Babbie

David Stockhoff · 20 Mar 2009, 17:24 · 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: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:24:25 -0400
Subject: (urth) Babbie
In-Reply-To: <mailman.10165.1237567141.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.10165.1237567141.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49C3D149.4070800 at verizon.net>

Thanks. It gets clearer for me with every iteration as well.

You can also think of it as a language. Wolfe is so steeped in myth I bet it oozes out his ears. As in language, you have standard words and sentence structures but you re-order and recombine them to get new meaning. So stags and faerie circles may not go together in myth (it's usually a pool or glade the stag leads you to), but they can meet if you want them to.

I don't know if a Neighbor "occupies" Horn, but it is clear that Horn dies. And there is a lot of psyche-sharing through blood in SS---it seems to be a motif, like eidolons in NS. It may well be that the Neighbor gave Horn life in the only way he knew how, by giving him Neighbor-life---but in Horn's memories in Horn's body, because memories are electrical/physical. 

Then the Neighbor went off to continue his own life in his own body, having merely imprinted Horn's body with not a copy of himself but with the most basic spark of consciousness. Just enough so Horn's body and brain could reboot (plus fix his neck!).

This requires a life-psyche distinction, but not necessarily a soul-psyche distinction. We know a body can live while its brain is dead, and that a brain can "live" without thought. It makes sense that if the Neighbor revived Horn, Horn would only have Horn's memories. However, on some level we can't fathom, he may "feel" Neighborish---enough to put 2+2 and realize what happened and what he is. So he wouldn't know anything about any ruins, but might be drawn to them.

Personally, I suspect that the "trees" somehow summon or project Neighbors, and if multiple trees (say, a circle of them) project one Neighbor, then it makes sense that it would be both multiple (many-legged) and composite. But that's just a hunch.

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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:23:56 +0000
From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Babbie
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <W657612303185601237566236 at webmail22>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

David,
This is an excellent post. You've stated very succinctly his technique, which I had understood, but seeing it framed like that is a reminder that helps me see the forest amongst the trees.

So, similar to Jordon's response, I'm with you on the faerie circle buck concept, and that it introduces Horn to their world and he is changed for it. I think no one could deny that this has happened in the mythic sense.

As to the particular Horn version, I think he was just repaired. There's no mechanism for a body cloning by Neighbors who might somehow also be bucks. Repair just makes sense without adding any devices. The fact that the Neighbors, on Green, tell him they could repair him (but you would still be here) is enough proof for me that they can do this, and it's more proof than any Neighbors as Greenbucks (or trees)

I was unaware of the faerie circle / buck symbol.

~witz 

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