{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/917",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 917,
    "subject": "IGJ, Major Spoiler re Silk (2)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-08-09T12:55:30+00:00",
    "last": "2000-08-09T12:55:30+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0011-0071@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-08-09T12:55:30+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) IGJ, Major Spoiler re Silk (2)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "My sense of it is that Silk committed suicide (with knife) by himself next\nto Hyacinth in her coffin."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "To expand this and add to it:\n\n1) I think that Silk really crossed the Rubicon and slashed himself,\noffering his own body as a funeral sacrifice, just as I think Horn's body\ngave out on him against his will to live and struggle on Green.  I don't\nthink Silk just thinking, \"Gosh, I could just die right now, I'm so sad\"\nwould be nearly enough.\n\n2) Because I think Silk killed himself, I think Horn has a very\ndifferent/revised impression of the real man behind the mask that was first\ncreated by the politics of Viron and later embellished/enshrined within his\nwork TBOTLS.  Silk's suicide is definitely non-heroic, even without a\nCatholic angle.  This factor plays in the whole \"Horn/Silk Tangle.\"\n\n3) Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.  My sense of what the\nNeighbors did and how they explained it is this: Silk wanted to die, and\nwas dying (but this was fixable); Horn wanted to live, and was dying; so\nHorn's spirit (and probably his soul, if it is a separate thing within this\ncontext) was put into Silk's body, and Silk's spirit/soul went elsewhere.\n\"Spirit Weak, Flesh Strong\" and \"Spirit Strong, Flesh Weak\" into \"Spirit\nStrong, Flesh Strong\" (and some discards of weak flesh, weak spirit).\n\n4) Seems to me that while Horn knows where Horn is (in Silk's body), and he\nknows that Silk is not there (except as a \"ghostly\" residue, like the seeds\nleft after a god has possessed a Vironese person for a while), he does not\nknow where Silk's non-corporal part is.  Two immediate options are: Silk's\nspirit/soul has gone on to Mainframe/heaven (in which case nobody is ever\ngoing to see him on Blue); Silk's spirit/soul has been installed into\nanother body, perhaps one that doesn't have a such a melancholic tinge (in\nwhich case he might appear on Blue at any moment).  I don't think that Horn\nthinks that Silk is in Horn's old body on Green: if he did, his\ndescriptions of \"Silk\" would sound more like the shorter bald guy we know\nHorn looked like when he set out from Lizard Island: still, it is possible\nthat this is what the Neighbors did, but I tend to think it is not (I think\nthe Horn body is dead and decomposed).\n\nNow, whether \"Passilk\" is a creation from before or after the suicide\nremains to be seen.  If after, well then, that's where Silk went--into\nMainframe (but even then he could download into a human host).\n\n=The Horn/Silk Tangle=\n\nAs we keep pointing out, the majority of the people in TBOSS know Silk only\nthrough reading TBOLS, they do not have firsthand experience.\n\nThe \"Silk\" they know, then, is a step or two removed from real-life.  And\nHorn is in a unique position to know, first-hand, how far off his own\nboyhood hero-worshipping version was.\n\nBut the world of Blue seems to really need a hero exactly like the Silk of\nTBOLS (crop failures, slavery, wars of expansion are just a few of the\nproblems marring the \"paradise\" of a new world).  And as an architect of\nthat hero, Horn seems to have volunteered/been drafted to become the hero.\n\nParadoxically, this means that Horn must become more like \"Silk\" and less\nlike Silk; he must become the fiction, not the warts-and-all fact.  So\nthings are being burned away: bits of Silk, bits of Horn.\n\n\nOn to the editing of Horn's first book (OBW), but not his second book\n(IGJ): yes, this =is= something very interesting.  OBW has five frames\n(Blue, Green, Whorl, present, and future), but IGJ has only two (Green and\npresent); we have no indication that Horn returned home, nor even his book\nIGJ being read by his family.  Things are very uncertain, suddenly.\n\nWith regard to the next volume, I have a suspicion that there will be even\n=less= about the whorl, directly and indirectly, then there is about Green\nin IGJ: rather like how Sainte Anne is in 5HC (you =think= you've been\nthere, but you've really just read a forgery and a traveller's diary about\nthe place).\n\n=mantis=\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}