Astral travel in time

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 06 Apr 2006, 20:01 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 13:01:15 -0700
Subject: (urth) Astral travel in time
In-Reply-To: <001401c659ae$dd6b0dc0$6f3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <001401c659ae$dd6b0dc0$6f3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <1f7617370604061301v73efd310m74cdabf4f8a46340 at mail.gmail.com>

> To accord Silkhorn the ability to change the
> past, as Andrew has already suggested, opens up a Pandora's box that,
> once opened, not only can't be closed again, but potentially lets out more
> possibilities than the box could ever have held to begin with. Where does
> Silkhorn's power to change the past come from, and where does it stop?

Okay, to begin with, it probably isn't "his" power, but that of the
Outsider, Whom he serves. I doubt he even knows he does it.(The
Narrator is brain-numbingly good at not knowing stuff about himself:
not so much an unreliable narrator as an unreliable observer.)

> Why shouldn't he go back in the past to change any number of
> outcomes he didn't like, things that were a lot more important to him
> and the other humans who came to the Blue-Green system than the
> particular inhuma sitting at the table?

I have no doubt that he would if he (knew he) could. However, this
is not the Outsider's focus. The Outsider (Who is the Christian God)
is interested in individuals, souls, not mass movements.

> I can't explain the appearance of the Silk-like and Oreb-like figures in the
> old woman's story, but if Silkhorn traveled back in time to spook somebody,
> he not only did it off-stage, he exercised his power, in my opinion, rather
> trivially and arbitrarily.

If he did it of his own volition - yes. If the Outsider/Increate/God did,
however, then it has some extremely important meaning in the lives
of the participants -- to which the Narrator is probably not privy.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net