that detail. Do you have a reference?

By "related to the Neighbors" are you refering to the Narrator's ability to walk between them, or that they are both lifeforms of the same planet/ecosystem, or something else? -Rostrum

And Rostrum queries:

Not right now -- I will be rereading the Short Sun in a couple of months & (if I remember!) will post this.

Nothing so specific -- only that there seems to be some kind of association between the two. The Neighbors always seem to be seen in tree-y areas. --Dan'l

--- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com> wrote: ...

I believe the narrator says quite explicitly, shortly after recounting the prophecy, that he (as Horn) was riding a beast with three horns when he was died. As Marc says, a Wolfean prophecy can have two meanings, though. Do we know that the unaltered Babbie has two horns, by the way? ... Jerry Friedman

Like Rostrum, I haven't noticed anything about the trees' eating people, although I do remember a strong hint of their sentience (when Horn sees through the dying Krait's eyes). As for spitting out copies--xylography?--I don't remember any hint of that.

I can see two possible explanations for this. One, which I saw suggested by Jeff Wilson, is that the Whorl got back to Ushas by going through a space warp, which is still warping the path of the light from the Red Sun and sending it on a round trip. The space warp would have been placed in the Whorl's path by the Hierodules or somebody, presumably to repopulate Ushas after the People Vanished. The difficulty is that you have to assume something with no evidence in order to save a theory that's already short of evidence. The other is that Silkhorn is not being overly scrupulous with the truth, as part of his campaign to tempt Juganu into helping him and Oreb and Hoof travel astrally back to Urth. After all, how does Silkhorn know which star it is? The difficulty is that most of his dishonesty is suppressio veri and suggestio falsi; what he says about the red star would be pretty close to a direct lie.

On 28/03/2002 16:47:47 Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote: and before him Marc wrote

Xenocide. Matthew