ground wire

Peter T. Cash · 01 Aug 1998, 17:19 · from urth-v0017.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: "Peter T. Cash" <PTCash at ibm.net>
Subject: (urth) ground wire
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 17:19:59
Message-ID: <urth-v0017-0073 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0017/0073.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Robert Borski wrote:

> I'd like to suggest the following
>about "Silhouette:" in my opinion it's meant to be read as the science
>fiction equivalent of a medieval Mystery Play. Throw in a little Francis

This is a compelling suggestion. The German names would make sense in that
context, wouldn't they? Weren't these plays a Germanic phenomenon?
...
>Neuerddraht--German for "New Earth Wire

Actually, I believe it's better translated as "new ground wire". Perhaps
Wolfe was staring at a German circuit diagram when he was thinking about
this story.

Hmmm. The ground wire is connected to...well...the ground, or the earth. The
inner Earth was traditionally thought to be location of Hell, so the imagery
really isn't inconsistent with your interpretation at all. The ground wire
draws the current down, into the earth, where it is lost.

So if the ground wire is Hell, what is Heaven? The antenna?

*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