Names, human and divine

Nigel Price14 May 2003, 14:24original

Mantis (yes, I checked, it was he) wrote...

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Me, I just give him the text bits he needs.

And very grateful he is too - especially for today's FCT (see below). On the subject of who-said-what, the very same Mantis also commented...

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Nope, not me (not recently, at least). Somebody else.

Congratulations, or maybe commiserations, Michael. You've made it through to that inner circle of family members, friends and pets whose names I am forever forgetting, mis-spelling or simply interchanging at inappropriate moments. It's bad enough when I call Daughter A by Daughter B's name...or by that of my younger sister...but when I call either of them by the cat's, or worse, the dog's, name, then I really am in trouble. I think I actually meant that Nutria suggested the connection with the Tree of Life, but if it was someone else entirely, please will everyone accept my apologies. (Including Joshua, who got called "Josha" for some reason.)

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Today's fortune cookie tip: In the text at the end it is capital-G God.

Now this really is interesting and does make the closing lines of "The Tree is my Hat" even more ambiguous. If Baden is praying to God, rather than to the god Hanga, is he in fact repenting, having cut off his right hand rather than risk going to hell with two hands? Listening to the audio, I definitely got the impression that he was talking (in despair) to the angered spirit of Hanga, his blood brother, but now I'm not so sure. There's the question, too, of how we come to read Baden's account. If the story is taken from the text of journal, how do we know what he said when he was on the plane unless he wrote it down? If he wrote it down at the time, then the journal at least must have survived the presumed plane crash which comes after the story's end. If he wrote it down later, then Baden himself must have survived the journey and the thunder storm. How likely is it that a journal would be fished out of the Pacific following a crash and still be readable? Is the story's very existence testimony to Baden's late repentance and survival? Hm. Just when I thought that I had understood this story... Nigel

James Jordan14 May 2003, 15:26original

↳ follows, by subject match Nigel Price

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At 09:24 AM 5/14/2003, you wrote: I think I actually meant that Nutria suggested the connection with the Tree of Life, but if it was someone else entirely, please will everyone accept my apologies. (Including Joshua, who got called "Josha" for some reason.)

Yes. Twas me. But Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, where the original man-eating shark dwelt. But I'm hampered in analysis, not having the full text.

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There's the question, too, of how we come to read Baden's account. If the story is taken from the text of journal, how do we know what he said when he was on the plane unless he wrote it down? If he wrote it down at the time, then the journal at least must have survived the presumed plane crash which comes after the story's end. If he wrote it down later, then Baden himself must have survived the journey and the thunder storm. How likely is it that a journal would be fished out of the Pacific following a crash and still be readable? Is the story's very existence testimony to Baden's late repentance and survival?

Well, how likely is it that Wolfe managed to find Severian's memoirs after they travelled the corridors of time? And Latro's journal, for that matter? Somehow, he gets hold of these things. No one knows how. He's not telling. He's obviously got some kind of inside track. Maybe the Outsider gives them to him. Nutria

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