Subject: (urth) Optical connections

From: j e <lo_phan17 at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 04:20:06 +0000

I haven't posted much, but I've been following the Peace discussion. It's 
been very interesting and I'm going to have to get my copy of Peace back so 
I can join in. I haven't read it in years, but Robert Borski's alchemical 
reading makes me want to again.
One Peace note: in that stream of consciousness part near the beginning 
(about the synthetic deer and the orange tribe) Weer asks "What is a wabe?"
It appears in Jabberwocky and I found a website which gives Carroll's 
definitions as well as Humpty Dumpty's:

Wabe (derived from the verb to swab or soak).
The side of a hill (from its being soaked by the rain.)

http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jabglossary.html

Without the book here that definition doesn't help me at all. Anyone?

Now that I've made a stab at being with the current discussion let me bound 
back to the Wolfe book I can't stop thinking about.

In the book of the short sun, I've noticed one of those nested significances 
Wolfe loves to employ to drive his themes. First, to establish some 
background, the technology of the Whorl is clearly photonic rather than 
electronic. We have several examples, the best of which is Incus' repair of 
Hammerstone in the tunnels where flashes of light are described coming out 
of the broken ends of the fibers. Photonics, based on the transmission of 
packets of light is fitting for a society which features many examples of 
technology that are just beyond our present level. It's also fitting 
thematically...all three collections feature sun in their titles for a 
reason.
When Horn and his men are on Green, trying to find the last part needed to 
repair a lander, the monitor tells them it's a wave guide coupler. A wave 
guide is what it sounds like - a way of directing a wave, the coupler would 
then join together waves of different length or waves from different 
sources. Horn's body was still there when Silkhorn returned to give Sinew 
the ring that allowed Horn to be seen by the Neighbour who allowed his 
spirit to be saved. This is part of the nested significance, the minor to 
the major one described in RttW. Near the end of that book, when Silkhorn is 
at the pole to give Pig his eye, M'to talks about repairing his ship, the 
Whorl, by re-connecting the many strands of what sounds like the Whorl's 
optical backbone. When the book ends, Silk has left New Viron as he said: to 
go "to the stars". The implication is that he will lead M'to and the rest of 
the crew to make the repairs, and I don't think any reader doubts that he 
will succeed.
I call Horn's episode the minor one because it involves a smaller ship, and 
fewer people. It's a goal for few, normal men.  Also, it seems that his 
failure is necessary in order to save the spirit of Silk (who was suicidal - 
he was not fighting with anyone...imho).
It is also interesting that what's happening at the pole is the connection 
of Silk's eye to Pig's optic nerve. All of these things are about attempts 
to allow the passage of light.

I noticed there's another Joe posting so I'll go back to Owl, which is my 
last name.

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From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 17:26:34 +0000

>Without the book here that definition doesn't help me at all. Anyone?

Finally, a question that falls into my area of expertise (such as it is), 
Lewis Carroll!

In the passage from _Peace_ you mention above, Weer is thinking about 
nonexistant races of men. I don't have my book with me and so can't 
remember the details, but from what you say above, it was the 
orange-skinned people who worshiped sundials. The passage continues to the 
effect that, after the threat of legal action allows the "orange tribe" 
into the country club, "they out with strange oaths. What's a wabe?" (I am 
reconstructing the quote from memory.)

The definition of wabe that helps here is not the one you quote above, 
which is the one Carroll gave for the first[1] version of Jabberwocky, but 
the one Humpty Dumpty gives in _Looking-Glass_:

----------------------
The grass plot round a sundial ... because it goes a long way before it, 
and a long way behind it ... and a long way beyond it on each side.
-----------------------

This is word play. The sound of the word "way" is combined with the sound 
of the common first letter of "before," "behind" and "beyond" to produce 
the word "wabe." (My apologies to everyone who already understood this 
perfectly.)

Because these people worship sundials, their oaths sometimes refer to 
sundials or the plots of grass surrounding them, the wabes. (Naturally, as 
sundial worshippers, they are familiar with Carroll's works, just as I 
would expect them to be with Wolfe's.)

[1] The first stanza of Jabberwocky (in slightly different form) was 
written by Lewis Carroll when he was still a boy, in a little private 
periodical he created by hand for the entertainment of his siblings. He 
referred to it as a "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Most interestingly, 
Carroll provides a gloss of the poem, in which he defines some of his 
invented words differently than he would later in  _Looking-Glass_.

The link below will take you to a page with a reproduction of the 
hand-lettered poem.

<http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jaborigin.html>

William Ansley

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From: David DiGiacomo <david at slack.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 00:20:22 +0000

>electronic.

The cards sound electronic to me.

>sources.

A waveguide is just a rectangular metal tube, and it is an electronic, not
photonic, device.  (Although optical fibers also act as waveguides, they
are not usually called that.)

Too bad Horn did not have access to eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1779221783

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From: j e <lo_phan17 at hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 13:31:12 +0000

I recently posed the idea that the Whorl technology was photonic rather than 
electronic.
Actually I probably sounded very certain of it. All I have to go on is 
recent reading on the subject. Scientic American ran a set of articles on 
the subject in the Jan 2001 issue.

>The cards sound electronic to me.

No question about that. What about data transmission in the Whorl...doesn't 
it sound optical? And possession by a god is literally through the eye.

>are not usually called that.)

I understood that waveguides (as the term is commonly used) worked for both 
optical and electronic systems. I'm not sure you're disputing the gist of my 
post, though.

>Too bad Horn did not have access to eBay

But then he'd be fighting his men for access; they'd be trying to hog 
bandwidth looking at porn sites.

Owl

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