Hut in the Jungle

David Stockhoff · 19 Mar 2009, 12:02 · 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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:02:33 -0400
Subject: (urth) Hut in the Jungle
In-Reply-To: <mailman.8255.1237441964.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.8255.1237441964.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49C23459.1070400 at verizon.net>

Right. Which is why Wolfe is always using mythic material. He doesn't regard it as inadequate in any way, merely limited in its truth vs the real Truth, which is eternal. 

Myths are fully human responses to a perception of the divine, and thus contain truth. Whether they were once true (Tolkien's approach) or they become true (Wolfe's, apparently) is a matter of perspective.

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:52:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Hut in the Jungle
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <506324.69896.qm at web37608.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Or another way to put it would be that some myths are true only in the future. They make themselves true by projecting pseudo-false stories about themselves in the past which help bring about their realization. That would be Severian, yes?

And on that reading, Talos realizing that his situation is what Prometheus was really all about is significant in the text because it's a smaller example of your Amphisbaena where the REAL meaningful Amphisbaena's are the cosmic myths which are lies (in the past) that make themselves become true (in the future).

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090318-0, 03/18/2009
Tested on: 3/19/2009 8:02:34 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

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