Subject: (urth) Mellow yellow pharmicon (remember?!)

From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 19:46:50 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Dan,

I lived in Bangkok for a time, and saw Buddhist monks in their saffron
yellow robes daily.  In daily life, at least among English-speakers (and
TBOTNS is written in English), the terms were used interchangeably.
Certainly no one referred to the robes as orange, and as they became well
worn (monks are poor) they faded. It is far more likely that the robes refer
back to Buddhism than to the odd American Hare Krishna cult.

Rostrum,

>I wonder if there could be some difference attributable to Severian's
>memory.

Well, of course, but by itself that just doesn't seem quite enough for her
powerful presence.

Tony,

>Yes. Jonas is a sailor, so it would be natural for him to regard a ship,
>or perhaps all space, as his home.

That's not quite what I meant, as I was speculating about his home world,
but of course you are right, and I think he does exactly that.

>I've always assumed that Jonas simply escapes to a -place- where he
>can be repaired, rather than a time. (A place in our universe, that is,
>rather than some other.) One of the worlds of the Hierodules, perhaps,
>or some other planet that still has a viable technology.

That must be right. I know who could fix him up! Well, maybe Ossipago could,
but I was thinking of--oh, what is his name?--the talus-maker on the Whorl.
You know for sure *he's* going to turn up again--Silk's gonna need them Tall
Asses.

>>Robert and Marie, too, could
>>have come from that place.
>
>I think if they come from anywhere it's the past rather than a
>parallel Earth, since it's implied pretty strongly that the
>Botanical Gardens extend into Urth's past. But don't forget
>that they may simply be "chant-caught" contempories of
>Severian. I've always loved that scene for its tantalising ambiguity.

Me too. And for the old-movie quality. Yes, I agree with you. I was just
scratching my head about Jonas, who certainly comes from the past, but not
that far into the past.

Chris,

>The autarch mentions he has a pharmacon *similar* to the alzabo, but not
the
>same. No doubt it was much more effective to bring hundreds of
personalities
>into another person.

Yes, but Thecla's presence is very powerful long before Sev takes the
pharmacon. For me, it's just a little something that I wish Wolfe had
bothered to clear up. Oh, well, let's just call it the Claw's influence.

-alga-

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: C R Culver <crculver at aol.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 02:32:36 +0000

>It is far more likely that the robes refer back to Buddhism than to the odd
American Hare Krishna cult.<

Probably they go back to Buddhism. According to Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha
made his robes from the cloth strewn around the Ganges, funeral wrappings,
menstural napkins, and all that stuff. They were mostly saffron, I imagine.
Apply whatever symbolism you want from that to the BotNS, if you'd like.
Interestingly enough, Mahayana is the vehicle of Buddhism in which the robes
of the modern-day followers are *not* saffron, in my experience. Pure Land and
Zen robes are black.

>Jonas, who certainly comes from the past, but not that far into the past.<

Careful there. Jonas knew of Korea and the Korean language (he could tell
KLS's nationality from his name), so he comes from a time not too remote from
modern Korea because a significant amount of linguistic drift has not
occurred.

>That must be right. I know who could fix him up! Well, maybe Ossipago could<

Ossipago and Sidero worry me. I wonder if they are relics from a past science,
kept in repair but no longer made (like the fliers), or if they are still
produced. Do the Hierodules still have the ability to heal Jonas?

Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com>
http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 11:29:34 +0000

> bothered to clear up. Oh, well, let's just call it the Claw's influence.

It depends on how the drug works.  And what it's like to have a memory
like Severian's.   And whether you can draw a sharp line between memory
and self.

If Severian's memory is more analogous to a perfect hard-drive, then I
agree that simply having Thecla's "files" on his hard drive would not be
sufficient to account for the way Severian seems to almost become
part-Thecla.

But imagine instead that it's more like what Larry Niven describes in
_World of Ptavvs_, where when a telepath reads a person's mind, the two
personalities struggle within the brain to deterine which is the "host"
and which is the "visitor," and if the visitor's personality is strong
enough, the brain may end up convinced that the visitor is actually it's
real, host, personality, even after the telepathic link is broken.  A poor
and totally unjust description of Niven, but it's the best I can do.  Read
the book instead, it's one of Niven's better ones, IMHO.

Anyway, imagine that having a perfect memory is not just having
information at hand, but having a greater degree of continuity with your
past self--since you can remember exactly how you felt when you were six,
and not just project back, you might even be able to get a sense of how
your six-year-old self would have thought/felt about current events.  

For Vodalus, et.  al., with their weaker version of the alzebo drug, they
spend a few minutes where their memories and personality become intermixed
with Thecla, but then the experience becomes a memory, subject to
degredation, only imperfectly recalled. 

For Severian, however, remembering the experience perfectly may be
indistinguishable from having the experience.  He doesn't just have
Thecla's files, he's got her "operating system," and he doesn't just have
it on a hard drive, accessible when he chooses, but always loaded in RAM. 

The autarch alzebo drug is stronger, so the autarchs never quite forget,
(or never quite stop having--is there a difference?) the experience of
communion with earlier autarchs.  

-Rostrum