The Tin Man

Robert Borski · 02 Jun 1998, 08:45 · from urth-v0012.mbox · original

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: "Robert Borski" <rborski at coredcs.com>
Subject: (urth) The Tin Man
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 08:45:34
Message-ID: <urth-v0012-0054 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0012/0054.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

For those of you into etymology (and many Wolfeans are), 'mantis' means
'prophet.' And since there is an ancient art known as haruspicy practiced
by fortune-tellers and sages, I issued this challenge to our own mantis.

"Do an organ reading for me, brother prophet (this being what haruspicy is,
as I'm sure we all remember from LONG SUN), tell me from the blackness of
the bile and the glisten of the liver and the bloodcharge on the heart what
the following divines:

Among the things the adult Number Five finds above the door lintel, besides
David's dessicated trumpet-vine flutes, "there is a 'broken' puzzle made of
the bronzed viscera of some small animal." Besides the grisly nature of
this (I mean what the HELL kind of plaything is this? Guts-for-tots, a
learning toy for junior vet wannabes?), what relevance does it play in
FIFTH HEAD?"

Unfortunately, mantis ran out of doves to sacrifice and is already out on
bail for rustling free-range chickens, so he's turned the matter back to
me.

So then...I see... entrails. Bronzed entrails. Metal-coated organs.

They're Mr. Million's.

We know this because he put them above the lintel himself, with the
confiscated flutes.

What do they represent?

Symbolically, several things.

The Wolfe clan's lost connection to the organic, the surrendering of their
souls. I.e., they've become so obsessed with their quest (read the
cloning-as-immortality-trope for not just its hubristic elements, but its
Faustian) and used such dire means to achieve their ends, they've forfeited
their humanity. And so like some families did in the old days, to help
preserve and remind them of where they've been, but can't return--the
"things lost" motif--they've bronzed their much more organic equivalent of
baby booties.

And why does Mr. Million put the bronzed viscera above the door?

Because he's the Tin Man from Oz. But unlike Baum's robotic woodsman, whose
goal in life is to secure for himself a heart, Mr. Million--easily the most
humane character in all of 5H--already has one, and so he can afford to let
his broken backup model collect dust above the lintel for all the rest of
time.=20

Robert Borski (who still has Oz-induced nightmares about tornadoes)

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

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