Hut in the Jungle

brunians at brunians.org · 19 Mar 2009, 05:02 · from 2009-March.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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:02:39 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) Hut in the Jungle
In-Reply-To: <154161.74746.qm at web37602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <W62781468770971237406913@webmail18>
	<cbf55b100903181627v6520d0b8j92b6827eb77a94c6 at mail.gmail.com>
	<154161.74746.qm at web37602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6371.67.142.130.19.1237438959.squirrel at brunians.org>

No, Talos (or Wolfe) meant that pretty literally. We discussed this when
Wolfe and met in the mid 80's. John Cramer was also present. Gene and I
found that we agreed that time was a certain way, which includes future
events affecting the past in certain tricky ways.





.

> Gwern, I see what you mean about those being two directions of the same
> issue. But there's something else going on there, as well.
>
> I always thought that Talos was really talking about myth and stories:
> he's saying, "Hey, this is _Frankenstein_, but backwards!" And the point
> is that myth shapes us, but we also move away from the original intent of
> myths so that they are changed and distorted over time.
>
> What happens in the hut seems less about myth and story than about
> reflecting on the consequences of one's actions, but also realizing that
> who we are may be the consequence of someone else's actions.
>
> Both are about how, you're right, it's hard to pin down an "original"
> cause or action. But they're dealing with different mechanisms: choices on
> the one hand and myth/story on the other.
>
> I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that there may be different
> ways that they're thinking about the relationship between past and future.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 6:27:57 PM
> Subject: Re: (urth) Hut in the Jungle
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
> wrote:
> ...
>> and they feel the Tokoloshe, spirits from the future.
>> "Don't you see they are only the results of what we do? They are the
>> spiritis of the future, and we make them ourselves?"
>> Is this just saying that the fallen state of Urth is contemporary
>> Earth's doing, somehow?
> ...
>> /confused
>> ~witz
>
> I've always taken this as being the opposite of what is said in _Sword
> of the Lictor_:
>
> 'Dr. Talos whispered, "Look about you???don't you recognize this? It
> is just as he says!"
> "What do you mean?" I whispered in return.
> "The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought
> of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past
> cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing
> toward the dark, our own shadows race into the past to trouble
> mankind's dreams."
> "You're mad," I said. "Or joking."
> "Mad?" Baldanders rumbled. "You are mad. You with your fantasies
> of theurgy. How they must be laughing at us. They think all of us
> barbarians... I, who have labored three lifetimes."'
>
> I've always loved that line: "our own shadows race into the past to
> trouble
> mankind's dreams."
>
> The spirits of the future trouble the dreams of the present, and the
> present make the results that lie in the future. Which was the
> original? Neither, perhaps.
>
> --
> gwern
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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