Subject: (urth) Sad Experience Teaches Me

From: Che Monro <flirt at technologist.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 02:17:49 +0000

Perhaps those who see more clearly can help me with a little detail that I 
have worried loose and wish to see where it leads, if anywhere?

In Return to the Whorl Silk seems to have a song on his mind a lot it goes 
in part (like this):

These young girls live to deceive you,
Sad experience teaches me.

I wish I knew what the tune was like so that I could try filking this song. 
I bet that Gene Wolfe had a tune in mind.

Mostly, however, I wonder what deception the girl in the song was 
practicing. Could it be that the girl was really a boy dressing up and 
deceiving the singer? It's a strange gender reversal in any case. Normally 
in folk songs it is the man who is the deceiver of the young girls as in:

Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How can you use a poor maid so?

So could this then be loosely related to the theme of Hyacinth as being a 
"deceiver", if you please?

My mind takes a leap like a dolphin, and more than likely, lands with a big 
splash. Could the deception Silk is musing over be the deception of the 
inhumi, particularly his daughter? Wasn't that character so sweet and 
tragic? And deceptive? The timing doesn't exactly fit, though.

Please, if not a gender deception, what then is the deception that young 
girls practice on their wandering seducers and peeping toms?

Che

Ché Franz Joseph Monro -- http://www.chemonro.com
che at chemonro.com    --     flirt at technologist.com

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