Sev's common lineage

Dave Tallman · 02 Jul 2008, 08:06 · from 2008-July.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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:06:54 -0600
Subject: (urth) Sev's common lineage
In-Reply-To: <001001c8dbec$be04a780$6dce4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <001001c8dbec$be04a780$6dce4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <486B371E.80008 at gmail.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> The simplest explanation is the one given in both the Play and URTH. In the
> Play she called the arches "windows". Just as Sev moved from arch to arch to
> keep her in view as she was escorted along, so the Countess in the Play
> perceived the man's movement as shifting from window to window. No need to
> complicate matters. Strop that Razor!
>   
I agree with that simple literal explanation, but I was looking beyond 
that for a symbolic meaning. They both appear and disappear to each 
other, which I speculated could refer to the contingent appearance of 
Master Ash.

Here is another clue. Compare this, from UotNS:
"Hers was a lovely face of that complexion called olive and as smoothly 
oval as an olive, to, with something in it that tore at my heart; and 
though it was strange to me, I had the sensation of return once again. I 
felt that in some lost life I had stood just where I was standing then; 
and that in that life I had seen her standing beneath me in just that 
way... If I had understood her expression at all, it had been one of 
mingled hope and fear, and perhaps she too had some sense of a drama 
being played upon a second occasion."

to this, from "House of Ancestors":
"He could sense her beside him in the blackness; and unexpectedly,  
overwhelmingly, the certainty came to him that they had waited together 
like this before, and that the sensation he now felt was familiar 
through countless repetitions."

In "House of Ancestors", the protagonist Joe interacts with robots that 
tap into the memories of his mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, 
etc. They not only read these memories, but they somehow rewrite them 
into the past. Joe gets these memories as part of himself through 
Lamarkian inheritance. The science is suspect to me, but Wolfe's idea in 
that story is that if one interacts with one's mother before the time of 
one's conception, then there is a "deja vu" effect. I suggest a similar 
idea is being used here.

> <snip> You haven't asked my opinion, but I hope you don't get carried away with trying too hard. FWIW.
>   
As you know from our "Seven American Nights" debate, I do try very hard 
to support my theories. I'll try not to get carried away. :)

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