The argument for Intractability:

Jordon Flato · 22 Dec 2008, 17:46 · from 2008-December.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: jordonflato at gmail.com (Jordon Flato)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:46:07 -0800
Subject: (urth) The argument for Intractability:
Message-ID: <273409710812220946m21f48f66g3f357ed2e7cf29c6 at mail.gmail.com>

David Said:
<It's also not clear exactly how the Conciliator myth influences events,
although that's something that can be understood broadly.>

1.  Well, for one, Severian would never have been born.  His mother was with
the Pellerines, who would not have existed if it weren't for Severian
becoming the Conciliator.  I think it's clear Sev's mother ran away from the
Pellerines, and again, they wouldn't exist without a succesfull Severian.

2.  The Conciliator and the Guild:  Well, the guild was ruled by a woman
when Sev met up with them as Concilliator.  He killed the woman, and seems
to have initiated the time of male only membership in the Guild.  His
actions led to the destruction of part of the wall of the citadel and the
leaning of the witchtower.  Maybe that isnt' part of the intractibility, but
it shows that Severian BEFORE HE DROWNED THE FIRST TIME, and thus apparently
before the first muddling with his timeline, had effected tha past by having
the wall blown up and the witchtower leaning, which shows that when he was
born, he had already suceeded as the New Sun.

3.  If he hadn't already succeeded, then Ymar wouldn't have been Autarch and
as such the world Severian would have inhabited if he HADN'T come back as
Concliliator wouldn't have existed as it did, or even close.

You can argue, I guess, that other events could have happened that would
have tangentially made all of these other events occur:  Maybe his mother
was imprisoned another way, or maybe Ymar would have decided to become ruler
after all, and Typhon would have been taken down without the need of a myth
of a Concliliator to rally his foes around.  Maybe Ymar would have come up
with the idea of Autarchy, or taking the throne.  Maybe the guild did
continue to exist, and was ruled by women, or that women continuted to be a
part, but Severians life was similar enough to come into being anyway, or
that women left the guild for some other reason.  I think you have to come
up with a pretty much infinite number of if's in that case though, and the
case for an unsuccesful, 'tractable' Severian then becomes waaaaaay more
improbable in my mind, based on the facts we know, then an Intractible one.

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:57 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> The significance of Apu Punchau is a mystery to me. I find it hard to
> believe that he's related to the Commonwealth state religion.
> It's also not clear exactly how the Conciliator myth influences events,
> although that's something that can be understood broadly.
> But you're right about the Guild, whatever form it took---still, if it
> already existed, then Severian's presence would not have changed things
> significantly. Unless we knew exactly what changed---and we don't. Other
> than the color of their cloaks.
>
> Does Severian ever hint that the Guild even remembers its role as the
> Conciliator's "hosts"? (I can't help but think of the Guild as resembling a
> "sons of the Revolution" type organization that claims descent from the
> soldier who stabbed Christ in the thigh---that the Guild might be aware of
> the necessary role it played the way Pontius Pilate had a necessary role:
> not an glorious one, but a necessary one and therefore in its way
> honorable.)
>
> If none of these 3 things was necessary to Severian's passing the test at
> Yesod, then the time loop can't be intractable.
>
> However, the loop does seem intended to suggest something important about
> Ymar and Severian---the first and the last Autarchs, and the first and last
> to be tested. But what?
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:08:35 +0000
> From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Particolored Brocade
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Message-ID: <W997314252102271229800115 at webmail45>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
>
>  >-----Original Message-----
>> >From: David Stockhoff [mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net]
>> >Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 09:35 AM
>> >To: urth at lists.urth.net
>> >Subject: Re: (urth) Particolored Brocade
>>
> The Guild may have already existed under Typhon, however. At least, an
> office existed that carried out torture for the monarch. But it uses a
> "strange uniform" rather than fuligin and may not use the term "journeyman."
> (Severian is vague on that point.) They are clearly not military but another
> branch, but are closer to being military than in Severian's time: "another
> journeyman with a vouge, looking almost like a soldier." So that's several
> points on which Severian created his own legend.
>
> ::::::::::::::::::::;;
> The circularity of myth here is what leads me to consider the timeloop
> paradox as intractable.  There can't be a Severian who doesn't become New
> Sun and then Conciliator, because there most likely wouldn't have been a
> Guild to nurture him or a Conciliator to inspire him, and perhaps much of
> Civilization would have been different without Apu Punchau.  Who knows
> though?
> ::::::::::::::::::::::;
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>
>
>
> ---
> avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
> Virus Database (VPS): 081220-0, 12/20/2008
> Tested on: 12/20/2008 2:57:06 PM
> avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software.
> http://www.avast.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081222/7e7a6236/attachment.htm>

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