{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3649",
    "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": 3649,
    "subject": "passion play and the weight of evidence",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-12-04T14:35:15+00:00",
    "last": "2002-12-04T14:35:15+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0212-2358@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "maa32",
        "address": "maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu"
      },
      "date": "2002-12-04T14:35:15+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) passion play and the weight of evidence",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "My best explanation for the cleansing of the sewers is that it is a passion \nplay that re-enacts the story of the conciliator, just as eschatology and \ngenesis was a passion play that foretold how the events of Urth of the New Sun \nwould run, passed on from Canog's book.  It is distorted, but valid \nthematically, and it serves as a message from the vanished people to Horn \nabout how the planet reached its current condition - a necessary flood.\n\nAlso, if a ship has the ability to reach back in time, like the ship Severian \ntakes by moving through space in UOTNS, then can't Silk in his astral travel \ngo through the same \"white hole\" or whatever to go back in time in his \ntravels?  There you go: he travels far enough away to pass through that \ndying/gestating black/white hole, and the red light he seeks is through that \nbarrier.  Since he travels with light, of course he is drawn to the spiritual \nbirth of the New Sun.\n\nHere are some more parallels that we should consider:\n\nIn the second chapter of OBW, they talk of the silver mines that have been \nfound, probably where the special ring of Silkhorn was found or forged.  Could \nthis be the mine of Saltus where that ancient \"thing\" was sleeping that \nSeverian woke up?  Could the ring that allows resonance with the vanished \npeople be a product of that ancient (perhaps vegetative or scientifically \nexperimental but forgotten by Urth) awareness (remember that Hide can see the \nVanished person on a tree floating where none previously was to be seen at the \nend of RTTW when he peers through the ring)?\n\nThe underwater wall that surrounds the huge city Seawrack speaks of: evidence \nof a flood.\n\nThe abilty of Green to affect the tide at its closest.\n\nThe statement by Krait that the most obvious truths are the ones that are \nparadoxical or impossible: how can Urth be Blue if the narrator is in both \nplaces? A pretty big paradox, eh?\n\nThis great statement, which I leave to all of you:\n\nFrom chapter 2 of OBW:\nThey see the whorl, but with the eyes of potatoes.\n\nNo offense, of course.\n\nTrees on the moon.  A flood.  Meetings with a man known to cross through time \nfreely, a man who in one of his travels met Typhon.\n\nThe importance of plant hybridization to the text.\n\nI'm done.  I'm satisfied. Let me just say this: Wolfe won't tell me whether my \nideas are wrong about Urth being Blue, but he just avoids the question and is \notherwise very, very friendly to me.  I think he is proud of hiding Urth as \nBlue: remember what remora said at the beginning of OBW: everything was \nrevealed in the long sun whorl, but that in the short sun everything is hidden \nand obscured.  I argue that the biggest vanishing act is that done to Urth: \nwhile it is still a big huge blue planet with a green satellite (that most \nthought would be Urth at first, but where then disappointed when it was \nrevealed that it was contiguous with the beginning of the New Sun text), Wolfe \nhas managed to hide it from us.  At least some of us.\n\nMarc Aramini"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}