Subject: (urth) Selves and Souls under Suns: a Sermon or Summary of Sorts

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 19:53:21 +0000

A reading from EXODUS:

	After a monent of silence, [Mint] added, "You've lost your 
	faith, or most of it, I think. What's happened to us?"
	     Potto laughed loudly.
	     Quetzal, seated between Oosik and Loris at the other 
	end of the table, murmured, "Circumstances have changed, 
	Maytera. That's all, or nearly all. There is an essential 
	core at the center of each man and woman that remains 
	unaltered no matter how life's externals may be transformed 
	or recombined. But it's smaller than we think."
	     Silk nodded his agreement.
	     "If I - ah - permitted." Remora pushed back the errant 
	lock of lank, black hair. "The General and I were companions 
	in, um, adversity. The - ah - spirit. The inalterable core, 
	as His Cognizance has, um, finely. The spirit that survives 
	even death. It grows when trod upon, like the dandelion. I 
	have learned it, eh? So may you, if you -um - reflect."

I think this is the key passage for one of the things LS, and indeed 
the whole Lupiverse cycle, is about: the nature of the self and the 
soul. Quetzal makes the key point, and receives support from both 
Silk and Remora: that the "essential core," i.e., the "soul," is 
"smaller than we think" ... meaning, I suggest, that much of what 
we think of as our "self" or "identity" is not a part of the "soul."

The Lupiversal approach to identity and to souls seems to me very
much motivated by a desire to make clear just what the soul is _not_. 
I mean that, in a universe where a whack on the head can radically 
alter personality, where is there a place for the immortal and 
immaterial soul? Similarly, in a world where certain neurological 
disorders can cause a person to be incapable of the freedom to make 
certain types of moral choice*, is that person damned for his or her 
immorality? Is the "soul" something separate from the body, or just
an epiphenomenon of a certain level of behavioral organization (and,
if the latter, how is a "resurrection" possible)? And does it have 
anything to do with what we normally consider our self or identity?

-----
* Start with simple intellectual incapacity, move up to Tourette's
  and certain rare epilepsies, and go on from there...
-----

Beginning with _The Book of the New Sun_, we have been presented
with a series of physical phenomena that radically question our
usual concept of personal identity: the Revolutionary; the alzabo
and its related analeptic; the serially resurrected Severian; his
very different "mergers" with Thecla and the line of the Autarchs; 
the aquastors; robots and chems, taluses and Talos; the gods of 
Mainframe; their ability to possess and "enlighten"; Mucor; the 
inhumi; the uncountable Neighbors; and the very mysterious nature 
of the Narrator of tBotSS. 

I don't know that we can draw any really solid conclusions from 
this -- indeed, I'm not at all sure that Mr Wolfe has a clear
theory to offer -- but I think it's clear that this _question_ 
is one of the fundamental things that he has been grappling with
through much of his career, not only here but in, at a bare 
minimum, 5HC and the "Soldier" books. 

All of which is kind of "why I _DO_ like Short Sun."

--